Railway Boom

Designer: Hisashi Hayashi

Developer: Simone Luciani
Publisher: Arclight Games
Ages: 14+
Time: 60-120 mins
Players: 2-4
Review by Nathan Beeler

Railway Boom cover art by Ian O’Toole

“So what’s good?”

That’s what I asked my friend, Justin, when I first entered the main playing room at Messen last November. He had recently come back from Spiel at Essen, where he helped collect and mule games back to Seattle for the local con. He’d also worked to reconstitute the games after travel packing, and had helped set up the library at the con. I knew he’d even managed to play a few already in the short time he’d been back. I was hoping some titles had stood out from that process for him.

His face lit up with a smile. Pointing to a table behind him where Railway Boom had been set up, he enthused about the game he’d played once and was eager to play again. Good enough for me! We jumped into a four player game, and the con experience was full steam ahead.

An inviting game set up for four players

Railway Boom is ostensibly a game about building up railway networks across 19th century Japan. This happened in real life, in the early Meiji era. Per a note on the back of the rule book, “Any resemblance to actual persons, organizations, events or anything else is purely coincidental.” If the publishers don’t think we should believe the theme, who am I to argue?

Lawyers, amirite?

In reality, Railway Boom is about auctions! Lovely, wonderful auctions. Specifically, there are four rounds with four different auctions each round, each of which are powered by four different resources: material (logs), currency (coins), technology (cogs), and coal. Auctions in the game are simply used to determine the player order in their associated phases, and that’s it. But that can be enough to make them really interesting.

Auctions in Railway Boom work slightly differently than in any other game I’ve seen. From the back of the line, players either put their bid token on some higher open bid number or flip their token over to indicate their bid is locked in. Notably, players don’t have to bid the highest amount possible to stay in the bidding, they just need to put their marker on some higher bidding location than where their marker started. After that, whoever has the marker furthest in the back of the line that is unflipped has the same options. This process continues until all tokens are flipped and the bids are locked in. The winning bidder pays the full amount, and the last place bidder pays nothing. The middle players either pay full or half rounded-up, depending on the number of players in the game. This can lead to agonizing decisions about how to thread the bidding needle.

White to bid, with a wealth of possible bids

One stroke of genius game design in Railway Boom is that the particular resource used to bid with in the first three phases of a round is the same resource used to accomplish stuff in that phase. It shouldn’t take a lot of thought to see why this leads to even more interesting auctions. Bid too much, and a player pays full price for the privilege of not being able to do much of anything good on their turn. Bid too little, and they’re left with the dregs the other players didn’t want. Like all good auction games, striking the right balance is the key. Given the double, triple, or even quadruple duty the resources are pulling, that feels even more crucial here.

Let’s look a bit closer inside the Train Phase, the first in any given round. Players use material stored on their material resource track to bid for the right to obtain locomotives and carriages. There is always one locomotive for each player and they’re always free. So going earlier in a round just means better options to pick from. But the locomotives can vary wildly, and some are just objectively better than others. Much better, sometimes. Carriage cards are even more varied. A player can buy up to two of these with the same material resources used to bid on turn order. Additionally, the game can introduce scarcity, depending on player count, by not putting enough for everyone to buy two each round. A player going early may have the option to buy the carriages they want, but they may not have the material left to afford them. And a player going last may have no good ones left to choose from, or even any at all!

Locomotives and trailers for sale (or rent)

Currency is used to grow a player’s rail network on the map in the Expansion Phase. This in turn allows increases in resource income and resource tiles that players will send on the rail cars they got in the Train Phase. Going earlier potentially allows a player to get a better starting city for their expansion, maybe even allowing them to connect it to their network from earlier rounds, an important thing to do for both end game scoring and in-game route connection bonuses.

Should be an interesting auction for Chiba Prefecture (home of Ozeki Kotozakura, my favorite Sumo wrestler)

Technology is the resource used in the Development Phase. This phase distributes development cards that give little ongoing, one-time, or instant boons. In yet another clever design decision, development cards are randomly flipped into sets of three, one set per player. Players who pay for the right to go early get to choose which set they get to buy from, but only one of the cheapest cards in a set is free. The rest, the better and more expensive cards that the player probably paid through the nose to access, must be purchased with the technology resources that weren’t blown at auction.

Coal doesn’t have an inherent auction phase associated with it, but is instead used to power trains in the Operations Phase. That and the income phase are the main ways players gain back the resources spent so easily in all the other phases. In the Operations Phase, players have a chance to do chaining shenanigans with the carriage cars pulled behind locomotives. Since cars are evaluated front to back, including costs and payouts, coal earned from resource tiles nearer the front of the car can be used to power carriages pulled later in the train. If done well, a train can essentially power itself and do a lot more besides. Neat!

This player really, really wants another lumber tile

The last phase, and the last auction of each round, is the Objective Phase. These objectives concern end game scoring, and there really is nothing to the phase except the auction. The higher a player’s place in the bid, the more points they score for that objective at the end of the game. The beauty here is in each round these auctions are controlled by a card that says what the objective is (e.g. number of forest spaces your network cover), what it’s worth for each place in the auction, and, most interestingly, what resource will be used to bid on it. These cards are known from the beginning of the game, so you can try to plan to build toward the objectives and try to have a lot of that resource when the auction happens. As we know, the best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley. Players probably need to win one of these auctions to get big points, but doing so is massively painful. There is no immediate gain—just a loss of resources to be felt during that phase in the next round.

Terrain Tycoon? I wanted to be a Train Tycoon

Let’s talk about another one of the genius aspects to the game, and that’s the free action, resource conversion. At any time players can exchange any two resources for one of another. Seems simple, right? But the ramification of this blows the guardrails off of the whole economy. Don’t have enough currency to expand your rail network into Tokyo? No problem. You can convert a material, two technology and a coal to get two more currency. Boom! You’re in Tokyo now. It’s just like a payday loan. And sometimes just as insidious. Players can not only overpay and overbid, but with this rule they can also WAY overpay and overbid. They can kill their whole engine, in fact. And sometimes, creating a train wreck is the right thing to do. Usually it isn’t.

You can’t park there, mate!

Essentially, that’s the game. Do each of the six phases four times. Add the Objective points to the points scored along the way. Add a pittance for extra resources and a significant chunk for your largest single network of trains, then find out who wins. For a game with so many weighty decisions, it barrels along at a brisk pace. Outside the auctions, a surprising amount of activity can be done simultaneously.

My lovely wife, Lizzy, thankfully also really likes the game. She thinks it’s so good it should have an exclamation mark: Railway Boom! (Hands go up in an exploding motion.) I can’t disagree with that idea. I also think it works surprisingly well with only two players. That’s insane for an auction game. Though admittedly it is better with three and four. I have yet to try the city overlay tiles that change the map, but I am excited they included them in the game for eventual variety. I can definitely see playing this enough to warrant.

Two player bidding is all or nothing

So what do all these parts add up to? As Justin and I and two other fellow gamer friends cleaned up, the mood around the table was excitement. Everyone really liked or loved it. For me, a person for whom “auction mechanism” is a love language, I knew I’d just experienced one of those magical con moments where I got to play an “it” game for the first time. I had that same feeling after playing Agricola, Terraforming Mars, and a few others over the years. Those games are among my very favorites now. Railway Boom surely will be, too. In fact, games like Railway Boom are why I keep chugging along, trying new games despite the dismally low success rate they have for me. Eventually, I can find a diamond hidden among lumps of coal.

Ratings Summary from the Opinionated Gamers

I love it!… Nathan Beeler, Justin B
I like it… Dale Y
Neutral…
Not for me…