I’ve always liked Mayfair’s crayon rail games. Weaned on Euro Rails, I wasn’t introduced to the family grandfather (Empire Builder) until I attended the World Boardgaming Championships about 10 years ago. Since that time, I’ve tried others - Martian Rails, India Rails. All with about the same level of anticipation and enjoyment, all accompanied by my annoying inability to improve.
The folks at Mayfair were kind enough to send me a copy of the second edition of Nippon Rails, which sparked some old enthusiasm, as I recalled my earlier ‘crayon rail’ days fondly. I wasn’t able to gather a group of like-minded, enthusiastic folk to try out this new Japanese map immediately, though there, tucked twixt the rules and the boards and the cards, I did find this CD; A shareware version of Empire Builder that you can use for a month, before having to register and purchase your copy.
Slipped that puppy into the drive before the packaging ‘peanuts’ had settled down. Took me a minute or two to get acclimated to the button by button process, including more than occasional use of the ‘Start Fom The Beginning Again’ option. But I got it. And sure enough, was immediately terrible at it.
Cyan, Green, and Red are kickin’ my butt.
But I keep at it, and start to develop a) a strong association with the map, which affords me some general knowledge about which cities provide which goods. I know, for example, that the only place you can get sugar on this map is in San Francisco. I know wood is available only in the upper NE and NW corners (the two Portlands). I know, too, that nine times out of ten, when you glance at your load cards (detailing which cities will pay what amounts for delivery of which goods), you are going to be nowhere near where you gotta be to pick stuff up and a long road away from that to where you have to be deliver that stuff.
You begin to economize. Well, you figure, I can get 20 million delivering sugar to Denver, but while I’m on my way to pick up the sugar in Frisco, I’ll pick up some iron and deliver that to Frisco, for 18 million.
Right! That’s the way it’s supposed to work. But as often over the past few weeks that I have ‘drawn’ load cards for rail delivery assignments, I have ended up traveling from places like Boston to Phoenix to pick up copper, so I can return that copper to New York. Nothing I can pick up in Boston does me any good on my journey to Phoenix, unless I want to go out of my way to create some rail line to pick up some tobacco from Raleigh and get a whopping three dollars for dropping it off in Atlanta.
Meanwhile Cyan, Red and Green are connected from Seattle to Miami, and from Portland, ME to San Diego. They’re whizzing around the board with their 12-space, three-good Express Freight, raking in the dough.
I forgot about b), which is the way in which a) - a passing familiarity with the map - informs your decisions. You see a sugar load on one of your cards, and your eye goes right to San Francisco. You get to where you can just look at load cards and see the possibilities. It does take a little while, but with the computerized version, you get mulligans without disgrace.
At the start of the game, you’re going to get to draw 40, dot-to-dot rail lines. Actually, what you have is $40m and you’ll spend it, $20m at a time to draw these rail lines. Your decisions as to where you’ll draw these lines will be strictly limited to 40 sections in length, so you can forget about trying to collect $35m for delivering something like sugar (in Frisco) to Portland, ME on your opening trip. You will not have enough money to build that route.
I can’t tell you how many times I tried, though. This is usually due to a miscalculation. You try to mouse your potential rail line out from Point A to Point B, without actually committing funds. Counting on the way – 2, 3, 5 (you just crossed a river), 8 (you just connected to a city), and you think you’ve got the $40m initial investment in rail line figured out. On your second-in-a-row, ‘draw track’ turn at the beginning, you discover that you will not be able to connect your Point A and Point B.
Mulligan!!
Start again!
Because the program is unforgiving. Myself and a live opponent ran into a few problems in our first two-player go-round with Nippon Rails and I, in particular, found myself doing some erasing and re-thinking when I fell short of cash to complete a given city-to-city connection.
The most compelling component of this computer version is one’s ability to give up when it’s appropriate to do so. It’s hard to imagine playing without that capability, because if you screw up early in this game with a live crowd, and you’re playing with anything resembling a serious group, you’ll spend the next couple of hours paying for your mistake, with virtually no chance of winning. Rare be the crowd, in my experience, that doesn’t grant the occasional mulligan in this ‘crayon rail’ system, but the computer does it in a heartbeat, and really. . doesn’t care.
So, I’m starting to pick up on some of this game and system’s subtleties that I had not fully appreciated before, all due to repetition of the experience over an extended period of time, thanks to this now-resident copy of the game on my computer. Game night pops up, and I load Nippon Rails into the game bag, toss it out to the gathered as a possible, and get one person interested. Okay, no problem, I figure, it’ll make things go quicker than that four-player thing I do at the computer.
Finally, I get the components assembled, the early money dished out, and the map facing my opponent, because he’s never played any of the ‘crayon rail’ games before, and I figure I’ll let him look at the names of the Japanese cities right side up, while I consign myself to reading names I’ve never heard of, upside down. I had a similar problem when I first learned Euro Rails, and figured I’d get over it.
But wait a second, this map is very wide, but not very tall; the four Japanese islands doing a lot of east/west, and not much north/south. And sure enough, I draw load cards asking me to travel from extreme west (Kagoshima on the island of Kyushu) to extreme east (Abashiri on the island of Hokkaido), building tunnels or ferries across the four islands that cost millions, with no intermediate loads to start accumulating cash. I’m in the same situation I kept finding myself in with the AIs of the computer Empire Builder. I got lousy load cards, and it takes me 10 or 15 minutes just to go over the possibilities. Three cards, three load assignments each. With two cities involved with each load process (the city where you pick up the good, and the city where you deliver it), that’s 18 cities on a map of Japan to find, and while I stumble across the occasional Tokyo, Osaka or Hiroshima that rings a few bells, I have no idea where these places are in relation to the map.
To make a long story (somewhat, but not much) shorter, the newbie kicks my butt, too. Every time I complete a turn of ‘track building’ I’m down to about $3 (million), and even when I manage to collect a decent amount of cash for deliveries (and there are some big payouts with this map), I’m usually forced to build more track just so I can get to places on my load cards.
I get the sense that Nippon Rails is better with fewer players; say, two or three. Four or more is going to create some bottle-necking; choke points through which three or four players are going to have to go, and inevitably, will be unable to do so (rules will tell you that only a certain number of players can make connections to smaller cities on the map; true of all of these games).
Originally released in 1992, Mayfair Games’ Nippon Rails was the fourth crayon rail game that began with the release of Empire Builder in 1980. Four years later, they published British Rails, and six years after that, they introduced Euro Rails. This, however, was my first experience with the Japanese map, which, like most variations on the Empire Builder theme, offers a set of unique challenges (alpine terrain, for example, which costs more to build across, or tunnels that connect two of the four islands for an exorbitant cost, but are worth it for mobility purposes).
The inclusion of a shareware version of Empire Builder in the Nippon Rails box is an excellent way to introduce yourself to this system, and I would highly recommend, if you’re new to the system, that you load the computer up and play with Empire Builder, at minimum, for the 30 days they’ll let you play it for free. The learning process for me has been (still is) something of a slow process, though perhaps it won’t take as long for you to pick it up. In any case, repeated opportunities to experience the ebb and flow of load cards, cross-country trips and the efficiency necessary to be good at it are all a part of the computer experience, which will aid you in your first go-round with Nippon Rails, or any of the other versions in the Mayfair family of ‘crayon rail’ games.
Final Note: After exhausting my 30-day grace period with the Empire Builder shareware, I communicated with Steve Okonski at Insystem to register my copy, so that I could continue my general humiliation at the hands of some very efficient AIs. In addition, I opted to download the map from Nippon Rails, and have just concluded my first few games of it, with equally efficient AIs. I refuse to select lesser skilled AIs against which to play (and you can do this). Too embarrassing. I’m a reasonably intelligent human being and game player, so I’ll take my lumps, learn the system(s) and hopefully, get better.
This second edition of Nippon Rails, published by Mayfair games credits Larry and Joe Roznai for its design, and is intended for play with 2-3 players, with a variant that allows for up to six players, aged 10 & up. As noted, the higher numbers will prove to be more challenging, offering opportunities for ‘blockage’ maneuvers, preventing opponents access to certain areas of the board. It’s good for a solid couple of hours, at least; more as the player numbers go up. It has a suggested retail of about $42, but as usual, can be had for less, with some diligent shopping.
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