The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

While I am incredibly bad at it, Settlers of America: Trails to Rails is a pretty cool game. It’s also very impressive in how it is completely accurate to the game it is based on, and yet plays completely and utterly different in actual execution.

In general, the game seems very similar to Catan. You have five resources, and you collect them based on dice rolls and the location of your cities. You can trade them around to build things, or to move units about, like Catan: Cities and Knights. 7s make you discard resources if you have too many, and move a thief around. It’s all extremely familiar.

However, taking the game as another Catan is kind of a bad move, as the changes to the goals of the game change the strategy significantly. Instead of building a certain number of things, your goal is to supply all your goods to rival cities by driving a train to the city and dropping the good off. Each city on the board can only be delivered to once, and you only unlock goods to deliver if you build more cities. Add to that the fact that you can only use other player’s tracks if you pay them a gold each turn you want to use them, and you have a game with a ton of strategy. You don’t want to expand too fast, because you can’t supply your own cities and you’d just be giving your opponents easy access. At the same time, you do want to expand fast to have access to more spaces to get more resources, and unlock more goods. Building rails lets other players have access to your cities, which helps them win, but it also, potentially, gives you a source of gold, which is a good thing.

I really can’t figure this game out. I have been dead, dead last each time I’ve played. Because tracks are not useful for expansion, I tend to ignore them until it’s too late for me to really get in there and deliver goods. I just can’t wrap my head around the balanced approach you really have to apply when playing the game. That doesn’t make it a bad game, of course. I think it’s a rather fantastic game, though it’s quite a lot longer to play than normal Catan. I want to keep trying it, but yeah. It’s complex. Still, people like that. People tend to prefer Cities and Knights to regular Catan because they’re weird.