TOKYO METRO

EvEvanstar5,9

This is a worker placement / railroad stocks game that has many magnificent mechanisms that weave together marvelously, but is also hampered by some pretty difficult to resolve poor graphic design and usability choices. Bookkeeping in the game is a bear. The game has multiple rail lines, which increase in value by 2 when the matching train token crosses a station or by 5 if the station is owned by a player who has any stock cards of that train line. The lines on the track are super tiny, and impossible to read from across the table. The math also gets difficult when you are choosing a line to invest in, because to know how much anything will be ultimately worth, you need to be able to see where the tiny marker is on the tiny track, then assess how much it's going to gain in the next few turns, by analyzing the messy and crowded board for how many movement points the train will have before the game ends, how many times it will hit each station, and which of those stations will belong to someone who is holding a stock by cross referencing the color of the station token with the cards players have in front of them. The design of the map is very messy. The whole thing is printed in cloth, which seems like a mistake. Station tokens are little wooden pieces that are meant to show claim to these circles, where they obscure the board. They also make it difficult to see claim for the stations that consist of multiple connected circles, since they just sort of stand awkwardly next to only one part of the space. Colored rings would have been ideal here. Movement of your worker pawn is counted in squares, and to build a station token, you have to be in a square that's touching the printed station circle. The station location circles are inconsistently positioned in the grid which means you have to be mindful that sometimes you can reach a station from many squares, and other times only one square depending on where you are. The other tricky board element is that when a station does consist of multiple circles, the same train line might hit several of those circles, but other times only one. Which trains hit where is shown in the color of the space, at times the color of half the space. When the board is full of tokens, distinctions like this can be easy to visually miss, which can throw off your calculations. The board is additionally needlessly cluttered by the thematic names of each station in big letters. The worker placement system is really interesting, the logistics are interesting, the choices are good throughout the game. It has a marvelous back and forth where players are able to react to and possibly benefit from each other's moves. I love how the action spaces change up each round, and how you can spend more worker disks and less money or more money to get similar effects. I love the way you can buy additional discs or personal action spaces. A better graphic designer could take this game and turn it into pure gold. ☆ 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