Every board game has its own unique theme that serves as a delightful backdrop to the gameplay. Either you’re spies attempting to figure out who to trust or gods vying for power over the land. Trains, meanwhile, are a common and much more realistic concept for board games. The train fan can choose from a vast selection of available games.
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Train games have a wide variety of gameplay mechanisms, from deep tactical adventures to casual party games. It’s gratifying to build a robust public transportation system from the ground up, laying down tracks and connecting stations. Here is a roster of excellent games that will get you up to speed on the great world of trains.
1. Ticket to Ride
A classic board game is a Ticket to Ride. It’s a great way to get into the hobby because the rules are easy to learn and the game is fun. In Ticket to Ride, you will use train cards to build tracks across the map. Your goal is to build a large network that links different places together. If you finish more routes, you will get more points at the end. But because everyone wants the few spaces on the map, you’ll often have to race to make your trains first. It makes the game more exciting and fun.
Ticket to Ride can be played in many different ways. Most of the time, the game will take place in a different country. There are also different ways to play the game. For example, in Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails, boats are part of the game. This gives you more ways to get around.
2. Colt Express
You play as a gunslinging bandit seeking to steal the most money from a speeding train in Colt Express. Instead of building rails, you punch, shoot, and pillage your way through each carriage. Each round of the game has two stages. First, you’ll be plotting, and shuffling cards into a communal pile. In the second round, each card in this pile will be activated one by one, resulting in shenanigans.
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The game is full of chaotic and ridiculous encounters. You must adjust your plans depending on what cards others may play. You’ll be getting shot a lot, jumping onto the train’s roof at times, and attempting to dodge the deadly Marshal. Each character has a distinct skill to make things fresh and unpredictable throughout the story.
3. Age Of Steam
Age of Steam is a great game for you and your friends to play together. You’ll all be competing to be the best owner of a railroad company. During the game, you’ll bid on turn orders, build tracks, and link cities together.
Age Of Steam has a lot of different ways to play. Try to deliver as many goods as possible to get points, but be careful not to go bankrupt. You could lose the game if you take out too many loans and build too many routes. There is a lot of interaction between players in Age of Steam, which keeps you all interested in each other’s turns until the end.
4. Ride The Rails
The game Ride the Rails is fun for three to five people. It’s all about using trains to connect the east and west coasts of the United States. Each round is made up of two parts. First, everyone will connect the cities on the map with train tracks. Next, you will pick up a passenger waiting in one of these cities and try to get them to go as far as they can on these routes.
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You don’t own a specific railroad company in Ride The Rails. You can instead split the cost of the different colored trains. When a passenger takes a certain route, the more shares you have in that color, the more money you’ll make. You need to make sure the paths are in good spots that everyone needs to use. At the end of the game, people often make deals with each other to try to build the best routes in colors they care about. When you make another player’s route completely useless, you feel like the devil himself.
5. Iberian Railways
Iberian Railways revolves around trains and debt. a lot of debt. The goal of the game is to construct pathways to the numerous villages and cities scattered over the landscape. You’ll need to purchase songs to do so. These rails are expensive, especially when numerous lines are built at the same time. This implies that you’ll have to take out more and more loans, paying back interest as you go. The game evolves into a balancing act of generating money, creating enjoyable routes between cities, and controlling debt.
Iberian Railways is not a high-scoring game, so when you approach the conclusion, it seems close and exciting. Points are awarded based on who has the most in several areas, such as who has the most connections, income, and so on. The game has enough twists to keep you interested without being overly difficult.
6. Brass: Lancashire
Brass: Lancashire is a complicated economic game set during the Industrial Revolution. You will build different production lines to try to make money. It is a big game that will take your whole night to play, but it feels good when your plans work out.
In Brass, there are two main rounds: Lancashire and London. In the first round, you’ll build canals to get your resources to where they need to go. In the second round, you switch canals for railroads and put down train tokens to connect your production lines to the market. In this game, there are many different ways to play. Will you try to make connections between all trains? Will you try to build expensive shipyards that are worth a lot of points if you succeed? Will someone ruin your plans by putting up a factory where you want to go? Brass: Lancashire has a lot of different options.
7. Switch & Signal
Try Switch & Signal if you want to work together more. You try to get goods to the port before time runs out in this fast-paced game. The catch is that you don’t have any control over how fast the trains go. A shuffled deck of cards and a few rolls of dice will decide which trains will move and how far they will go. This can cause a lot of crashes, so you and your friends need to work together to keep everything on track.
There are different switches and signals all over the map that tell the trains where they can go. When it’s your turn, you can change these routes to give each train a clear path. As the game goes on, there will be more and more trains on the map, making it harder and harder to keep track of them all. Switch & Signal is a crazy, silly game that is a lot of fun to play, win or lose.
8. Northern Pacific
I’m surprised by this. It has such a simple premise, and the big hook is that it focuses on short-term relationships. On your turn, you can either put a small or large investment cube in a city or extend the train. When the train gets to a city with cubes, all players with those colors of cubes in that city get a “payout” of their cubes from the supply (one for small cubes, two for big cubes) A round is over when the train gets to Seattle, and a player’s score is the number of cubes they have in front of them. After three rounds, the person with the most points wins. But here’s what I mean.
Like other good train games, moves are made by placing your cube in the same city as another player. You both give each other high-fives, and on their next turn, they move their cube into your city. But what if a player gets in the way between you and your “partner”? Will they join you and your friend in having fun? Or, on their turn, will they send the train in the opposite direction, leaving your cubes on the board? Even though these decisions are simple, they are a lot of fun and meaningful in the best ways.
9. Trick of the Rails
The trick of the Rails is the strangest game on this list. The main thing that makes it stand out is also the name: of taking tricks. In practice, neither the train gamer nor the trick-taking fan should be able to use it. But Trick of the Rails makes everything you play very important, even if you aren’t going to win the trick. You switch between getting stuck and laying tracks, just like in 18xx games, but the core of both is taking tricks.
During stock rounds, the winner of the trick takes the card from the trick lane (a line of cards that acts as a timer and moves players through each round) as a share, while players who didn’t win still add their played card as a share. During track laying, the winner of the trick adds a city or locomotive to any company. Cities are a big source of points, and the other players add their played cards to the line of their own color company. It’s a strange mix that works because every card play is important for expanding companies or getting a piece of the most valuable railroad. It is one of the trick-taking games I have played that made me think the most.
10. Railroad Ink
Railroad Ink is an old-fashioned game of “roll and write.” Each of you has a grid that you will fill with roads and train tracks. Every round, someone will roll the dice and tell you what lines to draw. You want to make a big network out of as many exits as possible. Most of the time, you play Railroad Ink by yourself, but it’s always fun to see how everyone’s boards turned out. Even though everyone has the same roads and tracks to draw, their railroad networks will be different.
There are many different kinds of Railroad Ink. For example, the Deep Blue Edition adds rivers and lakes. Each version has a different challenge to keep things interesting and new. You should also know that there is a fun mobile version of this game that lets you play it whenever you want.