The Year We Railed, II

This is the second of a three-part Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West diary. The first was posted last year.

It’s time to rejoin our intrepid gang who are competing to be the biggest rail bastard in a fictional American past where rail barons are just good people, deep down, and one gangsta cowgirl is the real villain rather than the late Thaddeus Reeves who is, of course, white (rail colour).

After finishing the first four games of Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West, let’s find out what happened next in this spoilery board game journal.

5: 1877, GREAT PAINS

What sort of story do we want from a legacy tabletop game? I don’t play enough legacy games to have the shred of an answer but I’m starting to get an idea. Pandemic Legacy: Season One painted its story in broad brushstrokes where voids were left on the canvas for players to explore. Whilst not a stunning work of fiction, Pandemic Legacy functioned as an emotive story engine. As always, how much players invest is down to the players themselves: our group never felt attached to the characters but bought into the rising panic, a world spinning into chaos, the constant fear that something worse was waiting for us around the corner.

LotW is an entirely different game. It’s a game in which the players are competing to build the future and it’s simply not going to command the same emotional heft. LotW has built a narrative around a villain, Mama O’Connell, who is attempting to build a criminal enterprise across the frontier.

First of all, five games in, the story deck is doing little except adding new events to the event deck. LotW has actually migrated its story off the story deck to the frontier board additions and the occasional postcard. It’s just too fragmented. Pandemic Legacy was driven by its Legacy deck and was, largely, a linear story with some strong beats.  LotW is attempting to lore a world into being, fleshing out detail in barely readable cursive.

It all feels a bit tedious. We’ve stopped reading out the postcard descriptions because they were typically delivered in bulk at the end of the game, as that’s when you notch out completed tickets to acquire each postcard. And, after playing for a couple of hours, no one wants to listen to a series of story nuggets that do not seem to connect to anything, ready to be forgotten next time.

So what has the Great Plains board brought us? Aside from a lot of trackbeds to fill, it’s added the concept of a “company town”. This means a player can “own” a town, putting a sticker on it to declare it theirs. Anyone else routing into it will have to pay a dollar or a train card to the owner; if a player cannot pay the tax, they are forbidden from building.

We are all offered a single company town sticker to put on the board. It would seem prudent for players to put them down on towns which are busy intersections for our tickets – or with an eye to where future routes may run – but that isn’t what happens.

There’s another company town network on the board – the Mama O’Connell network. It starts out in the Great Plains and can grow. There’s a new event being added that, when pulled out of the event deck, will spread the Mama O’Connell network to a neighbouring town. Seeing Pandemic here, we all used our initial company towns to hem in Mama. And, yes, somehow there was a brief echo of the co-op camaraderie from our Pandemic campaign.

But it was a completely pointless exercise. Players get to decide exactly where Mama expands to and, if Mama can’t expand, she’ll just sprout up somewhere else on the map. We already had “control” of a sort and using our company towns to manage Mama makes little sense. What this did do, however, was cost me a bunch of dollars and train cards as I didn’t do due diligence on the board when selecting tickets – guess who ended up paying out to company town after company town. Thanks, team.

I wasn’t the only one with trouble. Our Rail Queen, Mum, had issues because her tickets were all over the place and not connected up at all. Little Lady also got upset at Queen because she blocked her en route to Duluth at the last minute; Duluth is a dead-end on the new frontier map and, wow, it got pretty congested around there.

With my end of the game looking terrible, I tried everybody’s favourite Ticket to Ride desperate gamble: collect some more tickets on your final turn, hoping some will coincide with your existing routes. It was a gamble I lost, catapulting my game into absolute disaster and consolidating my position as the loser by a country mile.

Now, recall at the end of every game, the losing player is told to throw away an event. But, together, we chose the new one which allows the Mama network to expand. Maybe a new event will enter the pile later, but it seems we’ve stopped her expanding permanently.

Once again, my son, the Rail Prince, won and he selected the next Frontier board: Open Range. What new mechanic would this yield? Ah, a robber. But who was to know we would be so quickly robbed of the robber?

6: 1880, AT CLOSE RANGE

Now each new game we play is fatter than the one before, more cities, more tickets and even more trains. The first three games kick off with just 20 trains each but once the Frontier boards start hitting, the train counts climb. The sixth game sees us with 34 trains each. In the final game of the campaign, it’ll be 56 trains. The game only ends when one player gets down to their last two trains and I’ve already become nostalgic for how quick those early games took to run.

I’d like to tell you about the robber, but, at this point, I’m not sure I could do him justice (pun intended). The robber, who starts out with $20, can be moved around the board whenever someone plays a locomotive. Wherever he lands, he will take money from all the players who have built routes into that city – so this is an offensive action. But there is also an event where the robber can be captured, with any cash the robber has accumulated over the game available to players willing to put four train cards into the pot. If that event turns up, of course.

Okay, that was all game theory. What actually happened in the first two turns of 1880 is that Little Lady got a different event involving the robber. She put a notch into it and it turned out she scared off the robber for the rest of game. Well, gee, that was exciting.

I can’t say we enjoy the events; we find they don’t happen for ages and then the newspapers pop out in a cluster. Maybe it’s our fault for not shuffling properly, but it’s really annoying how the events just don’t move.

Now I have been irritated that my competitors are often better at building momentum and this was because they were leveraging the large cities. I had focused on building parts of my tickets which were difficult to establish or potentially screwed up by congestion, but my fellow players seemed to focus on large cities first. A reminder for the reader: building a route into a large city will net you a free train card from the deck.

This means they get all these free trains while building out a ticket and it helps them maintain a good pace of construction. If you leave your large cities towards the end, your bonuses arrive too late to help. I changed my approach in this game and it made all the damn difference. Suddenly I was Mr. Build, the Builder Guy from Build City. And I began to wonder if I might win this game because of one of my postcards.

Before that, let us say goodbye to the disappointing circus train, pulling out for the last time. If you remember, if we built long routes, we would get free circus train stickers to put in a little sticker book and finishing a circus train would earn a cash bonus at the end of the campaign. We finally reached the ‘STOP’ sticker on the Big Top sticker wheel which meant it was done. We shoved the sticker books into our vaults. I finished the $32 circus train but not the $64 one; Little Lady was absolutely determined to finish the $64 one and she pulled it off in this game. It’ll be interesting to see how this boils down in the final analysis.

Right, postcards! One of my postcards said I’d get a big fat cash bonus if I used all of my trains. And fortunately with my build enthusiasm plus an extra turn at the end of the game – a commiseration prize because I lost the previous game – I just scraped through. I was ecstatic. I didn’t pick up too many tickets, but it felt like a perfectly executed game. Man, I was so going to win!

This is a cautionary tale, reader. A cautionary tale.

Despite being on top of my game, I scored $96 while Queen came in with $95 and Prince with $105. WTAF. I suddenly realised at that moment that there was no way I was going to win the campaign. I play my best game, throw in a bonus, and still Queen and Prince are nosing around my score.

Okay, I’ll try to be positive.

What everyone didn’t know is that I was playing for company towns. I had a postcard that said if I got four company towns on the board, I would get another bonus. How to add a company town? By choosing the Vice President employee at the end of the game. I’d already done this once and was doing it again for the next game. I also had another postcard which allowed me to convert a large city to a company town which I imagine would produce some groans.

The company towns seem weak but I’m hoping they really ramp up if you get a lot of them. I’ve noticed a few players hate the idea in practice, though. We’ll see. Maybe I can make myself the most hated player with a board full of company towns.

Our Rail Prince got to choose the next board again. The Haunted Wastes. Turns out they truly are haunted, because there’s a glow-in-the-dark ghost train and a glow-in-the-dark die. Well. I suppose it’s neat, but we’re not going to play in the dark so… why?

7: 1883, WASTE OF A HAUNTING

Apparently, murdered Thaddeus Reeves is driving a ghost train around the Haunted Wastes. Whenever anyone claims a white route, you roll the ghost dice and move the ghost train that number of spots on the ghost track. If it lands beside a route you’ve built, you have to take a Curse card. This could be something like ‘you can’t earn money from an event’ or ‘your ears will drop off your head’. One of these I made up.

Why would you build rails across the Haunted Wastes then? Well, the Haunted Wastes are decked out with these tunnel trackbeds, which require extra effort to build on – you need to play train cards with a pickaxe on them – but carry big bonuses. There’s a full $16 for one of these routes.

The Rail Prince was very excited about the ghost train but I’m not sure this played out quite how he expected. I’ll come back to this, don’t you worry.

Another little surprise: bonuses for building on your own colour was doubled to $4. Each game is longer, with higher-value tickets or more numerous tickets and it’s making these later games more impactful in terms of campaign totals.

I also had this Secret Postcard that said I didn’t need to pay when building into a town with the black disease – I mean, the Mama O’Connell syndicate towns. Still, it wasn’t clear when you should announce this card, but you couldn’t keep it a secret as your boardgame family would want to know why you haven’t paid the criminal’s toll.

Unlike the last game, the Robber was left in play and came into his own. Every locomotive play cost somebody some dollars. In time, because I was doing well and had four company towns, everybody started Robber clobbering my routes. When the “white trains are locomotives” event flared up I was fucking hammered to death.

But the real enemy in this game was my son, the Rail Prince, and I smiled as I dropped my first loco and Robber clobbered him. And then – I mean, fuck sakes – then he tossed his Robber immunity postcard on to the table.

Yes, if I drop the robber, he won’t come a cropper, so my play was a flopper. Like my Mama O’Connell immunity, his immunity lasts the entire campaign. In some ways, this lucky find feels unfair because as the clear leading player in the campaign, the Robber is needed as a tweak for balance. But no, it’s only the losing players that get to attack each other. It’s always the rest of us that feel pain, isn’t it? The ones on the top of the pile always seem to have that Get Out Of Jail Free card.

Eventually the “I Found Dead Man’s Gulch” event turned up and every one has to throw in four train cards to get a slice of the winnings – which was up from $20 to $37. Little Lady only had two cards and Queen doesn’t have them either. I have plenty. Prince had the cards, however, but he needed them to continue his empire. But as the bastard would be devastated for me to take the whole pot – which I can’t help but stress was largely my fucking money – he threw in the train cards.

Absent-mindedly, I found myself Googling “how to divorce your children”.

The Haunted Wastes certainly felt dangerous and all of us avoided it, save Little Lady and Rail Prince had Wastes routes that didn’t carry ghost train risk… but none of us had remembered there was a Haunted Wastes event. When it turned up, plenty erupted across the table. The event declared that anyone who had built into the Wastes would automatically receive a Curse. Well, that took both the children out. Prince got ‘pay one more train to build your routes’ and Little Lady’s curse eliminated her company bonus for building on her colour. The Prince paid the fee with three train cards, but Little Lady accepted her Curse for the time being.

An interesting design choice here was that the card was punched every time someone assigned Curses to players. If it was successful in hitting players three times, the ghost train would retire from the game. But if the player avoided the Haunted Wastes, the event could survive for multiple games. In fact, we all learnt to avoid the area, because of what happened next.

An event we hated was played: the discard recycle. This tells the players to reshuffle the event discards back into the event pile. This meant the Haunted Wastes card could turn up again and it did! Both the Rail Prince and the Little Lady decided to pay their curses off. After the children had been shat on twice by the same card in a short space of time everybody implicitly chose to avoid the Haunted Wastes – a concept which is meant to be edgy and risky but we all learnt to steer clear. Perhaps our risk calculus was wrong but we just didn’t want to have to deal with it.

Prince won but all in all my game was pretty good. I built up plenty of cash, had nice overlapping tickets and had avoided the mesmerising glare of the Haunted Wastes. Prince, meanwhile, had been living with ulcer-inducing stress, building towards an enriching picaxe route through the Haunted Wastes from the start and only pulling it off in the literal dying moments of our game.

Again, we had to decide a newspaper event to throw away; we considered retiring the ghost train event but then worried that it would leave the train on the board forever as the train only departs for unearthly realms when the event is punched three times. We kept it in but realised much later any means of retiring the card would have laid the ghost train to rest.

And so it was time to adopt a new Frontier board from the box, ready for the next game.

We went with Badlands. Here, I assume the ‘Bad’ in ‘Badlands’ refers to capitalism, because that’s the new rule it ushered in.

8: 1886, SHARE ALIKE

In this game, we now have a share deck with two face-up shares laid alongside it. Now, if a player builds a particular colour train route, they can acquire a share in the related company if, and only if, it’s lying there face up for the grabbin’. The biggest shareholder in a company can claim a full $20 at the end of the campaign. If you largely leave this to chance, it’s probable the share spoils will be shared around equally and benefit no particular player. If you leave this to chance.

This one extra rule might not sound like much of an ask but we were drowning in a soup of rules especially with events introducing temporary changes. At one point, we had to remember we could claim shares, get $2 for building a route to a port, move the robber if we deployed a locomotive, claim $4 if building our own train colour, pay Mama if you built to a Mama plague town and move the ghost train if you built white. Did I forget the bonus card if you built rail into a large city? Don’t worry, no one forgets that, son.

But we were forgetting random rules, such as using the loco to Robber someone in their face. Sure, there’s a rules list on the back of the manual, but running through that every turn was going to slow the game to a crawl. And the rules did not memorably connect to the game in the way that Pandemic Legacy managed. Most of the time, barely-credible justifications for each new rule were forgotten in the next beat.

In my game, I made the normally suicidal choice to keep all four initial tickets which roughly represented two long routes orthogonal to the other. Initially, it looked like I was not entwined with other people’s routes. Ha, ha. I also picked up an extra route from a ‘free ticket’ event – all the routes looked quite bad, so I chose the least worst option. I was full-on terrified to seek additional tickets after this because the board could easily throw me something I was no good for.

I did something else suicidal. I began delaying rail building until a share colour appeared matching my rail routes. Because I organised my game in this way, I became the leading acquirer of shares. But at what cost? Funny you should ask that because a share selling event popped up where you could sell one of your shares every turn for $7. This event only lasted three rounds before another newspaper blasted it off the event deck but I made $21 which I think was worth it. Or was it? Let’s find out, shall we readers?

So, the Robber. I was naturally everybody’s favourite Robber target as the Rail Prince was immune. Then the Gulch event turned up, you know the one where people throw in train cards to raid the Robber’s vault. As I was becoming quite flush with cash, the bastard Prince asked if anyone is going to throw in the four cards to claim the Robber’s money. The pot stood at $33. This was fucking deja vu. A lot of that money is mine anyway but I can’t possibly be allowed to have it back. If no one else did, he would sacrifice train cards for the good of the rail community, to make sure more money didn’t end up in the hands of Mammon Dad. So fucking magnanamous. Little Lady said she would so Prince backed out and we claimed half the kitty each.

As we were cruising towards the endgame, I was finally blocked from completing that glorious bonus route I picked up earlier. If I didn’t complete it, I would lose $10. There was nothing to be done. I made the quiet decision, to charge ahead to the end of the game, finish early and cost people their tickets.

Enter a new controversy.

I accelerate this approach using the Financier employee. This employee allows you to buy extra trains not in your hand for $2. I didn’t think too much about it until after the game but this is an incredibly powerful card: you can blast through picaxe tunnels with cash and still make a profit; you can build one- and two-train routes in your own colour for free because you get money back from building them. I believe errata has downgraded the card but buying train cards for cash is a terrible mechanic that potentially unbalances the game.

Anyway, something our family doesn’t do enough of is forcing the game to an end. It’s a legitimate tactic but we’re often too compassionate, letting everyone “play out their game”. The big downside is that games then spill over into the late hours and endgames often become a massive crush if there’s limited resources or space. It’s a weakness of games for us that depend on player actions to bring things to a close rather than a timer mechanic (a la Pandemic). But I absolutely play this card now, pun intended.

I have omitted, however, the most serious reason we absolutely DO NOT do this.

Both my children looked at me like I was fucking Hitler, like just the worst parent on the face of God’s Earth. It was an awkward moment in which the silence implied an apology was due. I explained that the Rail Prince had blocked me and this was my legitimate response. Of course, he admitted he knew he was going to block me but made the aggressive patricidal move regardless because I could have blocked him. But you know, he still had the piggyback card to override the blockage, so he deserved his inglorious ending. That’s my take, anyway.

And in my final turn, I picked up another share and managed to exhaust all of my trains for the big zero-train bonus. Who were the winners and who were the losers? Little Lady cashed in a $12 postcard.  My beautiful Queen picked up a ghost train curse but she had a curse-retardant postcard, so fuck that. And it was Queen who was victorious with an enormous haul of tickets leaving me second, which I seriously considered a crime against reality.

Prince came last and got the Caboose. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Just saying.

Now, in keeping with the trend of too many rules to remember what you’re supposed to do, here’s one: you can only punch a hole in a ticket if you complete it. Little Lady absent-mindedly punched out a ticket she had failed to complete because of my evil endgame play. There was consternation on the table and I was aggrieved that we had committed a destructive action that could not be undone. But the arts and crafts department patched the hole back in and made it look as close to perfect as possible. I was still upset about the entire incident, but I can be a prissy boardgame bitch sometimes.

I was surprised that Little Lady still retained a curse, one which prevented her from making cash from events. I guess she thought it wasn’t a big deal. I don’t know. I think you can earn a lot from the events. But who am I to judge? We have no idea who’s going to win the campaign, do we, Prince?

Anyway, we were left with one final task – the winner had to choose the next Frontier board.

Our Queen chose Cascadia and discovered there were gold in them thar hills.

Next: Gold Crush