Economic

First, you decide on what finished goods you want to sell and how much, based on your capital. Based on that, you buy the raw materials necessary to do that. You combine raw materials to make finished goods. You sell the finished goods.

You have to bid on the purchase price of the raw materials and the sales price of the finished goods. When supply exceeds demand the prices drop. When demand exceeds supply the prices rise. If you bid less than the going price, you get nothing.

Easy to learn, but interesting strategies. Somewhat mechanical, but a good game by Sid Sackson.

Part of the 3M Bookshelf Series.

Epic Railroad Building in North America

Discover a modern North American classic. Celebrate one of our most vital and enduring passions: railroads. Use your initial investment to build track. Then pick up commodities where they are grown, mined, or manufactured and deliver them to a lucrative place of demand. Complete a delivery and make the money you need to buy larger, faster trains, and expand your railroad empire. Win the game by building the most effective railroad empire!

The original and flagship of Mayfair's crayon-rails line allows players, using washable crayons, to draw their train routes over a map of North America. Players start with an initial sum of money which they use to build short lengths of track during their first couple of turns. For the rest of the game, players operate their trains over the track network drawn on the board to pick up and deliver loads to various cities, and then have the opportunity to add to their track network or improve their train. The game uses demand cards which list three demands, each of a commodity to be delivered to a specified city for a given payoff. Each player has three demand cards to provide opportunities for income.

Each turn consists of an operations phase and a building phase. During the operations phase, trains are moved to cities where commodities are picked up at no cost and moved to one of the cities on that player's demand cards. When the commodity is delivered, the player receives the payoff and trades that demand card for a new one. Event cards are mixed in the deck with the demand cards. When an event card is drawn the instructions are followed. During the building phase a player may pay to build more track or upgrade his train.

A player wins by being the first to connect his track network to six of the seven major cities on the board and acquire $250,000,000 in cash on hand.

Darjeeling has two main board areas. The first is an array of squares representing one, two or three half-crates of tea in four different varieties (colors). Each player has a marker which moves about in the array, picking up tea at the rate of one square per turn. There are simple rules governing movement in this array and the players compete for the desirable squares.

Eventually, several times per game, each player has enough squares of a single color to fit them together so that the half-crates all make whole crates. Now he can make a tea shipment. This pays off in victory points in three different ways. First, there is a "demand" award of up to 6 VP depending on how long it has been since anyone shipped this variety. Second, if the shipment was of at least four crates, there is a flat bonus of 1 VP per crate.

Third and most pivotally, there are VP that will be awarded at the beginning of the player's next and subsequent turns. Each tea shipment is represented with cubes of the player's color (not the tea variety color) on a sort of barge. The new shipment of tea is always placed, in the other of the two main board areas, at the top of a column of all the recent shipments (the number of total shipments varying with the number of players in the game), so that as more shipments are made, the old shipments drift farther down the column and eventually out of play. At the beginning of your turn, you look to see where your shipments are in this column, and they pay out VP with better multipliers the higher they still are in the column. This constitutes the driving force of the game, as nobody else wants to see your shipment at the top of the column for several turns in a row. Players thus have an incentive to make a shipment even if they haven't yet assembled a large number of crates.

It's a race to 100 points. A runaway leader can easily take over if the rest of the table is not vigilant, so the best games of Darjeeling are those among vigilant players.

The expansion to be used by 'Cuba'. An additional game board, more and different ship cards, laws, buildings, new character cards to be used with the other characters, and a whole new phenomenon: Cuba - the Arrival of the President!
In their turn, players may take and play a character from the 'El Presidente' board: the worker, dancer, attorney, warden, revolutionary or musician. They all have different effects.
The worker puts your goods into the warehouse; all your goods are safe this turn. The revolutionary gives you one victory point, the musician two money. The player with the dancer card becomes immediately the new start player; the old rule for determining the new start player is no longer in effect.

With the attorney a player may use a building even when his supervisor is not on the row or column of this building, paying one money. The warden may change two adjacent ships in position. There are two mule cards being used when playing with less than five players; these cards cannot be chosen. When all players have chosen a card, the car of the president moves to the position of the remaining card; remember, there are six cards that each turn are shuffled and randomly placed.

Under each card on the board are symbols that come into effect when the car of the president stops there. The first makes all law proposals go into effect; the second makes it possible to move the supervisor anywhere on a player board in the next round. The next symbol also is in effect for the next round: it allows you to pay one money and overbuild a building with another; the difference in resources must be paid as well. One symbol makes the leading player to go back two points on the score track; another allows players to purchase market wares at discount prices. Players must now not only consider which role they would like to take, but also which position they likely want to be visited by the president.

There are 2 additional laws in each of the four categories, so that the game can now last up to 8 rounds instead of just 6.

Game description from the publisher:

Cuba prior to the revolution: Under turbulent circumstances, the villages of the island strive for independent wealth and influence. Who can buy and sell his products and goods on the domestic market profitably or take in the most on the trading ships? Who can send the right delegate to parliament in order to influence the government legislative process, or erect distilleries, hotels and banks at the right moment to the benefit of his village?

Whoever has accumulated the most victory points in Cuba by the end of the game wins. Players earn victory points by shipping merchandise from the harbor, but also by erecting and using buildings, and by abiding by the law.