Trains

Cable Car is a reworked rerelease of the the game originally published in 1997 by db-Spiele as Iron Horse and in 2000 by Queen Games as Metro, with a different theme, new artwork and the components and rules to play the new, optional variant "Cable Car Company," which introduces stock holding to the game.

Players place square tiles onto the board to form rail lines. The object of the game is to make the rail lines as long as possible. Players start with a number of cars ringing the board. When a tile placement connects a car to a station (either to those on the edge or to the power station in the center of the board), that car is turned to indicate it has been scored and the player scores one point for each tile that the route crosses.
(Slightly reworded for clarity and consistency from Queen Games' announcement of the game.)

Re-implements:

Metro

In First Class: Unterwegs im Orient Express, players try to score as many fame points as possible by building a rich network of rails, by building luxurious train cars, or by serving well-paying passengers.

First Class is a card game that feels more like a board game, and since each game is played with the base cards and two of five modules, the game offers lots of variety as not all elements are used in each playing.

In Yardmaster Express, two to five players compete to have the highest valued train after a set number of rounds. The game starts with the first player drafting a Railcar card from his hand, attaching it to his train, then passing the rest of his hand to the player to his left. This draft continues until all players have added one Railcar to their train for each round of the game. The trick is, while each new Railcar must match the resource type or value of the one previously played, players always have the option to play any card face down as a Wild Railcar; the Wild Railcars don't have much value, but they can be used to save a player in a bind or to thwart your opponents by "hiding" a card they need.

Yardmaster Express plays in ten minutes and consists of just 32 cards (no tokens, no cargo cards).

Backyard Builders Treehouse — released in the France as Way Up High — is a reimplementation of Yardmaster Express with players now trying to climb vertically to build a treehouse instead of adding cars to their train engine.

Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails takes the familiar gameplay of Ticket to Ride and expands it across the globe — which means that you'll be moving across water, of course, and that's where the sails come in.

As in other Ticket to Ride games, in Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails players start with tickets in hand that show two cities, and over the course of the game they try to collect colored cards, then claim routes on the game board with their colored train and ship tokens, scoring points while doing so. When any player has six or fewer tokens in their supply, each player takes two more turns, then the game ends. At that point, if they've created a continuous path between the two cities on a ticket, then they score the points on that ticket; if not, then they lose points instead.

Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails puts a few twists on the T2R formula, starting with split card decks of trains and ships (with all of the wild cards going in the train deck). Three cards of each type are revealed at the start of the game, and when you draw cards, you replace them with a card from whichever deck you like. (Shuffle the card types separately to form new decks when needed.)

Similarly, players choose their own mix of train and ship tokens at the start of the game. To claim a train route (rectangular spaces), you must play train cards (or wilds) and cover those spaces with train tokens, and to claim a ship route (oval spaces), you must play ship cards (or wilds) and cover those spaces with ship tokens. Ship cards depict one or two ships on them, and when you play a double-ship card, you can cover one or two ship spaces. You can take an action during play to swap train tokens for ships (or vice versa), and you lose one point for each token you swap.

Some tickets show tour routes with multiple cities instead of simply two cities. If you build a network that matches the tour exactly, you score more points than if you simply include all of those cities in your network.

Each player also starts the game with three harbors. If you have built a route to a port city, you can take an action during the game to place a harbor in that city (with a limit of one harbor per port). To place the harbor, you must discard two train cards and two ship cards of the same color, all of which must bear the harbor symbol (an anchor). At the end of the game, you lose four points for each harbor not placed, and you gain 10-40 points for each placed harbor depending on how many of your completed tickets show that port city.

Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails includes a double-sided game board, with one side showing the world and the other side showing the Great Lakes of North America. Players start with a differing number of cards and tokens depending on which side they play, and each side has a few differences in gameplay.

Players in New England Rails each represent a particular state during the 19th century – Connecticut and New Hampshire with two players, with Vermont added for three players, and so on – and start with two or three businesses in play under their control. Your goal in NER is to have more assets than other players at game end, as determined by cash in hand, cost of businesses owned, special routes completed and state subsidies acquired.

The game lasts at most 16 rounds. Each round players forecast the upcoming economic condition – depression, normal or prosperity – for a future turn, then take care of any events that occur, such as "Improved Bridge Building Techniques" that allow players to build across estuaries or "Sheep Boom Goes Bust" which represents the decreased demand for wool from New England farmers as the century progressed. Four of the first five events are fixed and represent historical activities, while the other events – including devastating floods, snow, and an improved business climate – are randomized into a face-down deck. Players then each draft a business or action card, with the option to play it immediately (thereby gaining a free action) if they choose to pay the cost.

During the subsequent development phase, players take two actions in turn order, either building twice, playing cards twice, or doing each action once. Players want to build depots that connect their businesses to one of the major markets in the area: New York, Boston or Montreal; to do so, they need to pay the track costs as well as the cost of the depots themselves. Players can build multiple depots in the same action, but the cost is higher since they're doing more work in the same amount of time. Once a business is connected, it earns the owner more income each turn since it's now supplying a larger, richer market. The cards allow players to start new businesses, play special actions, claim a special route (which generates income), claim one of the six state mail contracts, or collect a state subsidy, which provides special benefits like a free depot.

As the game progresses, the players pass through time time periods, with different businesses being available in each. The first period focuses on crafts and farms, for example, while the second introduces more industrial businesses such as shoe and textile production. When passing from one period to another, players must choose to make some of their existing businesses obsolete. Since a player can manage only eight businesses, however, you'll likely want to make room for more profitable ventures anyway.

If all mail routes, state subsidies and special routes are claimed by the end of any round, the game ends at that point; otherwise the game ends after round 16, with the richest player winning New England Rails.