Game Review – Russian Railroads

Russian Railroads
Number of Players	2 - 4
Play Time	120 Minutes
Ages	14 Years and up

Since I have been playing this game so frequently as of late, I thought it was time that I do a full review of Russian Railroads.

Russian Railroads is a train themed worker placement game.  The goal in the game is to help industrialize Russia through building three train routes and building factories.  The person who can gain the most victory points to do this wins the game.

In Russian Railroad the players take turns placing workers on actions on the board.  The actions are taken when the workers are placed there.  These actions consist of building factories, upgrading trains, moving pieces up the rail or industrial track, and purchasing engineers.    The actions cost 1 – 3 workers in most cases.  The exceptions are to purchase an engineer costs one coin and there is a rail building action that costs on worker and one coin.  The more powerful the action, the more it will cost to take.  Once all of the players have placed their workers, the round is over and everything is scored and the game moves on to the next round. The game lasts seven rounds.

As the players progress in building the rail lines and factories on their player board, they will achieve bonuses.  The bonuses include victory points, the ability to upgrade track and special bonuses that can enhance their player boards.  One of the challenges in the game is to time getting these bonuses so they can help you out the most.

One of the things that I like about the game is that there are multiple paths to victory.  There are only two major strategies.  The factory strategy and the pure rail line strategy but within those strategies that are a number of tactical paths to victory.

There is some variability in the game set up.  There are more engineers available in the game then there turns.  Since only one engineer is available to the players in each round, there is a change in the special abilities that are in a play.  There are also a limited number of bonus cards available and two are not in play in each game.

The thing that I do not like about the game is that there is very little room for error.  If any player makes the mistake of focusing exclusively on their own progress and not making sure that he is not helping any of the other players, it can cause a major point swing that they and other players will not be able to recover from.  Since the score of the game increases each round, it is easy to run into the situation where the rich progressively get richer and leave the other players behind.

Here are some tips for when you play your first few games.  As I touched on earlier, there are two good strategies to the game.  The first is to focus on building two of the rail lines trying to maximize the advantages you can get from them to gather as many points as possible.  The other is to focus on building factories and only build the track you need to gain bonuses to complete building a full set of factories.

Ignore the importance in collecting some engineers especially if their abilities help you reach your goals.  There is also a 40 point bonus at the end of the game if you have the most engineers.  In order get engineers you must make sure that you go early in the turn order by using one of your workers to make sure you are the first player in the next turn.  The plus about using the worker in this way in Russian Railroads versus other worker placement games, is that you get to reuse the worker at the end of the round on another action.

If you are looking for a solid worker placement game, you should definitely take a look at Russian Railroads.  It will be available in the US from Z-Man Games in mid to late December.