Daniel Solis

Light Rail will be one of the more simple and elegant games in my catalog. Fast gameplay, approachable but difficult decisions, tricky spatial strategy elements, and a fair bit of luck. Playtest comments have all been positive for a light filler. Experienced gamers like the twist of sharing routes as an area majority mechanism instead of routes being exclusively one type. Puzzling out the logic of the emergent game board has been the most difficult hurdle, but that might be the one little fiddly rule that makes the game a satisfying challenge of mastery. My aim from the earliest iterations as "Train Town" was to make a tile-based path-building game as approachable as Tsuro , replayable as Carcassonne , using no components aside from cards. I think it's pretty much baked! The only rough edges are some graphic design issues to make the Building icons distinguishable against the background at a distance and wording the Objectives more clearly. Minor photoshoppin...

Last year, I was tinkering with a game called Train Town that made the short list in a Korean board game contest, but ultimately didn't make the cut. I've been polishing that concept off lately and trying to trim out all the awkward gameplay while still keeping the core route-building thinkiness that I enjoyed. All this on top of the constraints of a standard deck of cards made for a curious challenge. I've got this core system pretty nailed down and ready for some more thematic twists. For now, here's the basics. Take turns playing cards of their own color in a staggered brick pattern. If you complete a route, check who has the most segments of their color on that route. That player will score points equal to the number of different symbols on that route. In the final version of the game, these symbols will be building icons. If two or more people share majority, they both score. In this case, pink and blue both have an equal number of segments, thus sc...

Train Town has had a short, odd little history. I sketched it out at the last minute, untested, and submitted a print-and-play PDF to a Korean Board Game contest on a whim. (In the interim, Julian Murdoch got ambitious and even had an Artscow prototype printed up for his own use, as you can see above.) Against all odds, it made it through to finals! I shipped over Prototype E for the final round of judging. Unfortunately, it didn't make the top 3 . Robin Lees also tested Prototype E with his family as a two-player and three-player game. It seems the biggest challenge of the game was analysis paralysis. Even with a restricted 2x2 grid, players would feel compelled to calculate every possible location. Also, including the Action cards as an endgame condition is a problem since it can cut a 3-player game to down to as little as 3 turns per player. And on production note, the background terrain was a little hard to distinguish for the color-blind. On the bright side, scores a...

Playtested a bit more of Train Town and Monsoon Market this week. Many thanks to folks who helped playtest! If you're in town and interested, swing by to Atomic Empire in Durham, NC most monday nights and you can see whatever weird idea I've cooked up that week. Train Town was more of a polish to check if the condition cards made sense as written. The rules themselves and the scoring mechanics were solid. There was some procedural clarification necessary, making sure that condition cards were used at the end of a turn, thus after the scoring phase. Also it seemed the 2x2 formation was better as a starter board since it was easier to track the paths from point A to point B. A 3x3 formation led to bigger point swings as each player could cover exponentially more territory with one clever placement. I may also make the endgame condition when either the condition deck or the path deck runs out. Keeping it only the path deck made the game run a bit too long for a light ...

DOWNLOAD: TRAIN TOWN PROTOTYPE B Well, the response to yesterday's post was really positive, so I've put together a printable prototype for Train Town with a slight retheme. Now, tourists are taking a trip through Train Town to see their favorite attractions. You're trying to build a route that will take as many tourists to as many of their desired attractions as possible. The attractions are one of three types of terrain, one of four types of foliage, and one of nine buildings. Each card has three attractions, as shown in the example above. This was a much more organic way to show what features are on each card without resorting to abstract icons. The theme lends itself well to making landscapes and map-like areas too. Here's an example of what the prototype looks like in play. And here's an example of how you can score on your turn. Let's say you placed the tile highlighted in pink below, thus creating the paths highlighted in blue and yellow. ...

Last night I quickly sketched out a tile-based train-themed path-building game. I've been on a path-building kick the past few weeks so it kind of makes sense that it would eventually lead to a train game of some kind. Hopefully this adds some twists to the genre to make it worthy of further development. SUPPLIERS AND PORTS First, you start with the basic path tile, representing a supplier along a train route. Each path tile has eight exits, with for path segments linking them in some way. Each card also features four goods icons, noted here by the plus sign, the dollar sign and the Q. Any path connecting to this card is supplied the goods indicated by this card. And these are destination cards, with eight endpoints for the train routes. Each of these is a port, each awaiting a specific good to come from the train. Along the top here you see a port that wants + and a dock that wants $. To the right, a port wants E, another wants +. SETUP To set up the game,...