I like the Empire Builder series of crayon railroad games. Something about their freeform nature — where you start with a blank slate and slowly fill in that canvas — appeals to my right brain and makes me think that I’m really creating something. Beyond that the games have a neat puzzle-like feel to them, where at any time you’re juggling a set of three demand cards, each with three demands, and trying to figure out how to best and most efficiently serve them. Creativity & puzzles together define some of my favorite game design elements.

As a result the Empire Builder series of games is, perhaps, the only games that I played in college that I still play today. Dune, Dragon Pass, Hacker, and others now largely gather dust, but I play a couple of tabletop games of Empire Builder (or one of the variants) every year, and I play the Iron Dragon computer game with much more frequency than that (albeit with frequent swearing at the slow and dumb AI).

Unfortunately Empire Builder is dated. The original game was released in 1980 and though there have been a lot of neat new maps, events, and terrain types since then there have been very few changes to the basic game. As a result, the game is too long and doesn’t make good enough use of its components. It’s also too solitaire and it’s got some rough corners that any modern developer would probably smooth right out. Unfortunately, Mayfair doesn’t seem too inclined to change the game. And who can blame them? Based on the continual flow of Empire Builder variants I have to imagine that the games remain good sellers, and that’s something that you don’t mess with.

Continue reading →