Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — The Soo Line

My most recent choo-choo game, The Soo Line, was weird and experimental, in that it involved me deliberately breaking "rules" of train game design: it's very front-loaded, there are fewer companies than players and therefore some players will be taking a less active role, and all the companies are rubbish. It was always intended to be a sort of an oddity rather than a crowd-pleaser, and as expected, there were folks who really dug it, and there were folks who found it frustrating and self-indulgent. I did see some comments about how Soo and the equally experimental/divisive For-Ex proved that...

The Soo Line is my sixth train game design. In some ways, it's similar to the others - for example, it's the fourth in a row to use some variation of the "track leasing" mechanism I introduced in Trans-Siberian. But it's also the most aggressively weird of my choo-choo games, which is the primary reason why I didn't offer it  to Winsome and we decided to go the Hollandspiele route instead.  The core bit of weirdness is that there are only three railroads to invest in, and the majority shareholder makes all decisions for the railroad. The game seats three...

One thing all my shareholding train games have in common is that once you buy a share, it's yours for keeps. You can't sell off your holdings in one company for some quick cash to float a new one, as you can in the 18xx. Neither can you "buy low sell high", divesting yourself of a company when it's at its apex, deftly avoiding the inevitable fall. This is something that used to irritate one of our playtesters to no end. Every time a playtest was concluded, every time we asked for feedback, she always said that she wished there...

The Soo Line is my sixth train game design. In some ways, it's similar to the others - for example, it's the fourth in a row to use some variation of the "track leasing" mechanism I introduced in Trans-Siberian. But it's also the most aggressively weird of my choo-choo games, which is the primary reason why I didn't offer it  to Winsome and we decided to go the Hollandspiele route instead.  The core bit of weirdness is that there are only three railroads to invest in, and the majority shareholder makes all decisions for the railroad. The game seats three...