Track or Share II

If you like train games, then the name Winsome Games might be familiar to you. If you are a true devotee then you may have picked up some of the publisher’s games, either direct or at the Internationale Spieltage SPIEL, also known as Essen. Alternatively, you may have purchased one or more of its designs in the international editions published by Queen Games. For example, Winsome Games’ 2007 Wabash Cannonball became Queen Games’ 2008 Chicago Express and Winsome Games’ SNCF from 2010 was republished by Queen Games as Paris Connection in 2011. More recently in a follow up to Chicago Express, in 2011 Queen Games republished the Winsome Games’ 2008 Preußische Ostbahn as German Railways, the first entry in its Iron Horse collection.

Designed for three to five players, aged twelve plus, as its title suggests, German Railways is all about German railways. More specifically, it focuses upon the period between 1832 and 1872 when some two hundred or so railroad companies were founded and helped connect the then innumerable Germanic states, forging economic and cultural ties that would further foster the drive towards unification. Even more specifically, German Railways is about eight railways and their share values. In most games about railways, the game’s focus is on building tracks between one city and another and then transporting either passengers and/or goods between them. In German Railways, the players do not transport either goods or passengers, but rather they invest capital in each railway and then expend that capital to increase both its network and its share value. Whomever makes the most from these shares by game’s end wins the game.

The game consists of three sets of Railroad Shares, a matching Railroad Income marker, and a set of rolling stock for each of the game’s eight railways. The rolling stock consists of ‘Iron Horses’ or Locomotives, similar to those found in Paris Connection. There is also a set of Player Turn Order markers and a Player Income marker for each player; ‘Talers’ or coins in various denominations; plus the board. The latter depicts a map of Germany – its towns and cities, rural, hill, and mountainous regions – overlaid with a hex grid, plus three tracks; the first for the Player Turn Order, the second for the Railroad Income, and the third for the Player Incomes. Each railroad also has a space on the edge of the board to hold its current capital. The game comes with rules in Dutch, English, French, and German.

At game’s start, the share value markers and the player income markers are placed on the appropriate tracks. Then a locomotive of the matching colour is placed on each railway company’s starting city. Each player also receives a certain amount of Talers, the amount depending upon the number of players – more players have less money. Lastly the shares are auctioned off in order – 'Preußische Ostbahn', 'Niederschlesische-Märkische Eisenbahn', 'Königlich-Sächsische Staatseisenbahnen', 'Königlich-Bayerische Staatseisenbahnen', 'Main-Weser-Bahn', 'Großherzoglich Badische Staatseisenbahnen', 'Cöln-Mindener Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft', and 'Berlin-Hamburger Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft'. The shares are also auctioned off in three waves, each wave consisting of one share from each Railroad, and all of the shares in a wave have to be auctioned off before the shares in another wave can be put up for auction. 

Once all of the eight shares in the first wave have been auctioned off, the players determine their current income. This is done by adding up the value of their shares and adjusting their marker on the Player Income track accordingly. Then player order is determined. This is done by drawing five Player Turn Order markers from a provided cloth bag. These five are placed as drawn on the Player Turn Order track. To seed the bag, the player with the highest current Player Income puts a single Player Turn Order marker of his colour into the bag; the player with the second highest current Player Income puts two of his Player Turn Order markers into the bag; the player with the third highest current Player Income puts in three; and so on. What this means is that the player with the highest Player Income has a high chance of not even getting a turn this round because he only has one Player Turn Order marker in the bag, where players with lower Player Incomes will greater chances because their Player Incomes are lower and they will have more markers in the bag. This is a balancing mechanism. 

On his turn a player can do one of three things. He can choose to pass, he can put up a Railroad Share up for auction, or he can build track. To do the latter, a player selects a Railroad in which he owns one or more Shares in and spends the capital invested in it to add Locomotives to that Railroad’s existing network. Usually this is three Locomotives, but may be more or less depending upon the Railroad. Each Railroad has a special feature. For example, the Preußische Ostbahn was efficient and so can build four Locomotives rather than three, whilst the Cöln-Mindener Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft focused on Share Dividends rather than expansion, so can only spend a maximum of five Talers on building track.

Every time track is built into urban and city hexes, it increases the value of the Railroad Share by one and thus the Player Income of any player who owns shares in the Railroad, though some cities increase the value by more than one. If track of one Railroad is built into an urban or city hex where there is the track of another Railroad, then a connection is made and Dividends are paid out on all Shares currently owned. Anyone who own Shares in the railroad that made the connection receives a double Dividend because it made the connection. Only a limited number of connections – one condition for ending the game is if all Railroads have made two connections to two other Railroads.

Initially, because the players are each investing with a set amount, each Railroad will receive a limited amount of investment capital with which to Build Track and increase its value. Thus Dividends will be low, but as the game progresses Railroads expand, the value of their Railroad Shares increase and more connections are made, so leading to greater Dividends. Thus the players gain greater money with which to purchase more shares. Towards the end of the game, the Dividends are even greater, but because the winner of the game is determined by whomever has the most Talers, a player must choose carefully between purchasing shares or keeping his money towards game end. Also during auctions in the later part of the game, there also comes a point where it no longer becomes worthwhile purchasing shares because the potential Dividend of a share is less than the price it can be purchased for. 

Whilst German Railways is for the most part well designed and presented, it is unfortunately beset by some poor colour matches. The problem is that the colours of the shares and their corresponding trains do not always quite match. Plus the colours of some of the share certificates look very similar. In particular, the colour of the brown, orange, and yellow shares are all so washed out that they are difficult to tell apart. This is a real problem in the game and it is even worse if any player has colour issues with his sight.

Another issue concerns the means of determining turn order. The mechanism is clever and innovative and designed as means for the player who is trailing those in the lead to have more turns and thus have a chance to catch up. As I said, it is clever and innovative. Some players though, dislike the fact that they can spend a whole round without taking a turn. That though, is their problem, not that of the game’s as they can still participate in share auctions and they will still benefit from Dividend payouts. Lastly play time is listed as sixty minutes – it is more like ninety minutes.

Ultimately, whether you like German Railways or not depends upon whether you like this Turn Order mechanism. It is the game’s divisive design feature. Some gamers may also have an issue with the fact that the game is a share manipulation game rather than a railway game. That said, so is Paris Connection with which German Railways shares the same publishers. German Railways is more complex than Paris Connection, but not by much and the complexity comes in determining share values. Get that right and you will be the master of the German Railways.

Track or Share?

One of the odder games to be released at Essen in 2010 was SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français) from Winsome Games. The oddity being that Winsome Games is best known for developing, publishing, and licensing detailed, historical train games – board games that focus on the building and development of railway networks and the trading in the shares of railway companies. SNCF was anything other than detailed or historical, but was instead a simple track and share game that could be played in thirty minutes. Nevertheless, it offered up careful tactical play and was quickly licensed to Queen Games and released as Paris Connection.

As both titles suggest, Paris Connection is set in France in which the players take the role of investors in the new railway companies that want to connect Paris with the rest of France. Designed for between three and six players, aged ten and over, the aim of the game is to increase the value of shares in one of six railway companies and to hold shares in these companies. Share values are increased by laying track and building connecting routes from Paris across France to her towns and cities. The first clever aspect of the game is that the wooden train pieces that represent the track or routes in the game also represent the shares in the company, so there will come a point at which it is more profitable to own shares in a company rather than build with them. The second clever aspect about the game is that share ownership is hidden throughout the game and only revealed at the very end, though share transactions are done in public.

The game consists of a board depicting a map of France with her various towns and cities. Most towns are worth a single point when scored, but in general, the further a town or city is away from Paris, the more valuable it is to score. Around two sides of the board is a scoring track that runs from one to thirty, showing not a player’s score, but the share values for each company. Besides the main board, there is a small storage board for each of the game’s six sets of share/track pieces. These come in six colours, are done in wood, and are shaped like steam locomotives. There is a card screen for each player behind which he can hide his shares. The last two components are a black cloth bag used to determine random share ownership at the start of a game and two sets of rules. One set of rules is in French, the other in English. Both are double sided, done in full colour with one side explaining how to set the game and the other the game’s actual rules.

Game set up is simple. Each player receives a screen and a train of each colour is placed on the start of the Scoring Track and on the start hexes in Paris. The remaining train pieces of all six colours are placed in the cloth bag and given a good mix. Each player then draws a number of random train pieces from the bag and hides them behind his screen. The number drawn depends on the number of players. The greater the number of players, the fewer the initial number of shares that they can hold at the start of the game and the fewer maximum shares that a player can hold at the end of the game without their scores being penalised.

On his turn, a player has two options. He can either lay track or take shares. To lay track he takes up to five train pieces from any one storage board and places them board so that they are connected to trains of the same colour. To take shares, a player places one the shares he has behind his screen on the storage board that matches its colour and takes two shares of another colour from another storage board. This is only way in which a player can increase the number of shares that he holds.

Play continues until there are only share/track pieces remaining on the single storage board with the remaining share/track pieces either behind the players’ screens or on the board. The other way to end the game is for a player to build into Marseilles. At this point everyone reveals the shares they hold behind their screens and receives points for each share according to its value on the Scoring Track. The player with the highest value share portfolio – after penalties are levied for holding more than the maximum number of shares – is the winner.

Initially, the idea that you are not building your own railway and that you do not own train pieces of a single colour is counter intuitive. In almost every other game, you are building your own railway and you do own all of the train pieces of a single colour. Once past this stumbling block, Paris Connection presents one base tactical question and then a number of smaller questions to a player. That base question is, at what point does it become more valuable to hold multiple shares in a railway network than to extend that network? In other words, at what point do share/track pieces become more valuable as shares than as track?

The subsequent and smaller questions revolve around how does a player affect the share values in the other rail networks? The game is not complicated enough that it includes rules on how to reduce share value, but it is possible to limit the growth in share value. The most obvious means is place the share/track pieces in such a way that they do not connect to any town or city and so do not score any points. Thus a rail network’s share value is not increased for a player’s turn.

The last question that a player needs to address is, how quickly does he need a rail network need to get to Marseilles? It might be that with several high value shares in his portfolio, he might want to end the game early to capitalise on those values. Conversely, the other players might want to lay track in a high value share to both stop it rising in value and it reaching Marseilles, hopefully giving them time to improve other share values and increase their portfolios.

There are three great aspects to Paris Connection. First, there is its simplicity. The rules are not only simple to learn, they are also simple to teach. In fact, the game is simple enough that after a single read through of the rules; a group could get playing, meaning that it is entirely possible to play Paris Connection out of the box. The second great aspect is that the game has almost no randomness to it, and what there is, consists of determining each player’s share portfolio at game’s start. The third great aspect is that this is a Euro Game not for two to five players as many good Euro Games are, but for three to six, and light games for six players are not necessarily all that common.

The production values on Paris Connection are very high. The board is attractively done and clearly laid out. The screens are nice, though prone to falling over. The wooden train-shaped track/share pieces are equally attractive if a little small and perhaps fiddly to handle. The rules sheet is bright and easy to read. Yet these high production values are source of the game’s single real flaw. Paris Connection is not an inexpensive game. In fact it is an expensive game given both how long a play through lasts and how simple it is. It is engaging and enjoyable to play, but it does not offer value for money.

The purchase of the copy of Paris Connection that we have been playing was an impulse buy. The promised lightness of the rules and the upper limit on the number of players were the draw despite the price. Having played it a few times, we have found it to be light and easy, but still offering some tactical choices. Not only is Paris Connection an excellent filler game, it is also a good starter game, a title that can be played and enjoyed with casual games players… that is, if you are happy to overlook the price.