Railroad Tycoon - The Board Game

I had a fun time playing Railroad Tycoon - The Board Game with friends during our new year party. The game is huge and has lots of pieces, but the rules are simple enough to unpack the game and start playing. Or so we thought. Unfortunately we played the German version, where the rules booklet was suffering from bad translation. And when I later looked up the game on BoardGameGeek I noticed we had done a huge mistake: when calculating how far you can deliver goods, and how many points they bring, we counted hex tiles, when what we *should* have counted was links between cities. Strangely enough the game still worked and was fun to play when using that wrong rule. But I suspect the game would have played rather differently if we had used the correct rules. As often there are several hex tiles between cities, moving goods X links is much farther than moving them X tiles. I only noticed that there was a problem because there is a rule about bringing goods from Kansas City to Chicago, and these are 9 tiles apart, but the best locomotive can only travel a length of 8.

Apart from that small problem, I really liked the economic aspects of the game. You start with no money at all, but you can get all the money you want by giving our shares, each of which gets you $5,000. But at the end of every round, you need to pay $1,000 per share, and at the end of the game every share counts as one negative victory point. So giving out lots of shares early to get the investments going can really backfire. It is an interesting principle, because you never run out of money, as you can always give out more shares. But you need to find the sweet spot between giving out too few of them and not having enough cash to build, and giving out too many and being brought down by dividend payments and negative points.