Mini Rails Review

Michael

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Posted by Michael on Oct 19, 2017

Critical Hits: Neat, compact train game; offers some compelling decisions and potentially ruthless competition in a “superfiller” package.

Critical Misses: Lack of detail; perhaps a little too reductive as decisions can become purely mathematical.

Mini Rails, designed by Mark Gerrits, purports to distill the essence of the train games genre into a short, compact package. This miniaturization process means that the essential actions that Mr. Gerrits has identified are 1) buying stock and 2) building rails, with the net result of 2) causing 1) to increase in value. There are no deliveries, goods, loans, or complications. On your turn you do 1) or 2). Period. Once everyone is done doing both things six times over six rounds, it's over and whoever has the highest stock value wins. Needless to say, this is a much simpler, much more direct design approach than you’ll find in any of the 18xx games, the popular Martin Wallace train game designs, or even the more streamlined rails titles such as Chicago Express.

But we aren’t quite at a Ticket to Ride or Transamerica level of accessibility, although this is a very easy to play, explain, and endure game. It takes about 30 minutes with any number of players and can be explained in about five minutes with just a couple of gotcha rules that may cause someone to think twice. I still feel like its primary appeal will be to train game fans even though it offers a fairly compelling mix of development, investment and competition in a compact package. At the end of the day, it’s a train game. And that is just not really a universally appealing setting.

It’s also highly abstracted with very little specificity. The train companies have no names, only colors. There are no cool train pieces, only wooden discs. The sense of in-game ego (i.e. “this is me, those are mine”) is very limited. Players represent investors (who are in turn represented only by what is more or less a chart) looking to strike it rich building rails over a modular board. Terrain is not really specific and there is only one central city on the map. Each space has a couple of dots on it in white or red that tell you how much a rail's stock will increase (white=up, red=down) if you build on there, representing a greater cost to build on less favorable terrain.. If you have stock in that rail, you adjust it accordingly on your board based on the dots. But actions taken for each of the six rail companies are limited- there are only so many discs of each in the bag, and the assortment is random each turn. This can affect your choices, especially toward the end of the game when discs are out of stock.

At the beginning of a round, discs are drawn from the bag and each player gets a turn to invest (meaning you take that disc and put it on your chart) or build (meaning you place a disc on the board). The discs you choose also determine the player order for the next round as your order pawns replace them in the lineup, which may have an impact if you need to go first to avoid a valuable rail taking a bad turn toward difficult terrain at the hands of other players.

There are other neat twists. One is that there is always going to be one disc left in the selection. That rail company is considered to have paid their taxes and is thus free from an end-game reaping where the tax dodgers are rendered valueless. And you can deliberately sabotage other rail companies by building onto red spots. There's some pretty cutthroat action that can go on, including making sure a rail you don't any stock in doesn't pay its taxes. And there are considerations such as the relative growth potential of a rail based on where it is and how close it is to lucrative (or harmful) spaces as well as being mindful of who all you are bringing up with you when you increase a rail's value.

This is a “superfiller” class game- there is sometime more to consider than you might expect and it doesn’t feel as frivolous as minimalist, compacted designs often do. But the stripped-down nature also means that some valuable detail is sanded down as well. I found myself wishing that the rails at least had names rather than just being colors, because my gang likes to make fun of names and it means a lot more when Crapton Rails Inc. tanks than when “Blue” does. And not having goods or deliveries sort of takes away that sense of satisfaction for making a big profit. There are also no majorities, ownerships, or anything like that, so it is easy to start to see the game as a series of -3 to +3 decisions despite the situational, tactical play.

But it's brief and easy to play, so it's hard to really bag on it too much. I would not normally choose to play this over Railways of the World or Chicago Express, but it is also a game that takes a fraction of that time and you can have it up and running in minutes with very little setup. There's a classic Winsome quality to it that I think fans of that company’s train games will dig, and it is more accessible (and available) than some of those titles. Mini Rails is a neat, fun train game that anyone can play. It won’t change the world or even its genre, but I appreciate the effort to present this kind of game at an essential level.