Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 3-5 hours
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)
This review is based partially on my older Empire Builder reviews, since they all share the same system.
The Components
Australian Rails comes with the standard components that you'd expect in a crayon rails game:
- 1 puzzle-cut board
- 6 crayons
- 6 pawns
- 100 load chips
- 138 demand cards
- 18 event cards
- 12 locomotive cards
- 1 pack of money
- 1 rulebook
Board: Like all of the newest editions of the crayon-rail games, this one has a board cut into six pieces that jigsaw together. It depicts Ausralia, including the southern island of Tasmania. As with other recent Empire Builder releases, this board looks nice. That's apparently thanks to designer Drew Perkett. There's some nice decorative borders, while the blue oceans and yellow deserts help give life to the whole board.
As with the other crayon rail games, the center of the board is a map filled with "mile posts", most of which are clear, but others of which depict other types of terrain. They're all arranged into a triangular grid used for drawing tracks. Overlaid on the map, are the Australian territories, which relate to some of the events.
Crayons: The crayons are, of course, used for drawing on the board. As with other recent Empire Builder games, I found that some of the crayons had too much wax in them, making it a bit harder to draw than should have been the case. It was inconsistent though: blue worked fine, while my own green took some work. I'm not sure if this was as big of a problem as on other recent releases. (Others have suggested China Markers, or just crayons from older sets as better drawing implements.)
As usual, the yellow crayon isn't really usable.
Pawns: Plastic pawns in the six player colors (red, blue, black, yellow, green, brown) that look nothing like locomotives.
Load Chips: The load chips are plastic poker chips that you stick icons on, as usual. As with other recent releases, the name of each load is printed on the sticker, which is nice. Most of the loads are old favorites (cattle, coal, uranium, etc.). Artifacts (available only in Alice Springs) was one of the few loads unique to this set. The icons are generally intuitive and easy to use.
Cards: The three types of cards (demand, event, loco) are fairly identical to cards in other crayon rail games. They're 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. One of the players in this game pointed out that they didn't even include the map grid location (e.g., G-5), which is the single thing you have to look up most. The trains come in three types, and are double-sided; the artwork is unfortunately very stark black & white that didn't reproduce very well.
Money: The money is paper-stock money in four colors and denominations. This game has some new (2004 series) Empire Builder money that looks pretty nice, though the stock is still plain & flimsy.
Rulebook: The rulebook is 16 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 of book, which are set up so that you can cut them out to produce four quick reference sheets, which is nice.
Overall, Australian Rails is exactly what I'd expect for a crayon rail game. I'm very pleased that Drew Perkett continues to work on these newer games as he continues to make the boxes and boards look nice. Now, if they'd only let him rework all the load cards. I continue to feel like there are some issues with the crayons in the newer EB games, and that's all that's prevented me from giving this release a "4". It still earns a high "3" out of "5" for Style: very good graphical work for a game design that's implicitly plain due to the blank slate required by crayons.
The Game Play
As with other crayon railroad games, the object in Australian 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 Australian 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 divided 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, while small or medium cities cost $3M to enter, 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, and you must connect to most of them to win. (There are only 5 in Australia: Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, and uniquely Perth, the only west coast major city, must be one of the ones you connect to.)
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. This game uses the singular $20M upgrades.
Delivery. You also have a train which you run on your tracks; it initially goes 9 mileposts a turn and can carry 2 goods; you can upgrade in two steps, eventually up to moving 12 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. As discussed below, Australian Rails has a few special event cards, but is mostly par for the course.
Winning. Empire Builder games all tend to have the same winning conditions: $250M cash and a network connecting to most of the major cities (4 out of5 in the case of Australian Rails).
Special Australian Rails Rules: Australian Rails is a fairly standard Empire Builder game with a few rules changes.
The Tasmanian Ferry. Down in the southeast of the map is Tasmania, which you can only get to via a ferry from Melbourne. You can build out of the ferry port for +$6M (only 2 players max). If you're moving a train you must stop at the ferry, and then the next turn you can start on the other side, but at half speed for that turn. The ferry is very expensive to build through and to use, but goods delivered to Tasmania are likewise more valuable.
Dry Rivers. Most EB games have rivers with cost +$2M to cross, but Australian Rails has some dry rivers which only cost +$1M to cross--unless rainy season (an event) has come up in which case they immediately become regular rivers.
Desert. Central Australia is filled with desert. It acts like clear mileposts ($1M), but there are some events which can wipe out all the desert tracks in certain parts of the board.
Darwin. You can build out of Darwin as if it were a major city, which is a rule that was barely worth writing (though it's presumably thematic).
The Australian Rails Map: The map of Australia is uniquely clustered, with most of the major cities in the southeast side and then another cluster of notable cities to the southwest. As a result there are a lot of deliveries on either one side of the board of another. Transcontinental deliveries are also common, with the best tracks running to the very south of the continent.
Along the northern coasts are a scattering of additional cities, but there are lots of mountains ($2M) there as well. The center of Australia is a mess of desert, dry rivers, and dry lakes, but it also contains Alice Springs, the only place to get native artifacts.
The Australian Rails map 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 some time is spent trying to figure out what's where. (Though I knew where at a least a couple of the places were when I got started.) Also, as with many of the other Empire Builder games, by the end of the game we knew some of the place names, and the locations for many of the goods. 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 a foreign landscape like Australia. (Alternatively a few games or so would probably resolve the issue.)
Australian Rails Events: The events of Australian Rails are very standard for the Empire Builder set of games. There's some floods, derailments, labor strikes, and taxes. The only truly unique events in this game are the Sand Storms and the Rainy Season card.
Relationships to Other Games
Australian Rails is a reprint of the 5th game in Mayfair's series of crayon rail games. This new edition of the game features a puzzle-cut board (rather than the original rolled-up map) and apparently has some changes in load cards, presumably for better balance.
Other games in the series covered: North America (Empire Builder), England (British Rails), Japan (Nippon Rails), Europe (EuroRails), a fantasy land (Iron Dragon), India (Indian Rails), the Moon (Lunar Rails), and Russia (Russian Rails).
The Game Design
Australian Rails is an older Empire Builder game, and thus it's pretty staid. There aren't any particularly notable changes to the rules, and thus its game design is very normative for the series.
The way the board is laid out is very interesting and allows for some different strategies in this game than in other EB games. The southern rail corridor looks pretty important, and I suspect setting it up early to allow quick and safe traversal between Perth and the east is pretty important, but journeys up the east coast, toward the northern reaches, or inland to Alice Springs all allow for some alternative possibilities, particularly if the board is crowded. Real differences like this in the board layout make these additional games truly worthwhile if you like this series.
I thought the introduction of the dry rivers and lakes would make a big difference in the game, with people rushing to build over them before Rainy Season made them more expensive, but at least in our game they were largely ignored.
Here's what I've said is good about the Empire Builder series in general: 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 (through the multiple demands on cards), 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 (though I played this time with 3 players and liked the length & downtime much more; I think that's the series' sweet spot), possible to get stuck (though nowadays I pretty much just suggest allowing up to $20M in loans, which must be paid back double, an alternative "mercy" rule), 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. Australian Rails is pretty similar to the original, and because it's the 5th iteration of this core mechanic there isn't much originality anymore; nonetheless, I still give Australian Rails a "3" out of "5" for Substance; I do enjoy to play these games, and would play them a lot more if not for the length.
Conclusion
Australian Rails is a fairly typical release in the Empire Builder line. Its map is quite different from North America, and that means play is very different as well. Beyond that, there's not a lot that's original, but it'll appeal if you like the Empire Builder line and want a new set of maps, events, and demands.
