Compared to my presidential election game, it went better!

After cutting out 130+ cards (108 of which are used for the bulk of the game), I simmed a two player game for a while.  The game took place for an hour and I ended up calling it short because it was late and I had learned enough from the first part of the test to end things there.

In general, there's some potential to the system.  I had suboptimally put some information on the destination cards.  The spur cards ended up being more trouble than they were worth, so they were gutted in order to provide for towns (think of the dotted tiles in 18XX).  Some of the cards were pretty worthless and I swapped them out with some other powers.  On the other hand of things, the 'Short Sell' card (now renamed 'Partial Owner' worked really well at leveling things.  I will probably add some more special cards on top of the exclusive 'money' cards if need be, but I wanted to see how fewer effects would interplay.  Finally, I formally added descriptions to the cards to kind of remind myself how things went and also included abbreviations of the regions (Eastern, Centra, Midwestern and Western) and fixed a couple cards.  I also had the idea to include end game scoring to include finishing the route for railroads and limiting a hand to 7 cards.  I also dropped the Dividend cards for now and will make it so that random cards are turned sideways in the deck at semi-regular intervals (4 dividends before the end of the game).  The final change was to base train obsolesence on dividends instead of route building which should make it easier to keep track of when to clear out those 2 and 3 Trains.  And finally (jeez!), I'm going to dig out some cubes for markers for the partial owners so players can use that although I suppose I could dedicate some further cards to that endeavor as well.  We'll see. Forgot I killed the "Draw 2 More" cards as well as they were kind of pointless.

In short, it played way too long for a card game.  I'm willing to stretch it some because it is a train game.  I'm aiming for an hour for two players, but ideally want it clipped to anywhere from 30-45 minutes.

Another play tonight, hopefully, to try out the new ideas.   I think they will make it a little faster and a little more interesting.