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Mini Express is a track laying railway game in the style of Ticket to Ride, but here you are connecting freight routes rather than passengers. Rather than collect sets of cards to lay a route you can just pick up the little trains of any of the four companies and set them down. Laying track increase the worth of a company and meeting the demands of a City will increase your influence in a company. The rider is that the longer the route you set the easier you make it for your rivals to buy shares in that company! Let me explain.
Share and Share Alike
The four different coloured train companies relate to four different commodities: Orange/Hides; Grey/Steel; White/Cotton; Brown/Timber. Players do not directly control a company but gain points via having shares in them. Thus we can have up to 5 players with only 4 companies. Companies have 9 shares each and every player starts with 2, randomly drawn, shares. These must be in 2 different companies and a different combination to everyone else. 6 remaining shares for each company are placed on the Asset Board.
The Asset Board also holds 4 trains of each company, 1 train is put on its starting square on the board and the other 20 are kept in supply. The compact but pretty, double-sided map board has the USA on one side and Europe on the other. Each depicts 32 cities plus the 4 company start locations. These cities are given a random Demand tile showing 2 commodities. These can be any 2 of the 4 commodities or a wild type and could be both the same.
Freight Train, Freight Train Going So Fast
Each turn you must either lay track or take a share. To lay track you take Train pieces from the Tracks space on the Asset Board and join that company’s network to a new city. The company goes up in value on the Track Length chart a number of levels equal to the number of tracks aka trains laid. As well, your own influence goes up on the Tracking Board for each of the commodities shown on the commodity tile. Each city has a connection limit of 3, 2 or just 1 compny that can link to it and no company can go to the same city twice. When the limit is reached the commodity tile is removed to show this.
The other action is to take a share in a company. To do this you simply reduce your Influence in that company by 1 for each train in its Tracks space. This means that the more tracks that have been laid the “cheaper” the share will be. Then 3 more trains are put in the Tracks space. This is the only way Trains/Tracks are made available for further building so shares need to be taken when stock is low. This is not usually a problem!
All’s Well that ends Swell
The game ends when any 2 of the companies have no shares left on offer. The 4 companies will have a final position on the Track Length chart with a line of 3 values. This indicates what the shares are worth for the players with the most Influence, second most Influence and the rest in that company. Players then use these values to total the worth of their shares. Highest value wins.
All Change, Please!
There are a number of Optional Modular rules you can add if you wish:-
For the USA board there is the Golden Spike Variant. This allows you to start building from San Francisco on the West Coast once Omaha has been reached in the middle. When East and West get connected the appropriate companies get advanced on the Track Length chart.
For the Europe board there are now Harbo(u)r hexes one of which is activated when a wild demand tile is taken. Each Harbo(u)r can now act as a new start location for the company that activated it.
There are comprehensive rules (almost as long as the main rules!) for an AI Bot to play in a Solo or 2-player game. Though I felt the game worked very well in my preferred multi-player solo mode.
Finally there are also rules for an Expert game for 2 Players.
Railly Good!
Mini Express is a well-designed, tight little game with reasonable theming and is quick and fun to play. The rules are straight forward and easy to understand once you get your head around the fact that the colours of the trains don’t relate to the colours of the players and it’s your Influence level with a company not the number of shares you have in it that determines how much you’ll get for them.
Each game will be different with the commodity tiles being randomly placed and there’s the optional variants as well. There are some nice decisions to make as to whether you build a longer track but leave a cheap share on offer for your rival and also how much Influence you are willing to sacrifice in order to get a share.
For once the timing rating of about an hour is accurate but the age rating of 15+ seems very high. I’d say this was fun for all the family and I’d certainly been able to cope with it at 11.