Archive for the 'Russian Railroads' Category

The Spiel des Jahres nominations were announced this week.  I have added a page for the SdJ with the details of the games as well as links to reviews of the games: SdJ 2014 page.

The winners will be announced on July 14th.

The main game board at game end. The large pale yellow oblong spaces are where the engineers are located during the game.

Russian Railroads is a meaty, worker-placement eurogame.  As you may expect from the title, players compete to construct the best railroads across Russia.

THE GAME
Unlike many railway-building games, there is no map to build across; however, this isn’t a hindrance and actually makes the game different to other games.  There is a central game board where players place their workers to take actions, plus each player has their own player boards to track their progress.

Each round, players take turns allocating their workers (cool-looking meeple with Russian hats) to various actions on the main game board.   For example, players can lay track which advances the relevant matching colour rail marker(s) along any of the 3 routes on their player boards.  There are 5 colours of track marker in the game (each route requiring a different mixture of track marker colours) but these colour markers are not allowed to pass one another or occupy the same space, so this means you need to consider the order in which you advance the track markers too. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the dust has settled following Spiel in Essen (due to work, sickness, voting on some awards, and life in general), I am finally able to start writing reviews of the games released this year.  Unlike other years, I didn’t get to play many of the big releases until after Spiel, rather than during it; however, I have played many now (and there’s still a sizeable pile still to play too) and can report there were loads of great games this year.

However, in advance of all the full reviews, I thought I’d post briefly about what I’ve played so far.  Last week, was a busy week with a chance to play a lot of games.  I’ve played Russian Railroads with 2 and 4 players now and it’s an excellent meaty eurogame with some pretty tough decisions, especially as there are lots of possible ways to make points but spreading yourself too thinly across a lot of them is not likely to turn out so well.  S0, you need to have a plan as well as a plan on what to do if progressing the first plan isn’t possible because other players get in the way. Read the rest of this entry »

During Russian Railroads, players compete to construct the best railroads in Russia.  Whilst there is no map to build across like many railway games, Russian Railroads is a meaty, worker-placement eurogame.

Each round, players take turns allocating their workers (cool-looking meeple with Russian hats) to various actions on the main game board.   For example, a player can lay track along their 3 different rail routes which advances the relevant matching colour marker along any route(s).  There are 5 colours of track marker in the game (each route requiring a different mixture of track marker colours) but these colour markers are not allowed to pass one another or occupy the same space, so this means you’ll need to consider the order in which you advance the track markers too.

Players can also use workers to build and upgrade locomotives that are placed on the rail routes.  At the end of each round, players score the track spaces their locomotives can reach, plus there are some other bonuses when locomotives reach certain spaces too.  Players usually have to take the lowest numbered locomotive available so the timing of building these is important.

Read the rest of this entry »