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Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame is a new (very) big box by Eagle Games. It's eight pounds of gaming goodness!
Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 30-45 minutes per player (2-4 hours)
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)
The Components
 As noted Railroad Tycoon contains 8 pounds of cool stuff. This includes:
- 1 gameboard
- many tiles
- 174 miniatures
- 1 first player marker
- 125 goods cubes
- 1 goods bag
- money
- shares certificates
- 24 engine cards
- railroad tycoon cards
- railroad operation cards
- 1 rulebook
Gameboard: An absolutely enormous map of the United States. It's a full 45"x36". The board is actually divided into 3, two-panel pieces. The board size is a pretty good match for the tiles and the miniatures. Everything has plenty of space on the board without being crowded. Some folks may find the size of the board quite daunting, but it did fit on my dining room table (with leaf inserted) and it did fit on a long foldout table at a friend's house (with just a bit of overhang on the edges. However, if you're sitting at the top or bottom of the map you might have to wander to the other side to really see how your holdings are doing.
The map depicts the Eastern United States, with various cities marked in specific colors, and the land generally divided between clear and mountainous terrain, with river running through the plains and ridges running through the mountains. The rivers were a bit hard to work with because they don't actually run along hex sides. Instead they follow what I presume are their more authentic courses.
 There are two notable, though not crippling production issues with the board.
First the board tends to warp upward on the edges. This was noticible, but neglible, in my copy of a game. I put a clip between two segments in my second game solely to keep the round track level, but it wasn't a big deal. It could be a bigger problem in higher humidity areas than California.
Second, the blue cities are printed too purple on the board. They're actually very distinctive from the purple cities, but it can be an issue if you're seeing a blue city on its own. I think most players made this blue/purple mistake at least once in each game.
As I said neither problem is crippling. The board issue is slightly annoying and the city issue is slgihtly frustrating, though the latter would disappear pretty quickly through continued plays.
The most important game info (actions and track costs) are all summarized on the board, which is a good touch.
Tiles: Players lay their track by putting down track tiles: straights, curves, or crossovers, in one of the two terrain types (clear or mountainous). The tiles are all full-colored and linen-textured. They're also all double-sided, which is great, but the fronts and the backs were somewhat random rather than being related to each other, which is less great.. As a result there was plenty of each piece, but they were sometimes hard to find. One of our players noted that he particularly liked the attention that had been paid to details in the artwork on the tracks.
Other tiles include twelve new city markers (and here the blue is much easier to distinguish) and two western link markers.
Miniatures: There are twenty-five trains in each of the six player colors (red, blue, green, yellow, purple, and black). In addition there are twenty-four brown "empty city" markers which depict water towers, coal towers, round houses, and railroad stops.
Overall these miniatures are well-molded and well-detailed. They look absolutely beautiful when they're covering the board as the game proceeds.
First Player Marker: A small black wooden train.
Goods Cubes & Bags: A large black cloth bag, filled with large wooden cubes in the five goods colors (blue, purple, red, yellow, black).
Money: Paper money in $1,000, $5,000, and $10,000 denominations. The denominations are distinguished by color, but otherwise identical.
Share Certificates: These linen-textured cardstock certificates feel almost like vinyl and are another of the very attractive components in this game. They each simply show a share count (1, 5, or 10) and the money earned for those shares ($5,000 per). We never had a use for the "10" denominations in either game I played.
Cards: The cards are all very sturdy and linen textured as well.
The Railroad Tycoon cards simply give each player a special goal. They feature period tycoons, complete with pictures.
The Railroad Operation cards offer various goals and bonuses. Good use has been made of icons to show when a card can be used. (They're also similar or identical to the icons used in Eagle's Conquest of the Empire, which is a nice bit of continuity.) The cards feature period artwork and text explaining the cards. The text is pretty clear, but entirely impossible to read from across the very large board. Some iconography would have made these cards easier to use.
Rules: The 12-page full-color rulebook is full of illustrations and examples. It dose a good job of explaining the game and also has some nice bits on strategy and history. There's a nice summary of actions and track costs on the back of the rules, but we never used it because all that info is helpfully listed on the board as well.
Overall, Railroad Tycoon is a beautifully produced, high-quality game. The game is gigantic, so be prepared for that, however. There are some minor production problems and some minor usability problems, but the game still earns a full "5" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Railroad Tycoon is to earn the most points through the delivery of goods and the meeting of specific goals.
Setup: The players must find a table large enough to set the board on. The board is then laid out and initial goods are put on the board. Each city is marked with a number between 1 and 6, and that many goods in random colors (blue, purple, black, yellow, red) are placed in that city.
Each player chooses a color and takes the trains in that color. Each player also draws a Railroad Tycoon card, which will give him a secret goal for the game (e.g., least shares issued, most money at the end, etc). Finally, each player also takes a "1" engine card.
An initial set of Railroad Operation cards are laid out across the top of the board.
A first player is selected and play begins.
The Board. The board depicts the Eastern half of the United States. There is plain terrain, sometimes with rivers, and mountains, sometimes with ridges. There are numerous cities on the board. Some are colored the same colors as the goods (blue, purple, black, yellow, red), while others are gray, which is uncolored.
Railroad Operations Cards. There are a number of different Railroad Operation cards. Some of these are goal cards, which give bonus points to the first players to do certain things (most frequently link up two cities or deliver goods to a specific city). Other cards can give players immediate benefits (e.g., an extra turn), later benefits (e.g., build track for free on a future turn), or continuous benefits (e.g., build 5 track once a turn; or earn a point whenever someone delivers goosd to a specific city).
Money. Note that no money is given out at the start of the game. Whenever players need money they must issue shares in their company. Each share earns a player $5,000. However, each one also has some deficits. $1,000 in dividends must be paid on each share every single turn and they're also worth -1 point each at the end of the game. However, players will need to issue shares to win the game: usually at least a couple and at most 7 or 8.
Order of Play: Each turn of the game is divided into the following phases.
- First Player Auction
- Threaded Player Actions
- Income & Dividends
First Player Auction: Each turn starts off with a simple auction to be first player. Players either bid or drop out, and it goes around until there's only one player left who pays for the privilege of being first player.
Threaded Player Actions: Starting with the first player, each player now gets to take three actions, one at a time. Actions come from a list of six possibilities.
Build Track. You can lay up to four spaces of track each turn, usually connecting up two cities. The cost is as low as $2,000 a space (for building on open terrain) to as much as $8,000 a space (for building over ridges in the mountains). When you build you mark the "link" (a connection between two cities) with one of your trains to show that you own it.
Urbanize. You can urbanize any gray city by choosing one of the "new city" hexes (available in all colors but red) and placing it on the city. The city is now the new color. You also take two new goods cubes from the bag and place them on the city.
Urbanized cities are useful because they give you a new destination for goods of the appropriate color and because they introduce a few new goods. They can also be used offensively to block a player's longer delivery of goods, as will be made more clear in a second.
Upgrade Engine. You can increase your engine size one level (e.g., from "1" to "2", up to "8"). This rating measures how far you can move goods cubes. This costs from $5,000 (for upgrading to level "2") to $20,000 (for upgrading to level "7" or "8").
Upgrading engines is entirely vital because the delivery length of a good is also the amount you score, and thus a 2-link goods delivery is worth twice as much as a 1-link goods delivery, and you need an engine "2" to do that.
Deliver Goods Cube. This is really the heart of the game, and the goal you're trying to reach, because it's how you earn points. The object is to deliver a goods cube of a specific color to a city of the same color. However, as just noted, you can only move it across as many links (connections between cities) as your engine size. So, that's initially 1.
There's a bunch of finicky rules. You have to move a goods cube all the way as one action. You must stop in the first city of the appropriate color you reach. You can't pass through a city more than once or use a link more than once (both meaning you can't loop goods). But, the main idea of shipping is pretty clear: move a good from one place to another, using the longest path you can.
After delivery you then remove the transported good and earn points equal to the number of links you moved the goods cube across to reach its final destination. (You can use other peoples' links, but then they get the points for their links used.)
Select Railroad Operation Card. You can take one of the Railroad Operation cards that's currently available. Some give an immediate action, some can be used later.
The goal cards can't be selected in this way; instead they're simply taken the second the goal is accomplished.
Build Western Link. Two of the cities, Desmoines and Kansas City, have special Western Links that you can build for $30,000. This dumps a bunch of red cubes in the city which can be delivered to Chicago, where they then multiply into more goods. It's a real special case that may not come up in many games, but is nicely evocative.
Income & Dividends: After everyone has taken their three actions, the round now comes to an end. Each player earns money based on their space on the score track. There's an income curve that runs up from $0 (at 0 points) to $25,000 (at 41-48 points), then starts decreasing again. After they earn their income, each player must also immediately pay dividends on their issued shares, at $1,000 per share.
Before the start of a new round, one new Railroad Operations card is put out. This will often drive the First Player Auction in the next round.
Ending the Game: Whenever a city is emptied of goods that's marked with a special plastic miniature on the board. When 10-18 cities are so closed (depending on the number of players), the game ends.
Any player who met their secret Railroad Tycoon goal earns a bonus of 2-8 points, depending on the card.
Each player loses points equal to his number of issued shares.
The player with the most points wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Railroad Tycoon has a somewhat complex family tree. The original computer game was produced by Sid Meier, with some help from Bruce Shelley. Bruce Shelley was also a contributor to the railroad board game, 1830, and as a result some of 1830's mechanics (primarily the stock and the ability to do hostile takeovers of your opponent's companies) ended up in RRT.
Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame, meanwhile, only shares a thematic base with the computer game. They're both about railroad, laying track, and (in different ways) about stock. However the board game is actually based on a series of Martin Wallace board games dating back to 1998. Lancashire Railways, New England Railways, Volldampf, and finally Wallace's hit Age of Steam slowly developed the track laying & goods movement system which is the heart of RRT: The Baordgame.
Age of Steam is the nearest design to Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame. Overall, RRT is a slightly simplified and considerably more friendly game system than Age of Steam. The economics are considerably more forgiving and the long-term strategic planning is easier to figure out because all the goods start off on the board. In addition, the components of RRT are 100% nicer than the ones in Age of Steam. RRT also has a few new aspects, in the Railroad Tycoon and Operations cards and the western links, each of which introduces some interesting variations to the game. Overall, Age of Steam will continue to appeal to those who want a harsh, unadulterated, serious game, but for everyone else, RRT will be a better, more enjoyable design.
The Game Design
Overall, Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame is a beautifully themed game that really feels like a railroad game. Perhaps that's the components, or perhaps that that's the game system, but you genuinelly get the feeling of building rail lines across the eastern United States. This creative force is a lot of what makes the game fun, as you watch your empire slowly blossom.
The game is almost pure strategy and there's quite a lot of it. Every build and every expansion you really need to think about how you're going to ship goods now and in the future. However, as noted, the economics in RRT are somewhat forgiving. As a result if you use poor strategy you're more likely to lose, but you won't be totally out of the game.
 The game considerably varies depending on how many players you have. In a 3-player game, the board was overly expansive, and our railroad empires never actually touched up. Thus, while we got to enjoy the creativity & strategy of the game, there was never any direct competition. In a 6-player game, players started butting heads pretty early and by the end of the game each player was involved with at least two other railroad companies. At this point you can have some fun competition, as players steal goods and good routes from each other.
On the downside, the game gets longer the more players you have. I'd initially estimate it as being a 45 minutes per player game, though I could see that dropping to 30 minutes per player with more experienced or less indecisive players. However, that means that a 6-player game lasts 3-4.5 hours, which I find a bit long. I think that downtime is well controlled by the threaded actions, but I know another player in our 6-player game felt it still excessive, because he read a book in between his turns. I suspect there's a single sweet spot for Railroad Tycoon at either 4 or 5 players, where you have a decent amount of competition between players, but a shorter length.
Finally, the Tycoon and Operations cards offer some nice variety to the game, primarily in the way of short-term goals which can give you some nice direction and some alternatives to just moving goods around. I'm not convinced that the Tycoon cards are entirely well balanced, because some are a lot harder for other players to mess up than others, but they're OK. I've heard some complaints about the randomness of the Operation cards, but I find that issue minor at best, because there's always a chance to bid for first player to take most cards, with the only exception being the goals, and it's pretty rare that a goal comes up which immediately benefits one player, and if one does it's because they've already got a well-designed empire.
On the whole I find Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame to be interesting, well-designed, evocative, and fun. I think it's got some issues with player numbers and game length as already mentioned, and there isn't a huge amount of depth to the system once you understand the basics of building and moving goods. I've given it a high "4" out of "5" for Substance: very good.
Conclusion
Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame, the newest iteration of the Age of Steam system, offers a friendlier and slightly simpler game than its Warfrog predecessor. Age of Steam fantactics won't be won over, but all the rest of us will find a less stressful and more enjoyable game that doesn't require the same intense logistical calculations as Age of Steam but still enjoys all the good elements of the game system. For all of us who found Age of Steam very clever but too daunting, and for everyone who's a slightly more casual player, this is the best serious railroad game to come along in years.
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