Review of Empire Builder

Empire Builder, by Darwin Bromley and Bill Fawcett, is a classic railroad building game, the first of Mayfair's "crayon railroad games".

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

This is a review of the 1999 edition, which added Mexico.

The Components

When you pick up Empire Builder you immediately realize it's a very hefty box. It includes:

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

Board: The board comes as 6 puzzle-cut pieces which jigsaw together. They're printed on heavy cardboard that's textured on the back and glossy on the front. The board depicts a fairly plain map of the continental United States, southern Canada, and Mexico.

An array of "mileposts" cover the board in a hexagonal pattern. Some are "clear" mileposts, some are mountainous, and some--clearly encircled by red--mark cities of various sizes. The only other terrain marked on the map are rivers, lakes, and oceans--things that might block track placement.

The 62 cities marked on the map range in size from small and medium, which just cover one milepost to major which covers 7 mileposts. Almost all of the cities are also marked with one or two icons to show commodities available at that location.

Overall, the various icons and symbols used on the map are easy to follow during the game, and although the board is plain, it leaves plenty of space to draw on, which is really the point. The map also contains many of the most important rules, such as building costs, starting conditions, and victory conditions, which is a plus.

Crayons: The crayons are special wipe-off crayons made for marking on the glossy board, and then removing with tissue. They come in the six player colors: red, yellow, black, blue, brown, and green. The crayons will inevitably dull, which makes them much harder to use. I wish that Mayfair would include a crayon sharpener in these games, as without I've been forced (more than once) to a carve a tip for a crayon with a kitchen knife.

Pawns: Small plastic pawns are used to mark the location of each locomotive on the board. They come in the same six player colors.

Load Chips: Each load chip is a small, white Poker chip with a sticker affixed to it showing a commodity (and I use the passive voice flagrantly: you'll actually be affixing those stickers to those chips, a task that is very tedious, but fortunately need only be done once).

Cards: The 136 demand cards and 20 event cards together form the "demand deck". They're all printed in gray scale, with the front being quite computerised.

The demand cards proper each feature three demands, each of which includes a commodity (via icon), a location, and a price. They're not designed as well as they could be as there's always an inevitable search to find where the desired commodities can be gotten followed by a search for their destination (e.g., "Where's corn come from?" followed by "Where's Knoxville?"). Experienced players will inevitably figure all this out, but in playing Empire Builder just once or twice a year, I haven't. A little map on each demand could have helped a lot, with source locations marked in a shade of gray and the destination location marked in black.

The event cards are mostly filled with text which explains various special, short-term rules. Each event affects specific locations, and again a general map could have helped players to quickly eyeball whether anyone was affected by the special rule.

There's also a deck of 12 locomotives, all printed double-sided with a different type of locomotive on each side. There are four types of locomotives total: each has a speed, from 9 to 12 and a load capacity, from 2 to 3. The pictures of the trains are pure black and white, and thus poorly contrasted. The speeds and the load capacity are easy enough to make out.

Money: Money is printed on colored paper stock in four denominations: 1, 5, 10, and 50, with a different color for each denomination. More variety in the look of the denominations would have been nice, since they're fairly identical other than the color and numbering, but I've actually never mixed up the various amoutns that I'm aware of, so the coloring probably does the job.

Rulebook: A black and white rulebook that actually runs a surprising 32 pages. Besides the rules, there's a commodity reference chart which shows what comes from where (and is constantly used every game) and 10 pages of variant rules. I've generally found the rulebook hard to reference during play.

Box & Tray: The box is a fairly typical American design: sturdy cardboard. It comes with a surprisingly nice tray which can be used as a "bank" during play. It contains slots for each denomination of money as well as for each individual commodity type. One word of warning: never set your Empire Builder box sideways on your shelf or in a backpack, else you'll spend the first 30 minutes of your game resorting commodities.

Overall, the components of Empire Builder strike me as fairly completely utilitarian. They also clearly come from an era when board gamers were expected to be very serious folks who memorized all the rules (or in this case the commodity locations).

I'd really love to see a new version of Empire Builder which was more beautiful, with better designed cards, with some method for easily seeing locations of commodities, with resin miniatures for the trains, etc. In other words, a new edition that brings Empire Builder up to the standards set by German games in the last decade.

However, just looking at the current set, I'll say that the components are quite sufficient for the game and that use of commodity icons and inclusions of a couple of major rules on the board are a great start to make the game easier to play thanks to good component design. Thus, for me, Empire Builder's Style rating still manages to eke by with an average "3" out of "5", even in today's gaming world.

The Gameplay

In Empire Builder you lay tracks in order to haul commodities around North America and eventually earn enough profit to become the Rail Baron.

Setup: Each player starts off the game by selecting a color and taking the crayon and pawn appropriate for the color. He's also given $50 million, one Freight Locomotive ("Loco") card, and 3 demand cards. The cards are all important and so bear a bit of extra explanation.

Loco Cards. Starting trains show a speed of 9 and have space for two loads of commodities on them. Throughout the game they can be upgraded for $20 million. From a Freight, you can go to a Fast Freight which moves 12 or a Heavy Freight which carries three loads. From those two trains you can go to a Superfreight which moves 12 and can carry 3 loads.

Demand Cards. The demand deck is made up of event cards and demand cards; if you draw any of the former at startup they're discarded, so only demand cards matter at first.

Each demand card show three different demands, each one listing a commodity, a city that it should be delivered to, and a price. Usually after you've gotten your first three commodity cards you carefully look over the board and figure out distances between commodity sources and demand destinations. You have to figure out routes that you can build which will cost less than your initial $50 million, and preferably you figure out routes that will allow you to complete a few different demand cards.

Note that you're only ever going to perform one demand on each card. You have three just to give you some possibilities, so that you're not entirely ruled by the randomness of the deck.

Initial Building. The game then starts off with two rounds of building, conducted as a switchback. Starting with the first player and going clockwise, each player gets to spend up to $20 million on building track or upgrading his train. Then the direction reverses, and starting with the last player, each player gets to do the same again. The rules for this building phase follow all the normal building rules, discussed below.

Order of Play: The normal order of play is broken into two simple phases for each player:

1. Operation. Move your train.
2. Building. Spend up $20 million on building or train upgrade.

A player may choose to exchange all three of his demand cards if he prefers, instead of taking a turn.

Operation. In operation a player moves his train a number of spaces on his track equal to the speed of a train. A player almost always stays on his own track, but may use another player's track if he so desires, for a cost of $4 million per turn, paid to that player.

Picking Up Loads. Whenever he's in a city a player may pick up as many loads of commodities supplied by that city as he can fit in his train. You can toss off commodities at any time to make space (which I've always found adds a bit of odd surrealism to the game). The commodity markers form a limit in the game, and sometimes you won't be able to pick up a desired commodity because other players are hoarding them.

Fulfilling Demands. If you bring an appropriate commodity load to a city, as defined by one of your demand cards, you immediately receive the listed payment and turn in the card (and the commodity). You can use each card only once, for one load.

Replacing Demands. After you've fulfilled a demand you immediately replace the card. If you draw a demand, you start figuring again. If you draw a event, the event immediately takes place (and usually creates some ongoing issue until your next turn). Events can stop movement in certain areas, knock commodities off trains, wash out tracks, and any number of other annoyances. You then draw to replace your event card.

Building. Every turn your building limit is $20 million; if you decide to upgrade your train, that takes all your money. Otherwise you can build up to $20 million worth of track.

You build track from any of your current track. You can also build track out of "major" cities twice per turn. There are various limits to how track is built: it goes from one adjacent milepost to another, and only one player can build between adjacent mileposts. There are also limits on how many people can build into each type of city: 2 for small cities and 3 for medium cities. Finally, you can never build track in such a way that it prevents the appropriate number of people from building into a city (e.g., there must be space to allow 2 players into a small city, 3 into a medium, and all players into a major).

The cost of building is all listed on a simple "building costs" chart to the side of the board. It's the cost for building into the appropriate milepost (e.g., you count the milepost you're going to, not from). It's $1M for a clear milepost, $2M for a mountain, $3M for a small or medium city, and $5M for a major city (though you'll probably never pay the last, because of those two builds you can do out of major cities every turn). It's also +$2M if you're crossing a river or one of the narrow lake necks, over the normal cost of the space you're building into.

The board is laid out in such a way as to create the challenges you'd expect. The Western U.S., for example, is full of mountains, with a few partially clear paths. The Great Lakes and a number of large rivers all are challenges in the middle of the continent. Finally, a mountain range cuts down by the east coast, and another fills much of Mexico.

Winning the Game: To win the game you must connect 6 of the 7 major cities (Mexico City, Kansas City, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Seattle, and Los Angeles). Clearly, each player usually leaves off one of the hard-to-reach edge cities (Seattle, Mexico City, and New York being prime possibilities). Once you've connected 6 cities, you must then have $250 million in hand. At that point, the current round of play ends, so that everyone has had the same number of turns, then the player with the most money wins.

Optional Rules: The Empire Builder rulebook also contains a number of additional rules. The most important are probably the "fast game" rules (more money, faster trains, and more startup turns, all to speed the game up) and the two-player rules. There are also some interesting rules involved discard loads and warehouses which are suggested for regular players as interesting variations.

Relationships to Other Games

Train games have been a prime design area for the Anglo-American game market since 1974 or so, when Rail Baron and 1829 both came to market. Though Empire Builder wasn't released until 1980, it and 1829 have probably been the most sucessful railroad games to date, each one leading to a half-dozen or more spin-offs, each using the same core system of its progenitor. When looking at railroad games in general, they tend to include a three possible gameplay elements: track building, moving commodities, and controlling stock. Empire Builder only uses the first two elements.

The current spin-offs of Empire Builder, each of which tends to use largely the same game system, but in a different geographical locale, are: EuroRails, Iron Dragon (a fantasy variant), India Rails, Nippon Rails, British Rails, Australian Rails, and Lunar Rails.

Empire Builder (and spin-offs) is very much a game of its time and place. Like most "serious" Anglo-American games of the 1970s and 1980s, it tends to run 4+ hours, and it doesn't shy from complex rules and thought-intensive decisions.

Since the advent of German games in the 1990s, which tend to be shorter, simpler, and more casual, a newer generation of railroad games have appeared. The Martin Wallace games are perhaps the closest in weight to the original Anglo-Americans. They include Age of Steam and seven others in the "Early Railways" and "Prairie Railroads" series. Closer to the German norm Alan R. Moon (an American designer as it happens) has released a number of games including Union Pacific (a stock-trading and rail-control game), Santa Fe Rails (a rail-building/connection game), and the upcoming Ticket to Ride; many of these do not include the features that traditional railroad gamers feel are core to the genre. Other notable recent railroad designs include: Transamerica (a rail-building/connection game that's won some awards) and Stephenson's Rocket (a Reiner Knizia design that include rail-building and stock-control).

The Game Design

Empire Builder is a classic that has sufficiently influenced the genre, that it's difficult to go back and say "what works" and "why is it good". Still, here's my best try at the cool gameplay elements:

Great Track Building Mechanism: In the time before the production of wooden pieces got cheap, Empire Builder choose an interesting and innovative method to mark track bulding, through its crayons (perhaps influenced by Source of the Nile (1977), an exploration game where you drew out a map of Africa as you went).

Good Combination of Elements: The combination of track building and train movement is a fun one that you don't see too often in games where a player, to a certain extent, creates the map that he then moves upon.

Good Cost Balance: Cost versus Return is well-balanced in a number of parts of the game. You have to measure the cost of building track to a location versus the return of delivering a load there. You must likewise balance the time it takes to delivery a load versus its payback.

Good Control of Randomness: The inclusion of three different demands on each cards helps to balance the randomness implicit from getting demands based on card draw.

Organic Railways Nice Reflection of Reality: Because you're making your decisions just a couple of loads at a time, your railway will grow quite organically, possibly including inefficient, out-of-the-way loops. This feels like a nice reflection of reality, and adds some interesting extra strategy to the game (e.g., do I spend money to take half-a-turn off my movement?).

Here's some of the elements I don't like:

Too Long: The fastest game I've ever played of Empire Builder was about 4 hours, and that was using some of the fast play rules. 5-6 hours is more common. Using the entire set of fast play rules and/or lowering the victory conditions would probably generally help here.

Possible to Get Stuck: It's possible to get totally stuck if you miscalculate the costs of building rails that you need to deliver your loads or if certain events (mostly, Floods) impact your track system. There are some "mercy" rules in the variant section that are meant to help out "beginner" players, but I think a better designed game would have more elegant answers for these problems.

Card Drawing Badly Placed: You draw new cards while moving your train, before building track. This inevitably means that you have to sit around figuring out your new possibilities while everyone else waits--because you might want to immediately build new track to start moving toward a new source or demand location on your next turn. The fairly obvious solution to this is to not draw cards until the end of your turn, though that's somewhat inelegant in the current design; a better integrated solution would have made a real difference for the game.

Looking at its gameplay on its own, I'd give Empire Builder an average "3" out of "5"; however, as an originally innovative game that's influenced the industry I up it to "4" out of "5". If you like railroad games you should at least give this a try.

Conclusion

Empire Builder is a pivotal railroad game design. if you enjoy railroad games, and don't mind longer, more complex games, you must give this one a try. However, if you're more inclined toward more recent German-style game designs, you might want to give this a miss and instead try an Age of Steam, Union Pacific, or Stephenson's Rocket.