Board games are, by definition, big bulky things.  It's hard to find a good game in a small package sometimes.  Especially one that is a pocket sized and can survive more than three or four plays without being boring - excellent examples include almost any favorite card game (Quincunx, Euchre) and anything with cards (Zombie in My Pocket, etc).  Some genres are just plain hard to fit into a small package.

So, I found myself trying to pare down 18XX into a pocket sized tin.  Impossible?  Yeah, probably.  That's what I was thinking, too... 

What about American Rails?  For those who don't know, American Rails is a game very similar to Chicago Express which is a game licensed from Winsome Games that was originally called Wabash Cannonball.  I recommend reading up on those games if you haven't heard about them, but I'm guessing if you are even following this site, you probably know about them already.  Anyhow, American Rails features city development, city value dilution, variable roles, share dilution, etc.  It's a great game for 3 or more players and is one that the girls and I here at home actually don't mind playing, which says a lot for two kids.  My wife is a more casual gamer and she also enjoyed it a lot.

I took some of the leftover pieces from the wreck that had been the whole Pocket Civ inspired train game thing I have been working on pretty steadily for the past month.  I tried whittling down the components and cities to something a little closer to American Rails.  No train values, but city cards with variable starting values of shares and total city slots.  Each city slot can have a city with a square having four values - two bolded values on opposite sides.  A city can be normal, normal and upgraded, a major city and a major city upgraded.  The values range on each city tile, say $1-$2-$3-$4 to $2-$4-$6-$8 or even staggered at $1-$3-$2-$4.  Anyhow, there's some of those.  I had cubes for shares so I popped those in a bag.  I had some dice laying around.  I didn't want poker chips and I didn't want a dividend track.  I wanted something simple enough to play on solo AND also something that had a somewhat variable end.  I also wanted something Euro without a bunch of cash and a low scoring affair.

I was also inspired by Pokomino, a game with dice and worms (it's a weird theme, but, hey, those wacky Germans are like that sometimes).  Anyhow, the jist behind that game is to roll at least a "worm" (6) and to lock a group of dice to get tiles of different values.  So, if you rolled 2-2-3-4-4-4, you could lock the 2's, the 3's or 4's.  To grab a tile you needed a "6" (worm) which counted for 5.  Anyhow, I wanted to use a similar mechanic. 

So, here's what we have...

• Cubes of six colors with one more than what is needed for each color (red has 3, blue has 4, others have 5 and one had 6). 
  
• Company cards with spots for each cube and spots for the number of city tiles it can hold.
• 27 city tiles, 6 black, 21 white.
• a cloth bag.
• 6 dice.
  

So, it sounds bulky, but it could fit in a pocket quite easily.  I was actually surprised I could get things down that far and still keep a semblence of a game together.  So how's this all work?

The object of the game is to beat the bank by $10. 

There are seven turns in the game.  All the cubes go in a bag.  All the white tiles are placed face down and mixed up.  The black tiles are drawn one by one for each company.  On the first roll of the game, roll four dice - anything with a 3, 4, 5 or 6 means you can keep a cube you draw out of the bag.  On later turns, a 3 and 4 means you pull out a cube and must discard it while a 5 or a 6 means you can keep it.  At that point, you draw the cubes and place the ones you want to keep on the companies of your choice.  After you do that, you draw 3 city tiles and place them in view - these tiles are available to possibly be added to the companies.  A second roll of dice (6 of them now) is performed in Pokimino style except 6's are discarded.  Groups of dice are locked until no more can be locked or the player decides to stop rolling.  At that point, if you have 10 or more rolled, you have a chance to either add a city (low non-bold value on a city tile) for +4, add a major city (high non-bold value on a city tile) for +8, or rotate an existing city on the city display for +3.  Multiple tiles can be placed or swapped, but all placements must be on a company tthe player possesses a share for.  If a 12 or less is rolled, the player may exchange one share on a company with one already discarded from the game.  Once this is done, the unused tiles are discarded.

At the end of the seventh turn, scoring is done similar to a dividend round in American Rails.  The value of all the cities on a company are added up.  If no cities are added to a display and the player has at least one share, the income goes to the bank.  If a company has no shares, double income goes to the bank.  If all the cities are filled in for a city, the city value is added by the number of non-starting cities are for that railroad.  Once that value is determined, the value divided by the number of shares (rounding down, remainder going to the majority player if possible) is tallied for each company for the player and the bank.  These two columns are added up and the number of shares issued by the player is subtracted.  If that result is $10 or higher, the player wins.

So how'd this play out?

I got in about 5 games over a few hours, tweaking numbers and values here and there.  I was surprised how much it came together.  It played a little light for me, although, to be frank, I love my train games.   That said, I had a good time playing it.  I found a few holes in the design that I filled in along the way and there are a few more tweaks that are needed, but all in all, it was probably one of my better shots out of the gate in a while.  I liked not pushing chips all over the place.  I liked the suspense of drawing shares, deciding which ones stayed and which ones went.  I liked planning rolls out for city development and pushing some railroads out versus developing more cash on some levels.  The decisions on building major cities up versus spreading things out was good.  I liked spreading shares out and having some steep penalties for not investing in a company (instead of semi-randomly deciding city tiles to go on unowned player companies).  I liked the share mechanism of subtracting used shares from the score as well to make up for some draws.  The one thing I didn't try from above is having more shares in the bag than could be drawn - I played with exact numbers and it was too easy to predict what would come out.  With one extra share from each company, it is possible (but unlikely) that one (or even two) companies may not come out.  I need to experiment with this more, but I think the odds of this happening are extremely remote.  The original variable end game condition of playing until shares run out goes away with the extra cubes, but I may change the "discard" on turns 2 onward to 2-4 instead of 3-4.  This might be enough to force some hard choices toward the end of the game and I think if the smaller companies with shorter routes aren't guaranteed to pick up, this may sweeten the deal on larger companies having their cities filled in a little more.  I may also vary the starting values on the city tiles slightly, but those felt good as well.  The ability to swap out a stock on bad rolls also was a nice touch.

All told, I "won" two games although after I got done tweaking rules, I had probably won 4.  Since the rules were fluid, I don't really count things down.

There are avenues for improvement, but its a good base.  I need to play and think some more.  Very promising.  It would be nice to have another game on my site for Christmas.  :-)