Designed by: Amabel Holland
In Northern Pacific, players are building a trans-American railroad from east coast to west, but although the goal is co-operative, the game is far from it!
Each player begins with three small investment cubes, and one large one. The board is placed centrally and shows the various routes the railroad may take. The game is very simple – on your turn you can either advance the railroad track, or invest in a station on the map, placing one of your cubes there. If the railroad reaches a station where you have an investment cube, it pays out: you receive the cube back into your supply, plus an extra one from the bank (or two extra if you placed your large investment cube). Each station can host up to three investment cubes, so players may share spaces or a single player may double/treble up.
That is the game, in essence: when the railroad reaches the west coast, points are scored for cubes in hand and then there is a second and third round where everything resets and you build again from scratch. But those exceedingly simple rules contain agonising decisions, because if you invest in the wrong station – anywhere the railroad doesn’t stop – your cube not pay out, and that investment is wasted. So you really want to make sure the railroad takes the route you want it to, but building railroad gives your fellow opponents information and opportunities to invest. After the third round, the richest player is the winner – with the tie-breaker being the player who invested in the fewest un-served stations.
A surprisingly deep and thoughtful game for so few rules - Northern Pacific is a brilliant distillation of the theme of many much much longer stocks and shares rail-building games. This one is really all about the players, and there's a good reason you play three rounds; you very much have to work together to bash the current leader. Alliances are made and lost from moment to moment, and an experienced group will, I suspect, see someone winning by a whisker. Very clever, and very, very dastardly.
PLENTY. The whole game is a sequence of Take-That moments, some inadvertent. Most not.
Low to moderate.
Though the rules are simple the decision-making is not. Wager too much investment cubes in a certain direction/location, and you can be sure your opponents will build the train far, far away from you.
If you like how the seemingly peaceful, collaborative goal of railroad-laying is a thin veneer for dastardly, screw-you moves then Northern Pacific's repeat value is all about what the players bring to it. There's no randomness here, just the agonizing decision-making. Play two or even a single round for a shorter game.
3-5
Players
6+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Northern Pacific takes the inherent tension in Ticket to Ride (will someone build that route before I can?) and strips everything else away, leaving a game that is so, so easy to understand even the very young can easily play, but so, so feisty that even the most sanguine adult may find themselves outraged by events beyond their control. Build or invest - every turn is as straightforward as that. But that simple choice is loaded with the high stakes of succeed or fail, win or lose, help yourself or (if you get it really wrong) help others.