China Rails

Theme : China Rails is the latest addition to the venerable Empire Builder 'crayon rails' line. This time around, you're in The People's Republic of China and you'll need to build and make deliveries in the Middle Kingdom. As the original, you'll be able to create your rail tracks using crayons, wiping them out for re-use at the end of the game. China Rails is more flexible, more fun and as always from this series, great strategy.

Gameplay: In China Rails, a large board is placed in the middle of the table, depicting a map of China. The map has fifty-two cities, separated into three types: major, medium, and small, and is divided up into a triangular grid of “milepost” dots. Next to each city, there are one to three icons depicting what kinds of goods that city produces.

In China Rails, each player takes a “train” token in their color, along with a special wipe-off crayon. Each player also receives sixty million yuan as starting cash and a Locomotive card that depicts nine speed and two goods. A deck of demand/event cards is shuffled, and three demand cards are dealt face-up to each player. The cards show three different cities on them, and the type of goods that each city wants along with the payout in yuan for supplying that demand. Stacks of chips representing each commodity are placed in a special area in the box, along with the rest of the Locomotive cards and the cash. The player who has the highest cash value on one their three Demand cards goes first with play proceeding clockwise around the table.

The first player to make 250 million Yuan will win China Rails, but as it costs money to create the rail lines and upgrade your engine, you'll need to balance delivering goods with building lines in a time efficient manner.

As always, China Rails as a crayon-rail game is not a 'filler' game, being quite long and involved.