Yay! A non-book related post! 😉 That’s for you, NE.
One time, in the rosy blush of my youth, I went to GenCon. I was and am an avid gamer (even though my gaming has moved online due to lack of a gaming group) GenCon was the pinnacle of all Gaming Conventions and was held, as it isn’t today, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; in a giant convention center. I was 19 and had gone up there without any of my other gaming friends.
I’d pre-chosen my events months earlier, as you do, and to fill a slot that was empty, I chose a game called Empire Builder. There wasn’t a description at the time and I assumed, being a lover of tabletop war games, that it was some sort of new war game where you build your empire by conquering others territory.
I couldn’t have been more wrong! It was a game about building taking control of a Railroad company and building your rail lines across the United States (continental 48 states, obviously) Taking loads from one city to another for cash. I fell in love with this game. It was fun and easy to play and best of all it took some thinking.
The board consists of a grid of dots, representing mileposts/terrain and you build your railroad by drawing on the board in crayon. The more difficult the terrain (i.e. mountains/crossing rivers) the more it costs to draw to that dot. You draw three cards from the deck and on each of these cards are three requests by various cities around the map for a type of load that they want, along with how much they are willing to pay for it. Each city on the map produces 1-3 products that you can pick up. Generally, the further a city is away from the product it wants, the more they will pay to get it. So, you have to balance up the cost of building to the city that supplies the product to the city that wants it and the various other deliveries that you want to make on the way. That’s the thinking part.
Over the years, the game has proved so popular that they have come out with games set in many different areas of the world. There’s Euro Rails, Australian, Nippon, Russian, Indian, British, and Lunar Rails. Even a fantasy-set rail game called Iron Dragon. I want to own them all!