Pioneers

The players are of course, the Pioneers of the title, building a network of roads across a nascent USA and establishing settlements as we go. (A later edition, Future Energy, uses a different theme)

The board shows the country, with a network of routes connecting settlement sites. You begin the game with a little stagecoach board full of little wooden pioneer people, and a bit of cash. Each turn has three phases: firstly, the bank phase brings you a little more cash. Then you can purchase one or two roads and/or another stagecoach, and finally you can move and colonise.

Players collectively – and on your turn, individually – move a stagecoach across the board, as many roads as you would like to travel: but you can only move along your own roads for free: using other players’ roads or the roads printed on the board costs a dollar, paid either to the player or back to the general supply. Why move? Because your goal is to deliver the people on your stagecoach board to settlements on the board: as soon as you empty one of your stagecoaches, you gain a bunch of points. Slightly hampering you in the process is that each pioneer will only settle on a matching-coloured destination, but helping you is the fact that having settled you gain the tile from the settlement, and these furnish you with either ongoing (extra income, or extra actions) or one-off abilities such as building extra roads or jettisoning unwanted passengers from one of your stagecoaches.

Before your turn is over, however, you must offer (starting clockwise from your left) the opportunity for another player to help establish the settlement. Only one player may do this: they pay you two dollars and get to add a pioneer to the settlement.

Scoring points during play is all about getting all the pioneers out of your stagecoaches and onto the board, but you also need to be thinking strategically because at the end of the game, points are awarded for each pioneer of your own colour in your largest network of roads.