Oct 13 2008
Empire Builder
When visiting my brother this weekend I was relieved to find he had my copy of Empire Builder–I was concerned I had lost it. I will admit it’s not a game for everyone, but I love it.
Empire Builder is played on a board that is essentially a blank outline map of North America, with ~50 cities filled in and a few natural features such as rivers and mountains, as well as a grid of dots. You, the player, are a railroad baron from the early days of the United States. Your job is to connect up 5 out of the 6 “major” cities with railroad track and earn a hefty chunk of change. You earn money by delivering cargoes and it takes money to build track, so there’s a lot of fun optimization decisions–”Hmm, connecting up my track here will cost 8 million but it will save me almost a full turn on delivering my cargo. Is it worth it?”
It’s one of those games that is easy to learn but tough to master, because you get a lot of ways you can succeed, but some are much worse than others. It does tend to take a while though, even if you play the accelerated version, which I do recommend. If you decide to play, settle in for a good 3-4 hour session. But it’s tremendous fun, enjoyable by a wide range of ages, and you draw your track on the board using crayons. I mean, crayons. Awesome, right?
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Hey-O, and I was just recently playing and displaying with “EuroRails” on the PC here, to show that to my WoW nephew. You can get it for your own at the BGG entry there, and it allows for LAN or even just taking ‘Turns’ at one computer for this, as well with AI capability. I hope you’ll find and enjoy the many others for that “genre”, of which we’d managed over the decades with them ALL!