Paris Connection is on Board Game Arena so I gave it a go!
Does it have that “Je ne sais quoi”?
A fast network/portfolio-building game with a train theme, with the objective of having the most valuable stock portfolio at the end of the game.
Paris Connection Game Play
This game has a map of France and 33 trains of each of the 6 colours representing 6 companies. One of each colour is placed in the spaces around Paris to get things started and 1 of each on 0 of the score track.
The other players secretly draw between 10 and 5 trains from a bag depending on if you play with 3 to 6 players.
Then in turn order, players take turns completing 1 of 2 actions, Build Track or Trading.
To build track, simply take 5 trains of one company from the supply and put them on spaces adjacent to where they are already, building a route. Only 1 train can occupy a city space and 2 in an open rural space.
To trade, return one of the trains from behind your screen and trade it for 1 or 2 from a different company from the supply.
So the trains themselves are both used to track shares and to track.. erm… track on the board.
The cities each train company visits increase the value of that company between 1 and 4 points depending on how big that city is, denoted by its colour.
This is tracked on the company score track.
The game ends when either only one train company is able to move or a company gets to Marseilles.
You get the value of the company of the relevant colour for each train of that company you have behind your screen. The player with the most points is the winner.
Theme
Trains innit? French Trains, shares and all that. Not new and done a lot.
I find these games very abstracted and this one is no different. Not sure why players getting stock in a company means it expands less now?
Components
Pretty standard for a train game really! They look very average…
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
A very simple game really. The only hidden information is the players scoring pieces. Once the very few rules to this have been taught, it’s fairly straight forward.
Paris Connection Summary
There are obviously a lot of games like this. Steel Driver is really good but very complex; Mini Rails is much simpler. If you want to take out the shares altogether, TransAmerica is a really fun pure route builder.
I do like the push and pull of building the track. You get random shares assigned at the start so you have companies to build. As you build out those companies they become more valuable and other players invest.
The more players invest, the fewer pieces there are available in the supply to expand that track further. This means players could start cashing them in for more a different company. This of course means that the initial company can be further expanded again.
This is the game really, trying to take advantage of the limited pieces available.
An issue is that every time you take the trade action you exchange 1 piece for 2, expanding your supply, therefore, your score. You can win easily without ever building track, and I’ve seen it happen.
But overall it’s not bad, it just has a lot of competition for similar games.
Jesta ThaRogue