Transportation

Strategy: Smuggling & Smuggler Catching: Long Haul Trucking

Players make money by delivering goods throughout the U.S. and certain overseas cities. There are two ways to make money: 1) make a successful delivery and 2) intercept an illegal delivery. Players can choose whether to attempt to make legal or illegal deliveries. Illegal deliveries have higher payouts.

Players can purchase boats, weigh stations, and upgrades for trucks in order to increase their chances of making deliveries or checking other players' deliveries. But don't get too carried away, because all assets count as $0 at the end of the game.

Are you ready to catch a Smuggler? Are you the Smuggler? Either way, this will be an action-packed, fun game!

Part of the crayon rail games, this game features unique timeline orchestrated by event cards and a distance warp to accommodate the vast distances of the Soviet Union region. The game begins in the post WWII era, with players drawing rail lines and delivering loads wary of the inevitable fall of the Soviet Union. Build an empire from the Black Sea to the Baltic.

Note that the "distance warp" feature was removed during playtesting, and the "inevitable fall" of the Soviet Union is not as inevitable as you would think if that card doesn't get drawn.

A Medieval game of trade and commerce, Die Händler is set in Europe, where trade wagons carry wares between six cities on the board. Essentially, players buy goods, load them onto wagons and send them for maximum profit in other cities.

The whole game looks very inviting. The medieval cities depicted on the board, together with the player crests, cardboard coins, money pouches, sticker decorated wagons and wooden commodity pieces, immediately creates the right atmosphere for the players.

There are six cities - Paris, Cologne, Brugge, Gent, Vienna and Genoa - which are interconnected by roads. Three wagons carry goods from one city to another. No-one owns the wagons or controls any of them single-handedly, and in principle a player can put commodities on any transport. There are six different commodities - salt, iron, wine, silk, cloth and food - all of limited supply.

The goal of the game is to make money by delivering goods to the towns, and use the money to buy increases in status. The game ends after a certain number of deliveries have been made and the winner is the player with the highest level of status.

Epic Railroad Building in North America

Discover a modern North American classic. Celebrate one of our most vital and enduring passions: railroads. Use your initial investment to build track. Then pick up commodities where they are grown, mined, or manufactured and deliver them to a lucrative place of demand. Complete a delivery and make the money you need to buy larger, faster trains, and expand your railroad empire. Win the game by building the most effective railroad empire!

The original and flagship of Mayfair's crayon-rails line allows players, using washable crayons, to draw their train routes over a map of North America. Players start with an initial sum of money which they use to build short lengths of track during their first couple of turns. For the rest of the game, players operate their trains over the track network drawn on the board to pick up and deliver loads to various cities, and then have the opportunity to add to their track network or improve their train. The game uses demand cards which list three demands, each of a commodity to be delivered to a specified city for a given payoff. Each player has three demand cards to provide opportunities for income.

Each turn consists of an operations phase and a building phase. During the operations phase, trains are moved to cities where commodities are picked up at no cost and moved to one of the cities on that player's demand cards. When the commodity is delivered, the player receives the payoff and trades that demand card for a new one. Event cards are mixed in the deck with the demand cards. When an event card is drawn the instructions are followed. During the building phase a player may pay to build more track or upgrade his train.

A player wins by being the first to connect his track network to six of the seven major cities on the board and acquire $250,000,000 in cash on hand.

Game description from the publisher:

In front of you lies the untouched soil of Germany. No track is cutting through its plains, no station is telling of the great industrial progress – but you are about to change that.

In Express 01, you can invest in the construction and upgrading of railway lines and build stations for different companies. When you upgrade such a station, you may reassign it to another company. Your main focus is the acquisition of shares, and as soon as shares are issued, trains can run on behalf of the companies. This way money will be distributed to the shareholders and you get new capital. So keep an eye on the other players to earn money or obstruct their opportunities.

The game ends after the round in which a certain number of Base Cards is upgraded or a certain number of decks are used up. The player who managed to gain the most capital wins.