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Mayfair's 'crayon' games - an overview, with history
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With the arrival of Martian Rails, I realized that I had yet to take an Examiner ‘look’ at the ‘crayon’ rail games produced by Mayfair Games. There are now 11 of them (not including a couple of add-ons). The first, published in 1980, was Empire Builder, which introduced the world to the idea of using crayons to create rail routes on a map of the United States, along which players move goods to earn money. Player with the most money at game’s end wins.
Each new edition of the game has stuck with the original concept, while offering players a different map and goods to play with. One of the challenges of any of the subsequent editions is learning where the cities are and what goods they offer. I learned more about the geography and manufacturing centers of Europe by playing Euro Rails (1990) than in all of the years I spent studying the subjects through high school and on into college. Unfortunately, this knowledge isn’t of much use in playing the game. While a familiarity with the territory is certainly an advantage when you sit down to play, the task at hand is figuring out a way to use that knowledge effectively given your starting position on the board and a random set of options available to you at the start, and as the game progresses.
Nearly 5,000 people have rated the 10 games on BoardGameGeek and overall, they own an average 6.9 rating on the 1 to 10 scale. At the moment, Martian Rails has the highest rating (8), but it’s based on only five people who’ve rated it and wasn’t factored into the overall ratings for the other 10 games. India Rails (1999) has the highest average (7.05), followed by China Rails (2007; 7.04) and Euro Rails (1990; 7.03). Right now, Nippon Rails (1992) has the lowest rating at 6.67. If you lump them all together and situate the result on the overall game ranking, it’d be game # 783 on the Geek’s list. Average number of people rating the 10 games was at 481, with Empire Builder, primarily because it’s nearly 30 years old, receiving the largest number of ratings (1,287) and China Rails receiving the least (96).
Each new edition of these ‘crayon games’ offered players new twists on the way goods were routed through the relevant maps, with some maps offering more accessible routes and relatively easier means of accomplishing the game’s objectives. Euro Rails, as an example, is credited with having fewer ‘bottlenecks’; locations on the board through which all players tend to flow, and is also thought to have a more balanced set of ‘disasters’ (randomly occurring events, initiated by card draws, which impede the progress of a player’s objectives, like floods that negate use of certain track sections, etc.). This accounts for the variances in the ratings. People tend to like certain maps more than others. I’m a Euro Rails kind of guy, but this may have more to do with my familiarity with the game than any reasoned analysis of pros and cons compared to the others.
There are 11 names associated with the design of the 10 games, with one of them (Nippon Rails) being uncredited. The original design (Empire Builder) was a collaboration between Bill Fawcett and Darwin Bromley. Four years later, with the release of British Rails, four people took credit for the design, including members of the Roznai family, whose patriarch (Larry) now runs the company. It was six years before a third game was released – Euro Rails – and Bromley took sole credit. After the uncredited design of Nippon Rails came out in 1992, Bromley teamed with Tom Wham for 1994’s Iron Dragon (a sort of fantasy land map), while Larry Roznai took credit for Australian Rails released in the same year. Fawcett came back to claim sole credit for India Rails in 1999 and in 2003, M. Robert Stribula introduced a whole new concept for the game with the release of Lunar Rails, which offered players a science fiction type landscape (the moon, obviously) and the ability to ‘wrap around’ the board. Deliveries, until that point, were restricted to east-west, north-south journeys that ended at the perimeter of a map. With Lunar Rails, deliveries could go ‘off-map’ to reappear on the opposite side, creating a three-dimensional effect. Russian Rails (by Jodi Soares) and China Rails (by Michael Dreiling) followed before Stribula returned with his second sci-fi, wrap-around addition to the family with Martian Rails.
Euro Rails was my personal introduction to this family and was on my list of things to play at the first World Boardgaming Championships I attended in 2002. As with many of the officially scheduled tournaments at the WBC, I learned quickly that the competition was fierce and that, on a personal level, I was missing an essential tool – the ability to maximize route efficiency based on the available goods, the distance between cities and the amount of money I had to work with at any given moment. This route efficiency tool seems to be more readily at hand to others than me, and at least part of it may have to do with overall experience. I got better at Euro Rails as time marched on, although I never got to the point where I could beat anybody at the game, especially at the WBC, where each year of experience I gained was matched by a year’s experience in the hands of my opponents.
That said, it’s a system that works and is a lot of fun to execute and make at least the attempt at proficiency. You’re constantly asking yourself three basic questions. Which cities need which goods? Where are the cities producing these goods located? And can I get to the cities with goods (create rail routes with crayons) and travel to the cities that need them. There is some concern on the part of respondents who rated the array of games poorly that they take much too long and that downtime, as others perform tasks, is unacceptably tedious. This concern tends to say more about the player than it does the game. While the length concerns are valid, they’re offset if you happen to be thoroughly engaged in the process – planning, executing, dealing with the game’s ‘curve balls,’ which come at you the way they do in everyday life.
I may never have been very good at this type of game (and the WBC exposed me to quite a few of them, up to and including Lunar Rails), but they’re something I’d always be willing to sit down and play. The arrival of Martian Rails was an occasion for celebration, as I ripped off the cellophane and started delving into its specifics.
We'll get to that next time.
For more info: www.mayfairgames.com; www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/168 (This wll get you the entry for Empire Builder, the first of the crayon games. Use the search function for information on the other games, by title).
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