Railway Boom

Railway Boom tells the story of the early years of Japan’s rail network, as industrial tycoons swallowed up smaller companies and competed with each other. But Railway Boom’s unusual approach to the theme is to do almost everything via the medium of auctions.

The board shows a map, broken into hexes, where you will build your railroads: across plains, forests and mountains – even water – and cities, where you’ll be rewarded with precious resources. Beneath the map is both a scoretrack, an auction track and a somewhat icon-heavy guide to the phases of the game, which we’ll cover in brief below. In the meantime, your own personal board has a bunch of tracks on it that keep tabs on how much you have of the resources in question – materials, money, technology and coal – and another bunch of tracks that show how much income you’ll get of these resources at the end of each round. There are only four rounds in the game, so you have a decent amount in your coffers before the game begins.

There are four auctions in each round, and they use different resources. In the first phase, everyone bids for Locomotive cards (and attendant Carriage cards) spending materials. Each auction works the same – you can only bid what you can afford, and the bidding keeps going up until all players have settled on their highest bid. The winner gets first choice of the cards, but pays full price – how much everyone else pays depends on the number of players, but the cost drops the lower down the bidding you are: last player gets last choice, but doesn’t pay anything. We’ll return to what these cards do later.

The next phase- Expansion – involves bidding (with money this time) to establish train Stations in cities on the board. When you place a station in a city, you also add train pieces connecting to it, using the ‘power’ value of the city to spread your network across the board. When a station goes into a city, it bumps up your income on the marked resource (sometimes two) and if your railroad goes into a city, you gain the resources shown there. In the Development phase everyone bids power for Development cards, which give you either one-off or ongoing in-game advantages over the other players. Next is the Income phase, where all your resources get replenished, just in time for the Operation phase. Now there’s no bidding: instead, everyone can spend coal to ‘run’ their Locomotive cards, which in turn gift you rewards of either resources, income boosts or points, depending on what resources you harvested during the expansion phase.

Then finally, there’s an Objective phase: now what is bid depends on the Objective card for the current round, but in essence all the objectives are about scoring points at the end of the game for having met certain criteria: lots of trains around a city, for example (City Tycoon) or a bunch of trains in a straight line (Express Tycoon) or having the highest income on a particular resource (eg Coal Investor). All players will get to trigger these scoring cards, but the higher bidders get a better return: your score in the criteria multiplied by four, say, instead of one or two.

That’s the gist of the game: you repeat these phases four times, and then the game ends with some extra scoring for the Objective cards, your biggest railroad and any leftover resources you have. Most points is the best tycoon. Boom!