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I Love Trains
Isle of Trains - if you say it out loud it sounds like “I love Trains!” which I do so that’s alright - sees you compete with other loco operators to deliver freight and passengers to six different locations on the eponymous Isle. Alternatively you can ply your trade solo to achieve objectives in one of ten different scenarios. This is all done via a large, 71 deck of cards that provide your rolling stock, their cargoes and the means of paying for them!
Isle of Trains – All Aboard is on the one hand quite literally an engine-building game yet is probably more realistically categorised as a worker placement vehicle. The setting is a fictitious island comprising of 6 different regions – plus a 7th if you are playing with 4 players – that have various requirements for freight and offer different rewards for the delivery of passengers. To achieve these goals you collect cards to build a train of an Engine and Cars that can carry such freight and people and deliver them. The setting, I would say, from the style of dress of the passengers and train stock depicted, is 1880’s USA.
The Island is laid out, using the 6 (or 7) island cards, in the same way each time. Whilst these are attractive and have neatly laid out rail routes connecting them, the track layout has no effect on game play, which is a bit of a shame. The island cards each have their own colour coded destination tiles and have a randomly picked Ticket tile associated with them. The Ticket tile shows the rewards for delivering up to 3 passengers there. Each player is given one Level 1 Engine to start with and dealt 5 of the ubiquitous train cards with a further 3 being dealt face up alongside the deck and also 2 random passengers from the draw bag.
Deliver The Goods – And Passengers
Trains can consist of an Engine and a number of Cars. The Cars can be: Hoppers that carry Coal, Tankers that carry Oil, Box Cars that carry Boxes(duh!) and Passenger carrying Coaches. There are also Cabooses that give various special abilities and bonuses. You only have 1 engine but you can have any number of the different cars in your train. However, each car has a weight and you can only have up to the maximum your engine can haul. To overcome this and build bigger trains you must upgrade your engine. Each engine and train car has 3 levels of increasing capacity. Each train card has a value that will count to your total at the game end.
The other type of card you can get is a Building card. You may only have 1 Building (normally) in play though you can change it. These Buildings give various end of game scoring VPs.
Each turn you take 2 Actions from: Take; Build; Load; Deliver.
Take - take 1 card, face-up or from the deck or 1 passenger from the bag Build - add a Car to your train or upgrade an existing one Load - a passenger on to an engine or Coach or cargo on a freight car Deliver – Freight or Passengers to their destination for the appropriate reward
Now there’s a lot going on with these Train Cards because not only do they provide the vehicles of your rolling stock but they are also the currency with which you pay for them. So if you want to build say a Level 1 Boxcar with a cost of 3 you have to discard 3 other Train cards to pay for it. Considering at the end of your turn you can only have a maximum of 5 cards in your hand you need to do some clever hand manipulation to get some of the higher value cards out. Upgrades are a bit easier as you only pay the difference in value between the two levels.
Tickets Please!
The third use of the Train Cards is to provide freight cargoes. Passengers have their own, coloured tokens that can be delivered straight from your train to the appropriate destination until the 3 spaces on the ticket are full. Freight is loaded onto a Car by having a Train Card with the matching symbol: Coal, Oil, Boxes on it and putting it under the car up to its capacity. Once you have a Train loaded with the demand of a particular Island Card you can deliver that and take the Island card. This will give you VPs at the end and the opportunity to deliver further cargo for big points.
The interesting thing about Loading is that you can Load onto your own Train or any of your opponents trains! If you load onto their Trains you get an immediate bonus but they, of course, will be able to later make the delivery. This makes for some interesting decisions as you will need to do this at times in the game, particularly to keep getting Train cards.
Each time an Island Card is taken or a Ticket is filled with 3 passengers the Progress Train is moved along the Progress Track and when it reaches space 4-6 for players 2-4 it’s the end game. After 1 more turn the vPs are all added up and the one with the most is the Top Conductor.
Final Destination
Isle of Trains – All Aboard is a pleasing game with a lot of variation. Every turn you have interesting little decisions to make as you try to duck and dive to get enough together to do the things you want to. There’s a whole marshalling yard of options for your train cards with 15 different cars to make your deliveries and 11 different Cabooses for in-play bonuses. Add to that the 10 different Buildings you can have for end-of-game scoring and there’s a lot of ways to win.
One slight drawback is, despite the descriptive iconography on the cards themselves, you can find yourself having to constantly check out the detailed descriptions in the 8 page reference section in the back of the manual but as this has a lovely cloth feel to it is not necessarily a hardship.
It took me a while to get my head around the fact that whilst you have to have the right cargo aboard to Deliver at a particular location and this takes a fair bit of organising, passengers can just be loaded in one Action and Delivered to their matching colour destination in the next. This is a quick way to generate more cards and early VPs. Also as a die-hard despatcher I found it odd that you don’t have to physically make your train travel from one location to the next you just say it’s going to X or Y and it’s there! Still, it all makes for a faster game.
One final note about the Solo side. This is essentially the same as the main game and you are offered a full campaign of 10 scenarios to work through. Your final tally of VPs gives you a rank moving up through Engineer and Head Conductor to Island Conductor at over 80 points. My sub 50 point scores leave me firmly as a Freeloader. I’m thinking Stoker but I’ll keep at it, pass me that shovel!
Toot! Toot!
