Players: 2-6*
Time: 30-60 minutes
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)

* Works with 7 is you add in a two pieces to represent the player--we used walnuts.

The Components

TransAmerica comes with:

• 1 gameboard
• wood bits:
  • 85 tracks
  • 6 start markers
  • 6 locomotives
• 35 city cards
• 1 starting player card
• 1 rulebook

Gameboard: A small 6-panel board that shows the United States with a triangular grid superimposed. 35 cities are located on the grid, with 7 cities each in 5 different regions. Each region is helpfully marked not just by a color (e.g., the west coast is "green"), but also an icon (a weird shield for the west coast). There's also a scoring track across the top of the board. The use of colors and icons overall makes the game very easy to play.

The entire board is printed in full-color on linen-textured cardboard.

Wood Bits: The woods bits are all good quality, painted wood. The tracks are simply black wooden sticks which are laid on the edges of the grid. There is also a start marker and a locomotive for each of the 6 player colors (red, blue, green, yellow, brown, white). The start marker is a sparse cylinder, but the locomotives indeed look like an engine carved in two dimensions. These are all the typical quality you'd expect for German wood components.

City Cards: These are small but very thick, uncoated cards with rounded corners. Because of the thickness they should easily hold up to play.

Each card is clearly marked with its region front and back, both by color and icon. The front also lists a city (e.g., "Jacksonville") and clearly shows it on a map of the United States. With many railroad games, one of the challenges is always figuring out which city is where. The inclusion of these U.S. maps very helpfully avoids that problem, and is a good lesson for other people putting together railroad games.

The start player card just shows an engine front and back, and is used to remember who started the current round.

Rulebook: A very short, one-sheet page explaining the rules in full color. It's simple and well laid out. There's only one example, but that might be enough.

Box & Tray: The box is a medium-sized square box, printed to usual German quality levels. There's just a big "gap in the middle" cardboard tray in the box, which means you'll need some plastic bags for your pieces.

Overall, the board and the wood pieces are all high quality. The cards are a bit disappointing, with their small size and lack of coating, but make up for it with their heavy stock. I also find the board quite attractive, and everything makes good use of icons and pictures to simplify play. The game overall ekes in a "5" out of "5" Style rating. It's almost perfect.

The Gameplay

In TransAmerica your goal is to link together five cities faster than anyone else.

Setup: At the start of each round of play each player takes five city cards, one from each of the five regions. This will give him one city each in the west (green), east (orange), south (red), north (blue), and midwest (yellow) to link up. In turn each player then places his start marker on any city on the board (likely, one of the five he drew).

Placing Track: Each turn, each player then places track along the lines of the board's grid. Most grid lines are marked with a single line, but some, crossing mountains or rivers, are instead marked with a double line.

A player on his turn may either place one track on a double-line or else one or two tracks on single lines. These tracks must be connected to the current network of tracks that includes the player's start marker.

If a player ever connects his track to another player's track, they may both use the entirity of the connected network. Typically, all the players have their tracks connected into one whole by the end of a round of play.

Ending a Round: A round ends when all five of one player's cities become connected through the network of tracks.

Afterward, each other player scores negatively for each connection he was missing for his five cities (1 point for a single-line link, 2 points for a double-line link). At the start of the game, all the locomotive scoring markers began in the "engine house" just past the 12; they'll all move backward from there each round. Typically, some players will just be 1 point off at the end of a round, but others may be 3-5 points away from completion.

After a round of play, everything is cleared off the board and the starting player rotates clockwise.

Ending the Game: The game ends when a locomotive crashes through the barrier beneath the "1" on the scoring track. If, after two rounds, no one has 3 or less points, the barrier is moved up to just two spaces beneath the last place player. This ensures that the end of the game isn't far away.

A game typically lasts 3 or 4 rounds of play.

Relationships to Other Games

TransAmerica has the facade of a connection-based railroad game. It's the same general category that includes Alan Moon's superb Ticket to Ride and Martin Wallace's recent La Strada. And, the gameplay of TransAmerica does indeed center around connection building.

However, TransAmerica is really a bluffing game, like King Me! or Klaus Teuber's Hoity Toity. In order to win you have to convince others to do your building for you, by implying you have no interest in doing that building yourself ... then hooking up to their network.

The Game Design

To be honest, there isn't a lot of game to design in TransAmerica. It's a short and quick game that's primarily unflawed, but also fairly simplistic.

The entire gameplay centers around two mechanics: making effective use of your resources, so that you never waste one of your possible two moves on a turn; and trying your best to intuit what people might help you out by building in your direction. The first, resource-allocation aspect is entirely basic, while the second, bluffing aspect is fairly original and innovative; it's a type of bluffing you don't usually see (though perhaps there are hints of the same trying-to-get-others-to-do-your-work-for-you aspect in Leo Colvini's Clans).

Another good thing I can say for TransAmerica is that it supports a variety of player numbers very well. I've played it with two players and I've also played it with seven (technically, higher than the limit for the game). It worked fine at both levels, though the games were very different (and typically better the more players you have, in my opinion, because the possibility for strategic bluffing increases).

On the downside, TransAmerica is quite random. Among players of the same experience level, winning will be largely dependent upon draws, and whether those drawn cities are close together or not. (However, differences in skill levels do make differences in the game; the one time I played with 7 players, I sharked them pretty well, because I was the only one who had played before.)

If I'd written this review of TransAmerica in 2002, when it was released, or even just six months ago, I would probably have given it a "4" for Substance. The gameplay is quick and fun. However, since, I think other releases have shown the true possibilities of this little niche and how basic TransAmerica really is, so on today's market I can only give it a "3" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

TransAmerica is a fine little connection-building filler. However, i also think other more recent games have surpassed it. In particular if you want a longer game Ticket to Ride is greatly superior, while if you're looking for a 2-4 player connection-based filler, I prefer La Strada, which has a better sense of strategy.

I can thus only recommend TransAmerica for two particular categories of play:

• If you're looking for a fun filler for 5 or 6 players.
• If you're looking for a simple game for kids or family.