Trains

The men who built the railways arrived with sound boots and got their shovels on credit; they were issued tickets, in payment for their work, which could be spent at the Tommy Shop or (more likely) on beer! As a ganger, or foreman, you are responsible for your own team of navvies as they travel through Mid and North Wales: digging the track beds, laying the rails, and occasionally helping a passenger or two along their way. Foothills lets you participate in grand-scale railway construction while paying attention to the small details; manage your navvies' work carefully, and you should be able to let them go to the pub at the end of the day.

Foothills is a tactical and intriguing two-player card game from new designer Ben Bateson and the designer of Snowdonia, Tony Boydell. Using your five action cards cleverly, collect resources, remove rubble, build track and stations, and use the action spaces you unlock, all the while collecting more victory points than your opponent. In the end, the player with the most victory points wins!

—description from the designer

Ticket to Ride: London features the familiar gameplay from the Ticket to Ride game series — collect cards, claim routes, draw tickets — but on a scaled-down map of 1970s London that allows you to complete a game in no more than 15 minutes.

Each player starts with a supply of 17 double-decker buses, two transportation cards in hand, and one or two destination tickets that show locations in London. On a turn, you either draw two transportation cards from the deck or the display of five face-up cards (or you take one face-up bus, which counts as all six colors in the game); or you claim a route on the board by discarding cards that match the color of the route being claimed (with any set of cards allowing you to claim a gray route); or you draw two destination tickets and keep at least one of them.

Players take turns until someone has no more than two buses in their supply, then each player takes one final turn, including the player who triggered the end of the game. Players then sum their points, scoring points for (1) the routes that they've claimed during the game, (2) the destination tickets that they've completed (by connecting the two locations on a ticket by a continuous line of their buses), and (3) the districts that they've connected. (A district consists of 2-4 locations, and you score 1-5 points for a district if you link all of its locations to one another with your buses.) You lose points for any uncompleted destination tickets, then whoever has the high score wins!

1846 is an 18xx game set in the Midwestern United States. Differences from other 18xx games include scaling the number of corporations, private companies, and bank size to the number of players, fewer restrictions on actions such as raising money and using private company powers, the initial distribution of private companies, and paying for virtually all track builds.

The city of Essen, Germany at the turn of the 20th century was a center for coal mining in Europe. Immerse yourself in the dark world of coal mining as you extract coal from pits, load coal to wagon trains, and then rail your coal off to distant locations in search of fortunes.

Coal Baron: The Great Card Game is a standalone game based on the very popular board game, Coal Baron, originally published in 2013. With innovative mechanisms and almost 240 cards, Coal Baron: The Great Card Game creates an experience that feels very distinct from, yet is just as intense as, the original game.

In the multiplayer puzzle game Railroad Ink, your goal is to connect as many exits on your board as possible. Each round, a set of dice are rolled in the middle of the table, determining which kind of road and railway routes are available to all players. You have to draw these routes on your erasable boards to create transport lines and connect your exits, trying to optimize the available symbols better than your opponents.

The more exits you connect, the more points you score at the end of the game, but you lose points for each incomplete route, so plan carefully! Will you press your luck and try to stretch your transportation network to the next exit, or will you play it safe and start a new, simpler to manage route?

Railroad Ink comes in two versions, each one including two expansions with additional dice sets that add special rules to your games. The Blazing Red Edition includes the Lava and Meteor expansions. Try to confine the lava coming from the erupting volcano before it destroys your routes, or deal with the havoc brought by the meteor strikes and mine the craters for precious ore. These special rules can spice up things and make each game play and feel different.

Each box allows you to play from 1 to 6 players, and if you combine more boxes, you can play with up to 12 players (or more). The only limit to the number of players is the number of boards you have!