Cards can also be spent to pay for the construction of your new train cars and buildings, or you can use your cards as cargo and load them onto available freight cars. You can either take a card from the deck and replace any existing carriage with the one you have just drawn, or you can use the ability of one of the face up cards next to the draw pile. Draw a card, replacing a car in the lineup with the drawn card and placing the replaced card face-up by the deck. My 8 year old also played but did need a little help, I think with a bit more practice she would be fine, but the train theme had less of an appeal to her. Players will get an engine card, which only states where the front of their train is and are then randomly dealt 7 carriage cards, which they will arrange from highest to lowest from their engine.

Meaning that there’s nothing special about the card abilities or game play that are unique to trains. Players can play cards that impact other players’ cards, but they don’t know the extent of the damage may or may not cause. You can also use your money in conjunction with your Lay Rails cards to put railway track (in the form of colored cube markers) onto different terrain types on a hex board map (in the base game, maps of either Tokyo or Osaka). The most complicated cards in the deck, and the ones to cause the most annoyance amongst your friends, are the discard cards.I’ve played several games now with two and three players, and I think the game works fine at both counts (and likely up to four–the game moves swiftly and isn’t hurt by the addition of players), although I prefer the two-player game because it’s easier to track what my actions will leave open to other players. They contain small landlocked bodies of water that provide un-crossable barriers, and will accomplish what the included boards failed to – they’ll make you adjust your gameplay. At the end of the game, it is revealed that the final station is a Nazi concentration camp, and that the players had been participating in the Holocaust.

You use the money produced by your cards to purchase more cards from a common pool of 15 piles, acquiring them to be shuffled into your deck. In fact, throughout the game the players kept making comparisons between Trains cards and Dominion cards. Replayability is high, since eight of the sixteen card piles are fixed and the other eight come from a pool of thirty different cards. So you can take an action, but it often takes several actions to get the railcars just the way you want them.A market exists on the side of the board, selling off sexier trains, more opportunities to lay rails or even abilities that instantly gain you victory points. Destructoid praised the game's nuance and mechanics, noting that it makes effective use of the board game format: "The Auschwitz revelation is but one aspect of an entire experience designed to make players question the way they follow rules, and how they’ll behave once they understand what’s going on, and how complicit they’re willing to be. There are 16 piles of cards to arrange in a common area; 8 of these are static from game to game, while the other 8 are determined randomly through the use of an included randomizer deck. What is really neat about Trains, is that every time you expand on the board(rails or stations or extra for building on existing opponent territory), you always collect “waste” cards. My kids are too young for Game of Trains, but it’s conceivable that they’ll be ready for it within a few years.