Trains: Rising Sun

6th April 2019

It's a Saturday evening, so it's an evening of gaming at Matakishi's.

And on this particular evening we played Trains: Rising Sun.

Trains: Rising Sun combines 3 key elements to make it what is is:

• Board gaming.
• Deck building.
• Trains (you may have got this bit from the imaginative name' Trains'). You know if a game-mechanic has become big when a 'rail-laying, train-running' game uses that mechanic. Which in this case combines deck building with trains, toot toot!

This game is a expansion/standard alone game (I guess that's where the imaginative name 'Rising Sun' comes from).

What's in a game?
Trains: Rising Sun uses a game board which depicts a map, a map that is overlaid with hexes (familiar territory for the players' of many, many train games) and you can build cities, connect rail links etc. Definitely familiar territory!

However the actions you take on the board are dictated by the cards you play from your hand of cards.

The Cards
Each player begins the game with a deck of 10 cards, 7 of which generate currency and 3 of which 'do things'. Each player draws 5 cards from their deck into their hand. So far so 'Dominion'!

Currency cards generate money that allow you to buy cards from a selection of cards to add to your discard pile. These cards give you extra abilities, more revenue etc.

When your draw deck runs out, your discard pile is shuffled into a draw deck, allowing you to draw and use the newly acquired cards.

Other cards such as 'Lay Rails' allows the player to errr lay rails! However it costs to lay rails. So your currency cards are also required to build railways. This is great as it forces you to make choices. 'Do I want to make use of the lay rails in my hand right now and miss out on that card I want?' For example.

There's an additional mechanic in this game called 'Waste'. Certain actions and cards generate waste. Each time waste is generated by a player, they take a 'Waste' card from the relevant stack and add it to your discard pile. Sooner or later you'll start drawing waste cards into your hand. What do waste cards do for you? As you probably surmised, they do nothing for you and clog up space in your hand and just get in the way.
There are various cards and actions that allow you to take waste cards out of your deck and return them to their stack.
It's a clever little mechanic that adds an extra layer of consideration when choosing your actions.

The Board
The board is double sided and features different terrain. It has hexes, rail links at the edges, cities, rivers etc. It's all very familiar. You use the board to build and connect cities to score points according to the cards that you play.

That's the rules  in a nutshell.

This hybridization of 2 different game styles works perfectly well. Without going into specifics about the rules, there's little more to write about the game.