Trains

Although there is a board for Trains, in essence it’s a card game. Each player started with their own set of cards with which they can build track or stations on the board; the goal being to link your track to the most stations. During play you’ll only ever have five cards, and on your turn you can play as many of them as you wish – or are capable of playing.

But you can also use cards to get more cards from the communal supply, which do a variety of things; not least score points. Point-scoring cards are good for the obvious reason that most points wins you the game. But point-scoring cards are also bad in that during the game, they have no purpose, so they clog up your hand – if you deal your five cards and find three of them are point-scoring cards, you only have a maximum of two cards to play.

The other thing that clutters up your hand are waste cards, which are a by-product of building. Certain cards bring you benefits, such as cutting costs when you choose to build, but these usually come with waste cards, and these go into your personal deck too. You can choose to forego your turn in order to dump waste cards back into the general supply, however.

So play continues with everyone trying to build whilst managing their waste, and judging when is the right time to start purchasing those point-scoring cards. The game ends when either four of the communal card decks are depleted, or one of the players have placed all their cubes (representing their track). Most points wins!