Trains

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 new special rules to your games. The Deep Blue Edition includes the Rivers and Lakes expansions. Increase the difficulty by adding the River route into the mix, or use the Lakes to connect your networks by ferry. 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!

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

Each player starts with a supply of 15 taxis, two transportation cards in hand, and one or two destination tickets that show locations in Manhattan (and Brooklyn). 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 taxi, 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 taxis 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 the routes that they've claimed during the game, the destination tickets that they've completed (by connecting the two locations on a ticket by a continuous line of their taxis), and the tourist attractions that they've reached with their taxis. You lose points for any uncompleted destination tickets, then whoever has the high score wins!

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 6 – France & Old West includes a double-sided game board that features France on one side and the western half of the United States on the other.

In the France half of this expansion, 2-5 players collect train cards and claim routes in order to complete tickets in hand, but most of the tracks on the board aren't colored! Each time that you draw cards, you must take a colored tile that's 2-5 train cars long and place that tile on an empty track bed. Once you've done this, any player can claim that route by discarding the appropriately colored cards from hand, as in any other Ticket to Ride game. (Single-length routes are already colored, and the map contains a number of gray-colored ferry routes.)

Multiple track beds on the game board overlap, and once a tile has placed on the board, any track beds crossed by this tile are off-limits and nothing can be built on them. At the end of the game, players score their tickets, with bonuses being awarded for longest continuous route and most tickets completed.

In the Old West half of the expansion, 2-6 players start the game by choosing (in reverse player order) a starting location for one of their three city pieces. The first route that a player claims must have this city as one of the route's two endpoints, and each subsequent route claimed must connect to that player's existing network.

After claiming a route, a player can place one of their remaining cities on either end of that route by discarding a matching pair of train cards. Only one city marker can be in each city. Whenever a player builds a route that connects to a city owned by another player, the owner of the city claims the points for the route, not the player placing the trains. If both endpoints of the route have cities, then the owner of each city scores these points. Whoever completes the most tickets in this expansion scores 15 bonus points.

As a variant, you can play Old West with Alvin the Alien. No player can start the game in Roswell, and the first player who builds a route into Roswell scores 10 points, then places the Alvin marker in any city that they control. The next player to connect to this city scores 10 points, then moves Alvin as before. Whoever controls Alvin at the end of the game scores 10 bonus points.

Ticket to Ride: First Journey takes the gameplay of the Ticket to Ride series and scales it down for a younger audience.

In general, players collect train cards, claim routes on the map, and try to connect the cities shown on their tickets. In more detail, the game board shows a map of Europe with certain cities being connect by colored paths. Each player starts with four colored train cards in hand and two tickets; each ticket shows two cities, and you're trying to connect those two cities with a contiguous path of your trains in order to complete the ticket.

On a turn, you either draw two train cards from the deck or discard train cards to claim a route between two cities; for this latter option, you must discard cards matching the color and number of spaces on that route (e.g., two yellow cards for a yellow route that's two spaces long). If you connect the two cities shown on a ticket with a path of your trains, reveal the ticket, place it face up in front of you, then draw a new ticket. (If you can't connect cities on either ticket because the paths are blocked, you can take your entire turn to discard those tickets and draw two new ones.) If you connect one of the westernmost cities (Dublin, Brest, Madrid) to one of the easternmost cities (Moscow, Rostov, Ankara) with a path of your turns, you immediately claim a special cross-continent ticket.

The first player to complete six tickets wins! Alternatively, if someone has placed all twenty of their trains on the game board, then whoever has completed the most tickets wins!

Ticket to Ride: First Journey features the same gameplay as the first Ticket to Ride: First Journey game, but with the players claiming track in Europe instead of in the United States.

Part of Ticket to Ride series.

Description from the publisher:

With the driving of the golden spike in 1869, the first transcontinental railroad was completed in the United States — but really it was only the beginning of a rapid expansion of railways that would crisscross the entire country.

In Whistle Stop, you make your way west across the country, using your fledgling railroad company to build routes, pick up valuable cargo, and deliver needed goods to growing towns, creating a network of whistle stops that you and your competitors can leverage as you continue to expand your networks. Along the way, you gain shares in other railroads and watch your reputation soar with each successful delivery before making a final push to complete long hauls to the boom towns of the West.

This design is a new twist on pick-up-and-deliver games. As players move their trains west and pick up goods, they can deliver those goods to small towns to gain shares in railroads, or hold on to them for a bigger payout when they reach the west coast. At the same time, they try to optimize their actions (and gain extra ones), lay down new track tiles, block the other players, gather and use valuable whistles for special moves and abilities, and carefully manage their coal resources.