Rail Games

[cherydactyl]

A week ago, I took a mental health day and went to Michicon. I made illyaa deal with both kids' soccer games, and my parents, who came to one of them, to boot. Actually, he volunteered to let me go. I left about 7:15 am, got to Troy about 8:05, had time to go get water and pumpkin seeds at the nearby drug store, and still get there quite early

Comments

[eviljohn]

[scurries off to read about Space 1889 on BGG]

I would be *totally* into a steampunk board game, too bad Space 1889 is mostly a roleplaying game. I'm a bit surprised it's a niche the hasn't been filled yet.

[cherydactyl]

Have you played any of the Mayfair Rails games? They are economic/resource management games in rails trappings. The Mars/Barsoom thing would be mostly a theme overlay. The creative part would be figuring out the commodities and the map. Barsoom is public domain at this point, I am 99.99% certain, so there wouldn't be any copyright issues for that content. OTOH, Lunar Rails is my favorite, and Barsoom would have to be two linked hemispheres just like Lunar. :)

[eviljohn]

Yep, I've played a few of them. The thing that's kept me away from most of the rail games and more towards the German games has been the play time and teaching time. -- I do know that if everyone has knows the rules and played before it can go pretty quickly, but in general with the folks we play with there's always at least one person we have to teach rules to. So that means those type of games are generally too long for us, plus if one or more people are analysis-paralysis types (unfortunately we have a few) it can go *painfully* slow.

But saying that I like a lot of the rail games (and play TTR, Santa Fe, Union Pacific, etc. as much as I can), it's just the learning curve that hold us back from Lunar Rails, etc.

[cherydactyl]

illyaa tells me we do have a steampunk minis game, Sky Galleons of Mars, cited as the tactical combat game system for Space 1889. Are you interested in playing that sometime?