Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 3-5 hours
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)

This review presumes that you've already been introduced to the crayon rails games, either through EuroRails or Empire Builder. Lunar Rails very much feels like an advanced version of the system, so isn't really an introductory game, and thus this review isn't either.

The Components

Lunar Rails comes with the standard components that you'd expect in a crayon rails game:

• 1 puzzle-cut board
• 6 crayons
• 6 pawns
• 95 load chips
• 130 demand cards
• 20 event cards
• 18 locomotive cards
• 1 pack of money
• 1 rulebook

Board & Crayons: Like most of the other crayon-rail games, this one has a board cut into six pieces that jigsaw together. They depict the two hemispheres of the moon. Each hemisphere is additionally circled with colorful "wrap letters" which show how the hemispheres connect together--because you're playing on a spherical globe. Everything else is pretty normal, with the usual symbols for terrain types, the helpful on-board info for how much stuff costs to build, etc.

The board is much more attractive than many of the other crayon rail games, because it's backed with solid black, and the two sides of the moon are depicted in shades of gray. However, this stylish design has also made the game more difficult to play. In fact, it's impossible to crayon visibly on the black, which means it's hard to draw to some wrap letters. Fortunately, this is a relatively minor issue.

In addition, we had a lot of troubles with crayon visibility on the map proper. It looks like they must have changed the formulation of their crayons at some point, because the crayons included with Lunar Rails don't really draw; they just sort of smudge instead. This makes them hard to read, moving toward impossible for yellow.

(We actually ended up using wipe-off markers, which worked fine for the most part, except on the very edges of each board piece where the coating isn't at thick. Ah well. I've since learned that crayons from an older Empire Builder set worked entirely fine, and would use those in the future.)

The map also notes the locations of various missions to the moon, which is pretty cool.

Other Components: The load chips are plastic poker chips that you stick icons on, as usual. Most of the icons are old favorites from other sets, and the new ones like He3 and robots were all pretty easy to distinguish. The only one I didn't like was Titanium, which was just Steel with a "Ti" next to it--which you could sometimes miss (particularly, on board).

The three types of cards (demand, event, loco) are fairly identical to cards in other crayon rail games: all full-size cards on medium cardstock printed grayscale. Both demand cards and event cards remain obvious as to their purposes, but don't make use of geographic iconography which could have made them easier to use. The locomotive cards are notable for two reasons. First, there are more, because you now upgrade trains for $10 rather than $20. Second, the type I trains had a list of commodities and cities on the back, which was very, very helpful.

The money is the typical paper-stock money in four colors and denominations. The pawns are the typical plastic pieces used to represent the locomotives, which look nothing like locomotives.

Rulebook: The rulebook is 20 pages, printed in black & white. It seemed fairly intuitive to read, which hasn't necessarily been my reaction to crayon-rail rulebooks in the past. There's are several lists of cities and available loads in the middle, which are set up so that you can cut them out to produce four quick reference sheets, which is nice. There's also a bit of lunar background on two different pages in the book.

Overall, Lunar Rails contains exactly what I'd expect for a crayon-rails game. The production has gotten a tiny bit slicker since Empire Builder, but not a whole lot. Conversely, I was a bit disturbed by the issues I had with crayons.

Since the crayons are the heart of the game, and they didn't work well at all, I've reluctantly given Lunar Rails a "2" out of "5" for Style. However this increases to a "3" if you can substitute crayons from an older game which work better, and if you're an ardent crayon rail fan, you probably can, making "3" a more honest Style rating for most folks.

The Game Play

As with other crayon railroad games, the object in Lunar Rails is to build a network between the major cities on the board and to make lots of money through the pickup and delivery of goods.

The Basic Rules: Since Lunar Rails is ultimately derivative of Empire Builder, I've decided to just briefly summarize the main rules here. For more info, go take a look at the gameplay section of my Empire Builder review.

In short, all the crayon rail games are broken into two sections of gameplay: building and delivery.

Building. At the start of the game you have $60M to build track, and you're allowed to spend $20M a turn. Building track is just a matter of connecting mileposts on the board. Plain hexes cost $1M to connect to, the highest alpine mountains cost $5M, and everything else falls somewhere in between. At the start of the game you'll build up an initial network, and as the game proceeds you'll continue to connect additional cities. As many as 8 cities on most game maps are labeled as major cities, as you must connect to most of them to win.

You can also use building cash to upgrade your train. The original Empire Builder let you do big upgrades for $20M each; more recent releases including Lunar Rails and Iron Dragon instead allowed smaller upgrades at $10M each.

Delivery. You also have a train which you run on your tracks; it initially goes 10 mileposts a turn and can carry 2 goods; you can upgrade in several steps, eventually up to moving 16 and carrying 3 goods.

At any time you'll have three demand cards, each of which lists three demands, with each individual demand listing a good (which can be gotten at 1 or 3 places on the board), a destination, and a payout. Whenever you successfully pick up a good, and deliver it to a destination, you turn in the card and get the designated payout.

Mixed into the delivery deck are event cards, which most frequently make your life harder by slowing down trains, dumping goods, and doing other mean stuff in certain parts of the board.

Winning. Empire Builder games all tend to have the same winning conditions: $250M cash and a network connecting to most of the major cities (7 in the case of Lunar Rails).

Special Lunar Rails Rules: Lunar Rails is a fairly standard Empire Builder game with only one notable new rule: wraparound.

Wraparound. As already noted, the map of Lunar Rails is a sphere. The map itself is drawn as two hemispheres, and each hemisphere is surrounded by "Wrap Letters". There's, for example, a yellow "K" on the left hemisphere which matches the yellow "K" on the right. These wrap letters are essentially "virtual spaces". You move (or build) to one, then you're instantly transported to the other, then you get to move (or build) off that space for free. It's a bit awkward, but it works, and the wraparound is a significant element of gameplay that makes for some enjoyable geographical dynamics once you really figure it out.

The Lunar Rails Map: I've already talked plenty about the spherical nature of the Lunar Rails map. The other main feature of this map is that it's very tough. There are some mares that are easy to build on ($1M), but some of the near side of the moon, and almost all of the far side of the moon is made up of highlands ($2M). Craters and valley rims (+$1M) each also make the building that much more challenging--and at a much higher frequency that you'd find similarly priced rivers on an Earthly board. I see Lunar Rails as a kind of advanced crayon rails game, and it's mainly because of the difficulty in building shown here.

The Lunar Rails map also suffers from a common problem shared with most of the more exotic crayon rail games. None of the place names nor the goods locations are that intuitive, and thus a lot of time is spent trying to figure out what's where. By the end of the game we knew some of the place names, and the locations for some of the more singular goods (like robots), but beyond that things remained a mystery. Some system to make the demands cards more intuitive could have really helped with this sort of thing, and the need is really shown on an alien landscape like the moon. (Alternatively a half-dozen games or so would probably resolve the issue.)

Lunar Rails Events: There are plenty of lunar appropriate events in this game, but the only two notable enough to discuss are Meteor Showers and Shortages and Booms.

Meteor Shows. These cards destroy a little locus of tracks around impact points that are near three random cities (determined by the next demand card drawn). Unlike the rivers flooding, sandstorms, and whatever else in other crayon rail games, these meteor strikes are almost entirely impossible to predict. At any time, track somewhat near any city could be destroyed.

Shortages & Booms. These cards allow any player to deliver one of a selection of different goods to any major city for a $20M payoff within three turns. For the most part, Lunar Rails is a more advanced game than other crayon rail games because of the unforgiving terrain (and the meteor showers); this is the only aspect of the game that makes things easier.

Relationships to Other Games

Lunar Rails is the 8th game in Mayfair's series of crayon rail games. Previous games covered: North America (Empire Builder), England (British Rails), Japan (Nippon Rails), Australia (Australian Rails), Europe (EuroRails), a fantasy land (Iron Dragon), and India (Indian Rails).

The Game Design

The game design of Lunar Rails is so similar to the original Empire Builder that there's not a lot to add.

Here's what I said was good about Empire Builder: great track building mechanism (original in its time), good combination of elements (integrating track building and goods delivery), good cost balance (measuring the cost to build track vs. the reward of a delivery), good control of randomness (though this was more of a problem in Lunar Rails, because the demand cards felt much more lopsided, and it was possible to get really outstanding payoffs if you were lucky), and organic railways nice reflection of reality (meaning they go all over the place).

Here's what I didn't like about Empire Builder: too long (and Lunar Rails is even longer due to the additional expense of building and the difficulties in locating cities), possible to get stuck (definitely true here, with those meteor strikes wiping out random railways), and card drawing badly placed (just as with the original, you draw your cards, then spend forever matching locations up while everyone watches).

I gave the original game a "4" for Substance, but part of that reflected its originality. Lunar Rails' one new mechanism, regarding the spherical board, is pretty cool, but as the 8th iteration of this core mechanic I can only award it a "3" out of "5" for Substance--a rating for the mechanisms of the game without considering their former originality. However, I'll add the note that if you're an experienced crayon rail gamer this one will probably be a really nice challenge that you'll appreciate.

Conclusion

Lunar Rails is, as you'd expect, Mayfair's crayon rail gaming set on the moon, with cool wraparound geography. Overall, it's a pretty difficult game, thanks to a very unforgiving landscape that's mostly mountains. I wouldn't suggest this as a starting game for the series, but if you're a long-time fan, this really is Empire Builder advanced--a very tough challenge.