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All aboard for another review! I have a bit of a tricky relationship with roll and write, and similar, games. Whilst I generally really enjoy them, I very rarely find myself craving to play them in the same way I want to play something more traditional with a board and cards and the like.
Now, that’s not universally true, I’ve got a few evergreen games that I crack out on the regular. Railroad Ink, Welcome to and rustling leaves frequently find themselves on my games table. For me though, it sort of feels that when a roll and write game hits a certain complexity, it probably should have just been a regular board/card game instead. That isn’t to knock some of these frankly massive roll and write games. Twilight Inscription, Hadrian’s Wall and Rome and Roll are well designed games, I just feel that the roll and write side of things sometimes gets in the way of the experience.
Choo Choo
So, with that lengthy preamble out of the way, let’s talk about Pioneer Rails. What we have here is a flip and write game where players are looking to build up rail networks around the American West in pioneer times. As you map out your expansion, you’ll be able to connect various points of interest into your network. When you do this, you’ll be able to cross them off of your sheet and earn yourself some points; maybe a special power or two as well.
Each round of a game of Pioneer Rails, the player with the dealer token will deal out 3 cards. They can select one for themselves, removing it from the options pool, and then the other players get to choose either of the two remaining cards on their turn. Whichever card you choose will dictate what action you get to take that round.
This is the essential roll and write experience. Sort of set collection ramped up to 11 with special powers thrown in too. What makes these games live or die is how interesting these sets are to collect. For me, I like to have enough different things to look for to keep things interesting. I tend to find that having a few options open to me makes me feel like I can overcome any luck-based draws when the action cards come up each round.
I also like it when some of these things interact with each other. Sort of, “Hey if you do either A or B you’ll score well. But if you manage to do both you’ll be swimming in points!” This sort of stuff is like catnip to me.
Anyways, let’s get back to Pioneer Rails. Each player will have the same hex based map in front of them. On that map you’ll have various town features, a river, some mountains, and 4 hexes; each with one of the 4 card suits in it. Those 4 suit hexes serve start points for your 4 different railway lines. When you select your card for the round it will have a suit on it and that is the suit that you get to play with this round.
You get to draw out rails on the edge of 3 hexes that link back to that initial card suit hex. As these railway lines get longer, they will start to be drawn around the outsides of the hexes that contain the various scoring features. Each of the features needs a different number of rails around it to be scored. The simplest gold nuggets only need 1, but the forts need 4 rails. This would likely be a bit tricky to remember, but luckily it is printed right there on each hex, so that’s nice!
Nuggets of gold
There is a nice variety of individual scoring features in Pioneer Rails. The aforementioned gold nuggets are everywhere, only need one rail and score a single point each. You’ll generally find yourself picking up loads of these because it is a nice way to pick up a point if you have less than ideal action card choices. Next up we’ve got banks, which is where you store all your gold nuggets. Activating a bank lets you cross off up to 4 of your collected nuggets. Doing this will earn you multiples of points for all your gold collecting.
This gets you into a nice little rhythm where you grab some gold, then look for a bank to drop it off at and then repeat. And as I mentioned, I really like it when these scoring actions interact with each other. It makes it all feel very cohesive.
Next up we’ve got Forts and Cattle ranches. They both just score points for each one you activate but the way you activate them is a bit different. Forts work the same as the other things I’ve mentioned but you need 4 rails to surround them. Cattle ranches are an altogether trickier beast in that you need to completely separate them from all other cattle ranches. You do this by using your rails as a wall to make neat little cells, each one with a single cattle ranch in. If you pull that off you’ll be up to your ears in points.
The last two scoring features are sort of linked too. They are the towns and rail yards. They both play into the way you expand your railway lines. You see, every time you expand your rails, they must form a single continuous line. As a rule you can’t do any forks in their paths. They will basically start at one of the card suit hexes and eventually wend their way to one of the towns on the board. Towns are a little different as they occupy the spaces where hexes meet, think where you put towns/cities in Catan. Once you reach a town, that particular rail line finishes. The first line to reach a town activates it for scoring, but you can send other rail lines there as well. The reason you may want to do that is that if you connect two lines in a town that start at different suit hexes, then you have just made a network.
Rail networks on their own do nothing. But if you have one or more rail yards crossed off you will get loads of points for the number of connected towns in your largest network. This is pretty tricky to pull off well, but lordy it turns on the points sprinklers if manage it. On top of all this, you also use towns to activate the 4 special actions you can take. Each town you connect to allows you one special action. This could be to build a bridge over the river, the only way to connect to the two sides of the map. You could tunnel between the mountain hexes, short cut across a desert hex, ignore the suit on the card you selected this round or even put a branch in one of your rail roads. All good stuff.
Approaching the station
All of this sounds like a pretty solid offering of a roll and write game, but there is just a little bit more I’ve got to tell you about. Each game will see 3 goal cards drawn. These mix up the game a bit and have you looking for different goals each time you play. But there is also the poker aspect of the game that I’ve completely skipped over. You see, those cards you select also have a value to consider. The cards will either be a 10, jack, queen, king or ace. And each one you select gets jotted down on your sheet. Every five rounds you’ll look at the hand you’ve created and score some points. You’ll always get at least 1, but you could get 6 if you’re clever with what you pick. Oh, and if you activate a saloon on the board, you can double the value of your next scored hand. *Head explodes*
I’ve waffled a lot here. In fact, you pretty much know how to play the whole game now. There are a few extra things to cover, like there being two maps to play on as well as loads of different goal cards to choose from each game. But coming back to how I started this review, when I look at this game, I don’t think Pioneer Rails should’ve been a more traditional board game with boards and little wooden tokens for rails. I feel the roll and write aspects of this game add to it, not detract from it. It’s really satisfying to watch your rails sprawl out over the map and at the end of the game just pick it up and compare it with your friends’. All of the different ways of scoring are good and there is enough interaction points between them to keep it interesting but not overwhelming.
It is a bit of a solo experience though; much like a lot of roll and write games. The only real form of player interaction is which card the dealer choses and who gets to score the goal cards first. Other than that, it is very much heads down and concentrate on your own board. Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing, not every game needs to have you worrying about what your opponents are doing at every turn. In fact sometimes it is nice just to lose yourself in your own little world.
At the end of the day, Pioneer Rails is a fantastic, medium weight, flip and write game that has some great thematic consistency that I can foresee that I will be playing on the regular for a long time.
