Last Night’s Game – Railroad Tiles and Rumble Nation
Due to various life circumstances, last night was the first time in weeks that I could sit down with A, J, and M to play board games. We played three games.
When a dedicated board gamer purchases a game with expansions, they tend to go “all-in” if there are any available expansions. The Collector’s Ediition includes both the base game and all the expansions in a very handsome-looking box.The same box from the side. We’ll get to Rumble Nation in just a bit. This view shows the gold foil embossing over the artwork.Railroad Tiles, as the name suggests, is a tile-layout game. The goal is to earn points by constructing a city’s transportation network, consisting of roads, railroads, and buildings. This pictures show my layout at about 2/3rds of the way through our first game. I’ve only earned ten points so far, but the game has substantial end-game scoring. The white star has to do with the placement of the colored pieces on the tiles.Players improve their cities by taking tiles from this central area. They indicate that they’re going to take all the tiles from a column by moving their piece (upper left) to the top of that column. However, the resulting order of the pieces determines the turn order next round. Notice that my piece (green) is last in the turn order for this round; I probably selected the last column in the previous round, giving me four tiles but with a disadvantage for selection for the current round. This is the major source of AP (“analysis paralysis”) in the game, since it’s not always obvious which column of tiles gives you the best improvement for your city.J handily won the first game. I won the second one, barely. This is my tile layout at the end of that second game. What made the difference is that J lost points due to “danglies”, that is, tile edges with roads or railroads that don’t connect to anything.For the second game, we played with additional tiles called “objectives”. They give extra points at the end of the game if you can organize your tile layout in a certain way. For example, the left-most tile in this picture is the airport, which gives you five extra points if there is a group of three or more orthogonally-connected building tiles in the same row or column as the airport.
We don’t often play the same game twice in a single night. Railroad Tiles was a short and fun game, and we might very well play it again in the future.
After Railroad Tiles, M excused herself. A, J, and I played an even shorter, less complex game: Rumble Nation.
The game’s title is probably a poor translation from the original Japanese.Rumble Nation vaguely resembles the classic board game Risk. Players attempt control territories in feudal Japan. Each territory is worth a randomly-assigned number of points. Players compete for control of a territory by rolling dice to determine in which territory they can place their units, and how many units they can place. In the picture A appears to be moving the yellow pieces, which are mine, probably to make room for his black pieces; J is blue.After all the units are placed, the primary (gold) scoring tile goes to the player with the most units in the territory; the secondary (silver) tile goes to the player with the second-most number of units. Each player is also allowed to play one Tactics card during the unit-placement phase; you can see that I played the Ninja card. That gave me control of territory 8……which seemed clever at the time. But though I won the territory, J won the game, by being more careful about in which territories he placed his units.
Rumble Nation is another fast game, taking perhaps 20-30 minutes to play. It’s perfect for a filler or, as in our case, an end-of-the-night game to wrap up a gaming session.
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