Preview di Paul Grogan su bgg:
Hi, my name is Paul Grogan and welcome to the first in a series of sneak preview articles for the game Railroad Revolution, the new 2016 game from designers Marco Canetta and Stefania Niccolini and published by What’s Your Game. In this preview, I’m going to be covering the theme of the game and the core mechanics.
The Setting
America, in the 19th Century. Large companies seize the opportunity to expand their rail networks across the country, laying track, constructing stations, and helping the Telegraph company develop their infrastructure. Each company ruthlessly competes to be the most powerful railroad tycoon across all America: the Railroad Revolution has begun!
Each player takes on the role of one of the big companies and will carry out a series of actions in the game to improve their position.
There are a number of different strategies to pursue in the game and a number of ways to score Victory Points (VP), which are only counted at the end of the game.
Gameplay
It’s actually very simple: Players take it in turns to perform one action at a time, and this process repeats until the end of the game has been triggered. Then everyone gets one more turn, and the points are totalled.
On your turn, you perform one of the 4 actions depicted on your Player board, and then play passes to the next player.
Actions
There are 4 main actions in the game, and performing each action requires one of your workers (don’t worry, you will start the game with some workers). You place the worker from your supply onto the action you want to perform. There are no restrictions on which action you choose; you can repeat the same action on consecutive turns if you want to, but the action is likely to be slightly different because it depends on which type of worker you use (more on this later).
Each player always has access to 4 actions, shown on each of the player boards.
The four actions (from left to right) are:
Station: Establish a station in a city you are connected to.
Rail: Build railway track to expand your rail network and connect to more cities.
Telegraph: Build a Telegraph Office to improve the infrastructure of the Telegraph company.
Trade: Gain money by selling off some of your company assets.
Workers
Each player will start with a slightly different company structure at the beginning of the game. However, all players will start with 4 non-specialized workers (white meeples) and 1 specialized worker (each player will start with a different one).
On your turn, you take one of the workers from your supply and place it on one of the actions. The colour of the worker you use determines the cost and outcome of the action. Using a non-specialised worker (white) lets you do the main action, but using one of the specialised workers generally makes the action more powerful.
However, there is still an advantage to using a non-specialised worker, because if you do, then after the action is completed, you may promote one of your workers into a manager. I’ll explain promotions more in a later preview, but essentially, in order to complete company objectives (worth VP), you need to promote workers into managers.
Now, it is really important to know that you can always use a specialised worker as if it was non-specialised. Therefore, when you place an Orange meeple for example, you can either carry out the improved version of the action, or instead, you could use it as if it were a non-specialised worker, carry out the basic action, and then perform a promotion. Don’t worry, the worker won’t complain about being given menial tasks to do. Well, not much anyway.
Your Workforce
As mentioned above, you are going to be using these guys to perform actions. At the start of your turn, if you have no more workers in your supply, remove all of the workers from your Player board, put them back into your supply, and then place one as normal. So, your pool of workers must be carefully managed, as you only get them back when all have been placed.
During the game, you will have many opportunities to gain new specialised workers, and you are going to need them, because when you promote someone to become a manager, they are removed from your available workers.
As we all know, once you become a manager, you stop doing any real work .
A very important rule is that you must always have at least 4 workers in your pool, split between your supply and your Player board. So, if you are down to only 4 workers, you cannot perform any promotions (or any other action which requires you to lose a worker) until you gain more workers.
Managing your worker pool is an important part of the game and will present you with interesting and challenging decisions: You must carefully assign each of your workers to perform the right action at the right time in order to exploit their specializations in the best way. You also then need to decide when to promote them, because once you do, you can no longer use them to take actions.
That’s all for this preview. I know I have only really talked about the workers, but they are a very big part of the game, especially Nick (one of the Orange workers).
Next time I’m going to be talking about building railroads and stations.
Thanks for reading!
Paul Grogan
Gaming Rules
on behalf of What's Your Game
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