A few weeks ago, I was playing a game of Martin Wallace’s Steel Driver, and when we finished one of the players asked, “Is that what most train games are like?” Though Steel Driver has some fairly typical features of train games, it doesn’t cover the entire spectrum of train game design. Overall, there actually aren’t a lot of games that cover all the features that you find in train games … and so I expounded for a while on my theory of train games — which is what follows.

In my opinion train games feature three main mechanics — connections, stock holding, and pickup and delivery — but few games feature all three.

Connections

Ticket to Ride

The fundamental mechanic that makes a train game a train game is connectivity — the act of building connections from place to place over a large board. Certainly, not all connection games are train games, as Michael Schacht has proven. However, I think that all train games are connection games.

In the modern day, Ticket to Ride (2004) is probably the definitive connection train game. The whole game is about collecting the resources (cards) to build tracks. You’re then rewarded with points, both for the actual building and for connecting up specific cities. Unlike most train games, Ticket to Ride allows you to build discontiguous rail lines, but the rewards for connecting cities usually preclude players from doing so. Metro (1997) and String Railway (2009) offer examples of even more minimalistic connections-only train game (the latter with strings!),

Meanwhile Alan Moon’s Clippers (2002) shows how a connections game can be both more complex and have a bit of variety.

First of all, Clippers is boat themed … but then railroad games don’t have to have railroad theming. They just have to have gameplay that would be equally applicable to a theme of train line building. Clippers proves this theory because it’s a revision of Moon’s own Santa Fe (1992) / Santa Fe Rails (2001) — which were largely the same game with railroad themes.

Clippers

Second, Clippers is a somewhat rare connections-only railroad game where players don’t control individual rail lines. In Clippers, they instead hold investments in ports … which score points based on which rail (ship) lines connect to them!

Streetcar (1995) and Transamerica (2001) are a few of the other connections-only railroad (or trolley!) games where players don’t have exclusive control of the railroad games. In both of these games, players are trying to get connections built to specific locations, but they’ll do better if they can get other players to do most of the building for them! Thus, they’re all about intuiting how other players will build on the joint lines and then sitting back in a Zen-like way and letting them do so. It’s an interesting subcategory of train games.

Having now stepped through a handful of connections-only games, we can see that they broadly address four questions — which are thus the four questions at the core of train games.

1.) How are connections built?

Some games allow players to build a set amount of track each turn, while other games require players to pay resources in order to pay tracks. The first sort of game — which includes publications like Metro, Streetcar, and Transamerica — clearly allow for simpler play. However, many games including Ticket To Ride introduce more complex systems of resources that must be spent to purchase track.

2.) Where are connections built?

String Railway

I was tempted to say that all games require players to build connections on some sort of grid, but String Railway (and its brethren) proves that’s not necessarily the case, as you can toss down your string anywhere on the table.

However, the vast majority of games use some sort of constraining grid. Ticket To Ride uses a tightly constrained grid where players can only play trains on certain places; these spaces thus become resources that are fought over. Contrariwise Transamerica offers a more wide-open grid where players choose a route among many options.

Numerous games instead use tiles to build connections. These are essentially descendants of “pipe” games, with rail lines taking the place of pipe. These games tend to have a medium level of constraint, as the placement of tiles will often get in the way of tiles that other players had hoped to play. Examples of this methodology span from Metro and Streetcar to Age of Steam (2002) and its variants — which are generally games that I’ve saved for the next part of this article.

3.) What resources are used to build connections?

Ticket to Ride Cards

As I noted, some games allow building without the cost of any resource (other than a player turn). This is a popular methodology for connections-only games due to the general simplicity. Ticket to Ride instead has a cost in cards for building each link of track — a fairly abstract methodology.

When we get to more complex games — including the stock holding and pickup-and-deliver games that I’m going to cover in the next article — they tend to turn toward dollar costs. This allows for more granularity of cost and thus a higher level of simulation — as when mountains or rivers cost more resources to cross.

4.) How do connections score points?

The connections-only train games have to figure out how to reward players for building those connections. As we saw, Clippers offered a very unique answer of scoring the places that the rails go to, rather than the rails themselves; while Ticket to Ride offers a more standard sort of scoring, for building and for connecting. Conversely, Metro players score by building out their lines in the most inefficient way possible. (I always explain it as the players having government contracts; given that my home town of the San Francisco Bay Area just opened a Bay Bridge that took almost 25 years to build and cost 4x more than its original estimate … people understand.)

Overall, there’s a lot of variety possible in connections-only games, just based on the answers to these four questions … but that’s not all the complexity possible in train games.

Not Necessarily a Train Game (I) — Connections

Through the Desert

As I said at the start of this article, a game isn’t necessarily a train game just because it has connections. Twixt is a classic connections game where players are trying to get from one side of the board to another; Pünct is a modern revision of the idea. Hacienda includes players building connected groups of animals, while Through the Desert involves players using camels to connect up oases and watering holes.

Why don’t I consider any of these train games, when I do count Clippers, despite its lack of train theming? It’s because I can’t imagine them being republished under a train game theme. I think that’s probably because they all tend to support branches and blobs of connected stuff — which moves away from the manner that you’d expect rails to be built.

These games also tend to prevent their “lines” from crossing over each other, where most railroad games instead embrace that possibility.

There are even more farflung possibilities within the connection game space, such as Blokus — a game that no one would confuse for a train game, but one that’s still entirely about building connections between pieces.

Conclusion

I’d of course love to hear your thoughts on the simple connections-only train games that I talk about in this article: what other attributes they might have, and whether you agree with my ideas of what the genre contains and what it doesn’t.

In upcoming weeks I’ll be back with a continuation of this article, talking about stocks and pickup-and-delivery — which between them tend to define the more complex sorts of train games.

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