On the Underground: London / Berlin

EvEvanstar4.6

Players are given control of a few colors of train lines. On your turn you place four rail makers down in any of the colors you control, so long as you are extending the end of the line you are placing. You get bonus VP for connecting certain spaces, or enclosing areas of spaces in a loop. Then the passenger token moves to one or two destination markers, giving 1 VP to each rail line it uses along it's route. It aims to walk the least number of spaces possible, and then transfer between lines as few times as possible. Upon arriving at his destinations, new destination cards are revealed from the deck, and the next player begins their turn. The game ends once the deck of possible destinations runs out. The game takes legitimately about an hour, and I have a real affinity for pathing games. The art is nice, the flow of play is clear. I like the tension of trying to claim the best line spaces, while risking that you are setting up too many transfer points and the passenger token might prefer another player's more direct route. One element of the game I stumble on a bit is the memory aspect. Each of the potential destination spaces only has one matching card for it in the deck, which means once that card has come up, the value of working into those areas is lessened. The game says you are not allowed to look at the discard pile to see where the token has already gone, but since my memory comes and goes with my energy level, I'd rather have this very trackable information indicated for me on the map. To this end I've taken some glass gems to mark all the areas not yet visited. I played this way for game 2 and enjoyed the game more as a result, but with multiple plays this might become too predictable. Somewhat on the fence about this game. I like it, but will it see play in the face of other more involved route building games? ★ 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