Isle of Trains was originally published in 2014 by Dice Hate Me, Lookout Games and Looping Games. Designed by Seth Jaffee and Dan Keltner, it's back! This new All Aboard edition is a redevelopment of the earlier iteration of the game. It features attractive art from Denis Martynets and it's published by Dranda Games.
Isle of Trains is a card game where the cards primarily represent your engine, coaches and cabooses et al, and also buildings. They are also repurposed to represent cargo; and the six destination cards are ultimately repurposed to record victory points. There are victory point tokens and All Aboard includes tokens or (in the deluxe version) screen-printed wooden meeples to represent the passengers.
Isle of Trains is quite literally an engine builder. You start with a level 1 locomotive engine which has very limited capacity. You can add coaches and other train cards to it, and you can upgrade the engine to improve its capacity and victory point value. You can also erect buildings that can earn you points at the end of the game. These are all build actions. You pay for them by discarding the number of cards from your hand equal to the build cost or, in the case of an upgrade, the difference between the card you are upgrading and the one you are replacing; so, for example, to upgrade your level 1 engine (cost 0) to a level 3 engine (cost 6) would mean you'd have to discard six cards. Players can only have a maximum of five cards in their hand at the end of each (two action) turn, however... You can draft a card from the display or from the face-down draw deck as one of the two actions you take on your turn but you'll probably find it more efficient to use an action to load a passenger to your train and, as a subsequent action, deliver them to the destination matching that meeple's colour. Several of the destinations will give you card draws. Of course, you won't want to take a deliver action that loads your hand with cards as your second action on a turn because you'd end up having to just discard cards that took your hand size above five: the trick is to deliver as your first action on a turn so you can spend the cards on an upgrade as your second action.
This is a game then about finding the most efficient route to earning victory points. Often this can mean taking actions that seem astonishingly charitable in a competitive game: you can load a passenger or goods onto an opponent's train. This helps them but it's not an entirely altruistic move: you'll earn for yourself the benefit shown on their train cards... If you're playing tho' with three or more players, this facility tends to act as a catch up mechanic for the player who appears to be trailing: all things otherwise being equal and given the choice, that's the player whose train other players are most likely to load their passengers and goods onto. It's refreshing to have a competitive game where the interaction is positive rather than 'take that'.
There are a lot of different card types, so tho' the game play is actually quite smooth once you get going, it can seem to new players like there's a lot of iconography and fiddly detail to assimilate when you get started. That said tho', Dranda Games have gone the extra mile by giving a very clear key to the numbers and symbols on all the cards - both on the back of the rule book and on the reference cards.
We've enjoyed playing Isle of Trains: All Aboard at two, three and four players, but the game also incorporates a very full set of solo options. You can, as with most solo games, challenge yourself to beat a target points score, but All Aboard additionally offers a range of scenarios to complete, each with their own specific success criteria.
It's definitely worth climbing All Aboard with this well-produced compact-box package.