First Train to Nürnberg

EvEvanstar2,5

This game has a really difficult rulebook and a very long setup time. The game itself has some good ideas, but feels underwhelming. At the start of the game you put a ton of cubes into a bag, then distribute 2 each to the many resource producing spots on the map. Then you remove some of the cubes you placed where the color of cube doesn't match the resource spot. Then you distribute passenger tokens to the town and city spaces from the bag. Then finally you are ready to play. I've played and loved some very fiddily games and even I felt ridiculous going through these setup steps. Players then get an income of 12 out of their 15 potential cubes. The cubes get spent bidding for steps on four tracks. Of those four tracks, one is really the focus, which is the track that allows you to spend steps to buy trains for the round. Buying the trains for the round is the primary way to score points. The importance of the buying trains track felt like a game design bottleneck that hurt the experience of play. Once the auction for track steps is over, remaining cubes and track steps are spent on laying down track tiles between regions. The players who have tracks that are the first to connect the two major cities gets a big point bonus, which can be done by a single player by turn 2 if people aren't careful. This also hurts the tension of the game. There are a few things to consider when building tracks, such as if you connect to a white, red or green space you have to spend a point on the corresponding track. You are also aiming to get sets of the four different deliverable tokens to score bonus endgame points, but overall everything falls back on needing the resource to buy trains with from the start of round auction, so all the interesting tactical decisions of the game get paved over by that start of the round auction. Since the cube income is so high, there's not much point in saving cubes round to round either. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ☆ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment

MeMestremutenstar6,0

Rating: 3/5 Production value: 3/4 Is the game in my collection/Love to have?: 0/1