Game of Trains is a pattern-building, card game.

Title: Game of Trains

Year Published: 2015

Designer: Alexey Konnov, Alexey Paltsev, Anatoliy Shklyarov, Trehgrannik

Publisher: Brain Games

Players: 2-4

Game Time: ~30 mins

Set-up Time: ~2 mins

Ages: 8+

Theme: Alternate Earth?

Mechanisms: Pattern Building, Hand Management

How to win: Get all of your train cars in order first

Game Description

Each player is in charge of their line of trains. At the beginning of the game, the train cars in the player’s train line — each with their own number — are sorted in descending order.

How to play Game of Trains

A quick how-to-play video with all the rules including each effect card.

Game of Trains Round-Up

There are no similar games to this for me so I would just add it into the filler section, like Love Letter. Purely due to this being a 4 player game where you’re trying to achieve a goal and prevent others from doing so. It’s a unique experience for me.

The basics of the game are simple. You have train carts in reverse order, get them in order, simple.

But how you do it is quite tricky. Adding cards to your row is easily done if the number is VERY low or VERY high you know what end to put it. But what if it isn’t? Do you risk it? Do you put a middling number in the middle and hope the middle will end up actually in the middle?

Then you have to make sure the cards you’re playing in the middle won’t help the other players. For example, in my first game, I played a 1 on the left-hand side of my train, but the card I replaced had the action to remove the left card… So my opponent played that and my 1 was discarded… doh!

Then you have to try and position your cards to work with the available actions if or when they are available to you…

For such a simple game there is so much to think about, it’s great

Rating

Nothing but fun!

I give it 8/10