Not many games do this very well, but one of the mechanics that I absolutely adore is positive player interaction. When someone does a thing, and everyone benefits. Concordia does this incredibly well, a couple birds in Wingspan benefit all players, but give extra benefit to the player who played the card, Brass: Birmingham has brilliant mutually beneficial relationships, where you can use other players things to fulfill what you’re trying to do to earn stuff for you, and the player whose stuff you used also benefits. I could go on, listing a ton of games as examples of this, as it’s one of the mechanics that when I hear it’s in a game, it makes me sit up and take notice.

So now I need to figure out why Isle of Trains: All Aboard has left me feeling cold, despite the entire game being built around this mechanic.

Let’s set the scene. Isle of Trains: All Aboard is designed by Seth Jaffee and Dan Keltner and published by Dranda Games after a successful Kickstarter campaign. This is a 2023 remastering of Isle of Trains from 2014, where they’ve added a bunch of things and completely revamped the art and graphic design. Isle of Trains: All Aboard is an attractive game, with vibrant colours, screen printed meeples, and bright and detailed train cars on each of the cards.

In Isle of Trains: All Aboard, players are racing to earn the most points by the end of the game. To begin, all players have a train engine. On your turn you can build train cars by playing them from your hand, loading goods on train cars (either your own or your opponent’s cars), delivering goods and passengers for various benefits, and take cards from the market or deck. Each turn you’ll have 2 actions to perform, then play continues round and round until the end game trigger has been reached.

The interesting twist in Isle of Trains: All Aboard is that all the trains that can carry passengers or goods generally have a special ability that gets triggered whenever an opponent loads them. This can be something like drawing 3 cards, or draw 2 cards and take an extra action. But this special ability never fires when you load goods onto your own train. You can only take advantage of the special abilities on your opponent’s trains when you load them.

The cards have multiple uses too. Every card is something that can be built, either a building for end game points, or a car on your train. Every card can be spent as a good to be loaded onto a train, and when you do build something, the cost is the number of cards you have to discard to build it. The cards are incredibly useful and versatile here.

Perhaps that’s where my criticism starts. It’s difficult to get cards into your hand, and keep them there. That’s obviously on purpose, the game is pushing you to use the mechanic of loading other players train cars so you get those powerful abilities, but that’s not always an option. Each train car can only carry a specific type of load (ore, oil, crates, and passengers). If you don’t have what your opponents need in your hand, you’ll need to inefficiently draw cards until you do. If the opponent’s train cars are full because they haven’t been delivered yet, too bad, you can’t access that ability.

Isle of Trains: All Aboard has a hand limit of 5 cards. If you’re over that limit at the end of your round, you’re forced to pitch cards until you’ve reduced down to that limit. This makes building things fairly difficult. To build a level 1 Boxcar, you need to have it, and 3 cards you’re willing to junk in order to build it. Assuming you have the max of 5 cards in your hand at the start of your turn, sure, you can pitch almost your entire hand to build that single car. Hopefully your remaining card will be something someone else can use, so you can quickly refill your hand. The end game scoring cards cost 6 each, so you really need to commit a whole turn by spending your first action to get the extra cards into your hand, exceeding the limit, then spending your whole hand to erect that station. If there were more actions per turn, or if that hand limit were higher, perhaps this wouldn’t grate on me so hard, but here we are.

For a train game, I did surprisingly well with almost no train (lost by a single point)

There is a mechanic where if you’re upgrading your cars, you only need to pay the difference between the levels. So a Level 1 boxcar costs 3, and a level 2 costs 6. If you’re upgrading, you only need to pay 3 cards and remove the level 1 boxcar from your train. This is helpful, but with the problem above of spending all your cards any time you want to do something, you can’t really keep cards in your hand to hopefully build later. More realistically, you’ll be drawing cards from the top of the deck and just hoping that you manage to pull the card that you want. It’s quite unsatisfying.

Each station starts by wanting 2 goods. Only one player can deliver to a station. When someone delivers to the station, they claim the card and have the opportunity to then deliver to one of the two extra contracts on that card. Each time the initial contract on a station is fulfilled, or, 3 passengers are delivered to a single location, the end game trigger progresses. Completing 4/5/6 progresses in a 2/3/4 player game triggers the end. I’ve mostly played 4 player games, and only once has someone managed to complete the secondary objectives. Getting 6 goods onto your train feels like a really steep ask, considering that if each player claims a single contract, you’re already approaching the end of the game. By that point it’s pretty likely that some of the cities will be close to being full of passengers and the game comes to a screeching conclusion before anyone really wants it to.

I don’t want to hate Isle of Trains: All Aboard. On paper, I was super excited to play it! I had such high expectations for it, that I’m kind of crushed that it fell flat for me. It looks great, it comes in a small box, I love the multi-use cards, I just feel like it could have been more. I hate it when a game falls flat, especially when I was so excited for it before I started playing it.

I feel like it might be a better experience at 2 players, but it’s so rare that I play anything at that player count, I’m just left with a sour taste in my mouth. Isle of Trains: All Aboard isn’t for me, and that’s okay. I have seen some positive reports from the solo community, especially with the dozen or so scenarios included in the back of the box. So if you love train games, and play solo, you might have a better experience than I did.