Mini Rails

Mini refers to the rules, really, which are pretty simple – but don’t be fooled. Underneath the simple options (you only take twelve actions the entire game) there is a real beast here.

In Mini Rails you are investors in six different railway companies as they expand across the board. Over six rounds you take two actions in each: build track, and buy shares. Every player has two markers on a shared Market board to show what order they’ll play in, and at the start of each round a number of coloured discs – each colour representing a company – are drawn randomly from a bag: equal to the number of players, plus one. Players then take their turn moving their markers down from the turn track to claim a disc: having done so, they can either turn it into a share, or build track with it.

When taking it as a share, simply add it to your personal board on the zero spot. When playing it as track, simply add it to any empty hex on the board adjacent to a disc of a matching colour. You’ll notice that each hex has white or red dots on it. Adding it to a white hex will cause all shares of that colour (owned by any players) to go up in value. Adding it to a red hex will cause the value to go down. Once everyone has taken both their actions, the round ends and new one begins.

And apart from the scoring, that’s pretty much it. But the scoring is where Mini Rails gets interesting. At the end of each round there’s one disc left over, and this goes into the ‘Taxation’ band on the Market board. Thematically, this means that this company has paid its taxes. For the players, that means that after the sixth and final round, shares in the company made be worth something! For come the end of the game any company that hasn’t paid taxes won’t score points at all (though they may cost you negative points!) and companies that have ‘paid their taxes’ can discard any negative scores, and only count up the positive ones. Most points wins!