It has been a while since I have written a review of one of
the Empire Builder series of games so this week I will review one of the less
common ones out there: Nippon Rails.
The game is set in the land of the Rising Sun, Japan and
like all games in the Empire Builder series is a game about developing and
using a rail network in that country.
Nippon Rails plays like all of the other Empire Builder
games. It uses the unique feature of the
Empire Builder family of games, the free form building of track. The player uses special crayons that are
included with the game to draw their track on the board. Between games the marking from the previous
game are erased from the game so that in the next play of the game the players
start with a fresh board.
Game play is fairly simple. The player gets three demand cards at the
start of the game. Each of the demand
cards has three different load demands on them.
In order to complete the card, a player must deliver one of loads on a
card to the city that needs the item.
Once the load is delivered the player discards the demand card and gets
a new on in its place. If the player
does not like the demand cards they have they can opt to lose a turn and
replace all of them.
A turn goes as follows.
The player moves their train along their track on the board, and then
builds any additional track they need or upgrade their train before passing the
turn. The amount of movement the train
can take depends on the size of train they have. The starting train moved 9 spaces and can
carry 2 loads. The super freight, which
is the best train can move 12 spaces and carry 3 loads. During the build phase the player can spend
up to 20 million yen to upgrade their train or build additional track. Tack costs are the same as other games in the
series, 1 million yen for plains, 2 million yen for mountains, 5 million yen
for alpine, +2 million for a river crossing, and +3 million for a inlet
crossing. In addition there is an option
to build a tunnel from Honshu to Hokkaido for 20 million yen. In
order to win Nippon Rails you must be the first to connect the four major
cities and have 250 million yen.
As with all the games in the Empire Builder series, Nippon
Rails can be slow for players that are new to the game, mostly because they are
not familiar with the map and where the loads originate from. Because of this, I always recommend that new
players play with the fast start rules to help speed the game along. In the case of Nippon Rails those fast start
rules are the player starts with five demand cards and they must discard down
to three by the end of the pre-build. The
train speeds are increased from 9 to 12 for Freight and Heavy Freight and 12 to
16 for Fast and Super Freight. The Tax Card is ignored.
The thing that I like about the current addition of Nippon
Rails is that they made it possible to win the game if you start in the
north. In previous editions if you
started anywhere be in the south, you were guaranteed to lose the game.
The thing that I do not like about the game is that because
of the shape of the board there is only one viable option to win the game. You need to build your north south track as
quickly as possible and do one or two delivery runs along that track to
win. The other issue with the game is
that unlike the other games in the series the number of players for this game is
2 – 4 instead of the standard 2 – 6 because the board is so narrow.
If you are looking for a game to try in the Empire Builder
series of games, this is not your best option.
You are much better off trying either Empire Builder or Eurorails. Even though they tried to fix some of the problems
that the first edition had they just cannot get around the problem of the shape
of the board. With this in mind I only
recommend Nippon Rails for players who are completing their collection of
Empire Builder games and those that really want to play a train game based in
Japan.
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