A complimentary copy of The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls was provided by the publisher for the purposes of review
I am a big fan of the Roguelike video game genre, and while I’m not a huge fan of The Binding of Isaac specifically, it’s been impossible for me to ignore The Binding of Isaac, as it really was one of the first the rougelike games, before roguelikes became as popular as they are today. My main beef stems from the grotesque subject matter, references to abuse, and the cartoony body horror. Nevertheless, I’m always intrigued when a roguelike video game gets a tabletop adaption.
The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls attempts to distill the essence of the roguelike genre into a deck of monster, loot, and treasure cards, while offering a multiplayer experience that diverges from its digital counterpart. Played either solo, cooperatively, or competitively, The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls has lots of content to explore following its two successful crowdfunding campaigns totalling more than 8 million dollars.
Starting with the physical production, The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls has some odd design choices. A long, half empty rectangle box, a tiny pamphlet rule book, and 100 cheap, plastic pennies does not scream “8 million dollars” worth of components. It’s important to say here that the version I’m playing is the 2nd editions retail version, so no added content in my box, and there is space in this box to expand if you choose to do so. The cards themselves are good quality, and the art is very invocative of the video game. If you like bloat flies, and crying babies, you’ll have a good time with artist Krystal Fleming’s creations.
As for gameplay, The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls has players take on the personas of various heroes, each equipped with unique persistent items to aid in their quest to collect four souls and claim victory. On your turn you gain and play loot cards, activate abilities, and can choose to attack one of the monsters on the table. Should you defeat it, you’ll claim its rewards. The hook of the gameplay is that nearly every time you want to do something, you need to take a pause and “Pass priority”, where in player order, you ask everyone else if they want to react. All the card effects are arranged in a stack that gets resolved in a ‘last in, first out’ order that only gets resolved once everyone passes priority in succession.
This stack concept is the core of the game. Everyone can react to almost anything, creating a chaotic game experience. It’s rare to play extra cards during your own turn; instead, the real fun comes from using your cards to thwart your opponents’ plans. This aspect creates a high level of engagement and interaction, as the loot cards you hold are more often geared towards disrupting your opponents rather than benefiting yourself. If you like the ‘Take-That’ mentality, you’ll surely be howling with laughter, especially when what looked like a sure-fire victory for one player, turned into a 6 card combo that blew up in their face.
Interestingly, player elimination in The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls isn’t as harsh as it initially sounds. You will die while playing The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls. It’s less ‘elimination’ and more ‘minor inconvenience.’ Players who die lose a loot card, a coin, and exhaust all their cards, but then are plopped right back into the game, invoking that roguelike charm where dying isn’t that terrible and starting another run from a fresh start. That being said, the core of the game thrives with higher player counts, where the mechanics of stacking and interrupting are most effective, thus leading to more deaths. At lower player counts, the game can feels too simple and stagnant. It lacks the chaos that make the game actually enjoyable.
Unfortunately, combat feels arbitrary, as you’ll pick one of the two monsters on the table, and roll the dice a few times to see which of you falls first, either boosted by teammates, or sabotaged by opponents. I found the cooperative experience more fun, but that’s more of a reflection on my gaming tastes. I generally don’t like chaos, and I don’t like directly sabotaging my opponents. If you have good memories of Munchkin, or Exploding Kittens, you should have a pretty good idea if The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls is for you. It’s unfortunate that combat is so prevalent to the game, and yet it feels so pedestrian. I wish combat was more interesting, but the fun lies when players get involved with each other’s turns. Gloomhaven, this is not.
The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls offers a wild, interactive experience that shines with a full table of players. It’s a game built for fans who enjoy the aesthetic, unexpected betrayals, and don’t mind getting knocked down a bit. While it may not perfectly replicate the rougelike experience, it does manage to provide a unique and engaging way to enjoy the world of The Binding of Isaac with friends. If you like getting under your friends skin, or don’t mind having your own plans thwarted, The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls promises an entertaining time.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is the kind of book that tells you everything that you need to know about the titular character. Eleanor is completely fine. How’s work? Fine. How’s life? Fine. Should life be more than fine? Well, that’s the book, isn’t it?
Eleanor is an accounts receivable clerk for a graphic design company in Glasgow, and has been for 9 years. She lives alone, she doesn’t socialize with her coworkers, she eats the same lunch and dinner every day, each Friday she gets a plain pizza and 2 litres of vodka and drinks herself to sleep each night. Sounds fine, doesn’t it? She feels there’s nothing wrong with this life, and feels no drive to change anything. Why would she? Everything is just fine, thank you for asking.
Eleanor seems to miss every social cue possible. She takes metaphors literally, and is unsympathetic to everyone around her. She’s not uncaring or unkind, but lacks an iota of empathy. She’s articulate, cold, and detached. When the office staff are giggling at her, she barely gives them a second thought before returning to her work. Eleanor bares the scars of a mysterious trauma on her face and hands, but she doesn’t pay it any mind.
Two things set the story in motion. Eleanor develops an unhealthy crush on a local musician and begins to fantasize herself with this star, motivating her to take steps to improve her physical appearance to become more fitting of the role as ‘rock star partner’, and she witnesses an elderly man fall to the street while outside with a new co-worker, Raymond.
From the start of the book you find yourself wondering ‘just what is up with Eleanor?’ Is she autistic? Asperger’s? As the book progresses, and you learn more about Eleanor and her life, and her past (which she speaks about bluntly, no matter how horrific the subject matter), you come to realize that this poor woman is broken, and has been for a long time. She’s a robot, a walking coping mechanism. She continues to get phone calls from her ‘Mummy’, in which Eleanor is relentlessly berated and verbally abused. Her only romantic experience in her history left her literally battered and broken on the floor.
Raymond constantly involves Eleanor in various tasks and meetings across the city, much to Eleanor’s chagrin. But in doing so, he introduces people who slowly show her what unconditional love looks like, even if she isn’t aware of it at the moment. Raymond’s mother, Sammy’s kids, all good people who continue to keep in touch with Eleanor and continue to disrupt her static routine.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is broken into two halves. ‘Good Days’ and ‘Bad Days’. Golly did the bad days ever take a turn. Thankfully, by the time the turn happens, Eleanor isn’t alone anymore. Raymond is kind and caring, but never expectant. He offers assistance when needed, but never expects any kind of reward for his deeds. During the bad days, Eleanor is broken. Her world is shaken, her coping mechanisms fail her, and she spirals down into her rock bottom. Raymond shows up at her apartment when she doesn’t show up for work, and cleans her up, gently pushes her towards getting the help that she truly needs. Her boss and work is nothing but supportive, urging her to take as much time as she needs to recover. They don’t pry, they give space when space is needed, and encouragement when encouragement is needed.
On the surface, Eleanor is annoying. She misses obvious social cues, she’s rude to staff members everywhere she goes despite her own ignorance, and she speaks with a pretentiously large vocabulary. A lot of the negative reviews I read about Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine focus on how grating some people found the character of Eleanor, how unlikeable she is, or unrealistic. I get it, Eleanor is a difficult person to be around. I feel like all the people who dropped the book after 50 pages because Eleanor annoyed them are basically Eleanor’s co-workers. People who are judgmental, not curious. People who see someone odd, and instead of trying to find out what made them that way or what’s going on in their lives, just snicker with each other around the water cooler and move on with their day with a smug feeling of superiority.
I loved the depiction of counselling in the book. So much of media gets counselling completely wrong. Even Ted Lasso which was described as a therapy session for the nation when it first came out, got some of the aspects of counselling terribly wrong (I swear, if one more show has a counsellor date their former client, I’m going to throw a chair out the window). Eleanor gets MAD at her counsellor as the counsellor picks and pulls at her old wounds. This is good, counselling isn’t always comfortable and easy. Eleanor runs away from it, only to come back, and once she emerges the other side, realizing the good work that needed to be done to heal from her traumas.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine isn’t a love story. This is a book about Eleanor and her healing journey. This is a story about kindness, acceptance, and growth. This is the kind of book that sticks with you long after you read the last page. I highly recommend Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. A 5-star book, a contender for my book of the year during a year when I’ve read some amazing books (Demon Copperhead and Pirinesi are the other two favourite books from the year so far). Just be prepared to pause all your reading for a week as you nurse that book hangover!
At the time of writing this, I was also working on my Knarr review, and in that review I reflected on how my gaming tastes have pulled back from playing really heavy games. Then the opportunity to play Indonesia came up, and I was instantly excited. Splotter’s Food Chain Magnate has been my favourite game for years, yet it’s the only Splotter game I’ve ever played.
I dove into the rule book and was instantly dismayed. A text heavy black and white PDF from 2006. I was reminded of Iberian Gauge that I played recently, and how the rule book is a 2-page leaflet. The nice thing about Indonesia is that, like Food Chain Magnate, the actual rules are only 8 pages long, which is pretty bearable
Let’s set the stage. Indonesia is a game about getting rich. Yes, you’ll acquire companies, produce and ship goods, and even merge companies. But the goal of the game isn’t necessarily to sell the most items, the goal is to get the most money. The game is played over 3 eras, and each era consists of a number of years. Every year goes through 7 steps, which allows players to bid for turn order, merge existing companies, acquire new companies, improve their powers via research & development, operate all the companies they own, and finishing off with some city growth.
Indonesia is a big game, and I’m not going to list all the rules out right here, but the two big parts of the game is the mergers, and the operation phases. In the merging phase, any player can choose to merge any company, provided they have a sufficient merge skill, and have the capacity to take the company on (which is based off the slots’ skill, both skills are able to be improved during the R&D phase). The merge is a fascinating moment, because the minimum bid for a merge is the value of the good the company produces (Rice is 20, spice is 25, rubber is 30, oil is 40) multiplied by the total number of plantations of the two companies being merged. Then, bids must be increased in multiples equalling the number of plantations. As an example, if you’re merging two rice companies, one a size three and one a size 5, the starting big will be 8 times 20, so $160, and all bids must go up in multiples of 8, so $168, $176, $184, etc.
Any player who has an open slot can bid on this merger, which makes it a great way for players to steal opportunity from each other. The real challenge comes from how each player values the company. When someone wins the bid, they pay out the money to the now ex owners of the newly merged companies. In the above example, if the winning bid was $184, the player who had the company consisting of 3 rice plantations would get 3/8ths of the bid, so $69, and the player who owned the company consisting of 5 rice plantations would get the remaining $115. Obviously, winning a bid where you didn’t previously own one of the two companies proves to be a huge expense, but these companies also hold tremendous potential, as you’ll operate the whole thing during the next operation phase. This also has potential to be absolutely brutal, as when you pay out a huge sum of money to acquire a merged company, the next player can call a new merger on a new pair of companies, knowing that you are now cash poor.
The next big phase of the game is the operations phase, where each player chooses to operate one of their companies. Production companies produce one good for every plantation, then must sell as much as possible to cities around the board, earning money for each sale. Goods must travel by boat, and for every boat travel that happens, the owner of the shipping company gets $5 from the sale of that good. This is another potential for aggravating situations, as if a company can sell, it must sell, so if a player manages or orchestrate a lengthy chain of boats connecting a distant city to a plentiful plantation, it’s completely reasonable for the owner of the plantation to lose money on the sale as shipping fees drive the company into the red.
Splotter games are fairly infamous, and for good reason. Now, I’m not an expert on Splotter, I’ve only played 2 of their games, but what Food Chain Magnate and Indonesia share is a robust game system that tasks players with seeing through the opacity of the system to squeeze out a profit, and highly interactive gameplay. Everything every player does affects you in some way, and you need to be paying attention to what the other players can do, as if you’re not careful, someone will eat your lunch right out from under you. And in a game of Indonesia, a skilled player will absolutely steamroll novices.
Indonesia is a remarkable economic game. Published in 2006, playing it felt like a robust experience. Companies shifted ownership, all players had moments of being flush with cash, and being nearly destitute. None of us were experienced with the game, and we all grappled with how to play the game well. I suspect that none of us improving our expansion trait beyond the second level was a mistake, and we all struggled with how to value companies. It was fun to lock eyes with another player and perpetually increase the bid for the companies into nearly unfathomable heights. It was exciting when one player took over most of the shipping on the entire board for the final round, although it wasn’t enough to for that player to win. I can see Indonesia becoming one of our favourite economic games, as there were tones of player agency. Never did any of us feel like the game was being unfair, that something other than our own poor planning stymied our progress. We were the masters of our own destiny, the authors of our own demise.
It’s also surprisingly simple. As I said above, 8 pages of rules, and considering how deep and interesting the economy is in Indonesia, that’s a feat to be lauded. All the phases are pretty simple (except for mergers), and turns generally flow fairly quickly. Once our players had a plan in their heads, we didn’t stall on turns very often.
All that said, Indonesia is rough on the eyes. The cities are glass beads, the cards that tell each player where they can place a city at the start of each age are just little slips of paper. The plantation chits are too big for some of the small provinces, the lines on the map can be unclear in many places, and the font used on the map is nearly unreadable. The production of Indonesia leaves a lot to be desired. I’m no UI/UX designer, but there has to be so many ways that the user experience can be improved with Indonesia. Thankfully, a 3rd edition is on its way, with a fairly massive graphical overhaul. I can’t wait to see what the new edition looks like.
If you’ve played a Splotter game, you should kind of know what you’re getting into when you sit down to another one. A complex game of tight decisions, where mistakes are fatal. If you like Splotter games, you’ll probably like Indonesia. If you dislike what Splotter has done before, I doubt this will change your mind. As for me, I still prefer Food Chain Magnate. Part of that is surely familiarity, and the theme of fast food chains is infinitely more interesting in my estimation. My two gaming partners, on the other hand, said they would hands-down play Indonesia over Food Chain Magnate. Part of it is the novelty of a new system to explore and exploit, but another part of it is that it feels less punishing. The decisions you’re making are smaller in scope. The companies spawn in predetermined locations, you can’t shoot yourself in the foot too terribly, like a dumb restaurant placement in FCM does.
I enjoyed my play of Indonesia, and considering one of our gaming friends was absent during our play, we’ll likely play it again soon. I am curious to how different the game will feel with an extra player, and how our map will develop differently. There’s no scaling for player count, so I expect that we’ll all be poorer throughout the experience. Hopefully I find the replayability interesting, as there is no content discovery here. The only replayability comes from interacting with the game system, and forcing my opponents into less than ideal mergers and executing hostile takeovers.
Over the last 6 months, my table has been somewhat inundated with the works of Vladimír Suchý. This wasn’t entirely on purpose, but his games have just happened to come into our possession. Last night (at time of writing) I played my 5th game of his, so I felt the urge to make a quick list of the games I’ve played, and their rankings!
First, what makes a Suchý game, a Suchý game? I find that Vladimír Suchý’s key trait in the games of his that I’ve played are twofold. An interesting action selection mechanism, and a tight turn economy. Suchý games are not ones that let players take 50 turns, instead players need to figure out how to squeeze blood from a stone, where missing out on a single resource could be catastrophic to their game experience. But let’s talk about the games in detail below! As always, my top lists are completely subjective and are likely to change with time, and take this whole list with a pinch of salt as (except for Underwater Cities) I’ve only played each of these games once.
5 – Evacuation
Evacuation is a bit of a tragedy, in that I was so excited to play this game. From the first moments I saw the preview images of two planets snaked by a winding track, and heard the theme of ‘the old world is dying, players need to disassemble their engine from the old world and transport it to the new world’, I was frothing at the mouth with excitement. The mere concept of shipping goods between planets and needing to manage when to take down a fabrication plant on the old world and establish one on the new world was fascinating.
In play, however, we found that the shipping goods aspect of the game fairly dull and uninteresting. We did not play the race mode, opting to play for points instead, which may have been a folly. Evacuation plays over 4 rounds, and ships only move between planets at the end of each round. This means each ship you buy can be used twice in the game. In our experience, the old world was fairly lush with resources, so it felt more action efficient to just build new ships and send them over, leaving a graveyard of one time use rockets on the new world. The points mode lets the game go the full four rounds, and by the end of the final round, all of our productions on the new world skyrocketed, and we all pretty much completed everything that we set out to do.
That said, I really loved the asymmetric tech tree each player gets to grapple with, and there were tonnes of interesting decisions to make throughout the game. Evacuation sits at the bottom of my list, but it’s the game that I want to return to the most. I’m sure there are hidden depths for me to plumb, and it surely has the potential to rocket up this list.
4 – Pulsar 2849
Pulsar 2849 is probably the least memorable game on this list. Not to say it’s a bad game, heck, even Evacuation sitting at the bottom of the list is still a super rad game. It’s just hard to remember all the nuance that makes Pulsar 2849 special.
Pulsar 2849 is a dice drafting game where players are setting out to harness the powers of the stars. The action selection mechanism is driven entirely by dice, and there’s even a neat aspect where you need to find the median dice available, and taking dice on either side of that median has some effects.
This is the game that I remember the least well, as Pulsar 2849 has a lot going on, and it’s been a few months since I played it. I remember liking it, but not loving it (you’ll notice it didn’t make it onto my top 100 list). Pulsar 2849 is absolutely a game worth checking out if you like bigger space games with lots of decisions, and when dice power the action selection mechanism.
3 – Woodcraft
The cover of Woodcraft camouflages a complex game with a tranquil wrapper. You’d be forgiven if you saw the brightly coloured forest nymphs cheerfully toiling away at their craft in a serene forest landscape and assumed it would be a light and breezy experience.
Woodcraft’s action selection wheel is probably the most interesting of all the Suchý games I’ve played. Each action is a tile on the wheel that slides to the next quadrant each time it’s used, with the rewards for tiles left behind growing as actions move along the quadrants. It’s a great system, obviously improved upon the action selection wheel in Praga Caput Regni (which I’ll talk about very soon). The most used actions get no bonuses at all, while the ones languishing in the back can rack up some serious benefits.
The downside is that this whole game is tied to a recipe fulfillment or contract fulfillment game, which ends up being deeply unsatisfying for me. I’ve always found recipes to be inherently luck based, and can skew a tightly balanced game, as happens here. Woodcraft is an action efficiency puzzle, and it seems like one player can just luck into collecting the perfect contracts. Less actions spent acquiring the final goods to fulfill a contract can really give a player a distinct advantage.
Despite my aversion to contracts, Woodcraft is still an incredibly interesting game. Players have a ton of tools at their disposal to acquire, transform, and manipulate your resources, and the action wheel creates interesting decisions, especially when the bonus you desperately want is aligned with an action you do not need.
The last two paragraphs sound really down of Woodcraft, which is unintentional. You can also check out my first impression post of it here, where I was a lot more excited and positive.
2 – Praga Caput Regni
With an action wheel like Woodcraft, Praga Caput Regni is another action efficiency puzzle, but instead of fulfilling contracts, Praga is more of a point salad where every action you take can result in a deluge of effects and bonuses.
In Praga Caput Regni, players are in Prague, developing mines and quarries, building walls and houses, and advancing along the Kings Road to deliver the eggs needed for the Charles Bridge. There are a ton of ways to squeeze efficiencies out of every action, and plenty of opportunities to bulk up each action so it gives you more when you take that action.
Each action tile on the action wheel each contain two of the 6 actions. When you take a tile, you can choose either of the two actions depicted and preform it. If the tile was further along the wheel, you get points for taking it. If it was further back, you’ll have to pay gold for the privilege of taking that tile. Along the inside of the wheel is an additional bonus that you get when you take the tile.
By the end of the game, each action feels like a slot machine of bonuses. “I’ll take this action, which gives me two stone as a bonus, and my technology lets me earn points when the stone is my bonus, I’ll take this action, which gives me extra points because my action is upgraded, and I’ll produce gold, which also gives me two points, and egg, and another point and a stone…”. That sentence sounds crazy, but in the context of the game, it’s a pretty normal turn. The biggest downside to Praga Caput Regni is that if you make a mistake and want to undo your turn, it’s seriously onerous.
1 – Underwater Cities
Underwater Cities was my first Suchý game, and it remains my favourite. The action selection here is a mix of worker placement and hand management. Each turn, you need to play one of your workers on one of the colour coded actions around the board, and play a card. If the colour of the card matches the colour of the action, you get to do both!
Again, action efficiency at it’s finest. There are 3 eras of cards with scaling powers, and the economy grows dramatically. In the first few rounds, you’ll barely scrape a living, but by the end of the game you’ll be searching for anywhere to spend your copious amounts of loot.
I think Underwater Cities is one of Suchý’s most popular games, and for good reason. It’s a brilliant game that gives you plenty of time and actions to achieve your goals. You probably won’t achieve everything you set out to do, but you’ll likely get lots done. The puzzle in Underwater Cities is balancing expanding your underwater colonies with improving your existing infrastructure. It’s an eminently replayable game that I always enjoy going back to.
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. Concordiadoes this incredibly well, a couple birds in Wingspanbenefit 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.
