Workers on a Train - Russian Railroads ( Initial Impressions )

Russian Railroads was recently released by Z-Man Games and Hans im Gluck at Essen 2013. It flew under my radar as I had assumed from its box art and stated category on BGG that it was a train game. Train Games = Major Dislike for me.

While at the fair, there was a lot of buzz for the game and we ran into a gamer – who demoed Yunnan with us – who kept declaring it the game of the fair ( for him of course )

Having eventually checked out all we wanted to do, Dion and myself decided to head on over to see how good this “Game of the Fair” was. Dion got a demo in while I watched from the sidelines. The result ? He loved it ! Game of the Fair for him.

Could it be that Russian Railroads is all its hyped up to be ?

I got a play in last Saturday at Eric’s place – a 4 player game involving Jillian, Eric, Dion and myself. Read on to see if its captured my attention as well !

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First impressions : Rokoko

Look at all the pretty pretty dresses!

Rokoko, one of the games that Jon and I were looking forward to, I think he more than me. Its a game about dress making and fashion and is an action selection game that combines deck building as well as resource gathering. Players try to manage obtaining resources to make dresses or buy decorations which will all lead to end game points. The deck building portion ties in with the action selection where each player will choose 3 cards to play for that round. Game lasts 6 rounds and there is a rather complicated end game scoring to be done and whomever has the most points will win the game. This is a 1 game impression and we had 5 players for this game. Lets take a look at what I have learnt.

First impressions : Caverna



Of course being a dog lover, I had to build the Dog trainer room :)


Caverna, another widely anticipated game from Uwe Rosenberg, is seen as a better version of Agricola and was released at Essen 2013. In essence this is quite true because it plays very similar to Agricola except for a few changes. Thematically we are all dwarves now (?!?) and we now have a mountain to dig into and build mines. Also that is where our rooms are now built. There is still a farming aspect where the normal Agricola features are available but with the new mountain area, it presents a new path to victory and that is expeditions. So did it work?

First Impressions: Russian Railroads

And round and round our scoring marker goes!

So if you have been following up on the releases at Essen 2013 and Fairplay list, you will know that Russian Railroads topped the Fairplay list and is one of our big surprises. I did not notice it because I had wrongly assumed that it was a game involving railroads (similar to 18xx) and thus all the preconceived notions about the game (takes very long, shares etc) did not appeal to me much and I gave it a miss.

However judging from the responses I did take a look while Essen was going on and lo and behold, its a euro worker placement game with a railroad theme AND there is no laying of tracks involved! Quite a twist don't you think? I wonder if this is the first of its kind.
So Dion came on by after dinner and we just HAD to give this a try and see what all the hype is about.

ImprEssens - Shephy

To be frank, there were not many real surprises for me at Essen this year. This is mainly due to the flood of information that is readily available on the internet ( and largely due to Eric Martin's awesome Essen updates and preview ).

Russian Railroads did surprise me but only for the fact that it wasn't a train game but a train themed worker placement game. I completely blocked it out of sight once i saw it resembled a train game. A mistake on my part. So for the fact it was a great game, that was a major surprise.

But one big surprise of Essen is finding a small booth that was demoing a game called Shephy.

ImprEssens - Coconuts

Coconuts was a game I had highlighted previously on our Essen Podcast episode ( Episode 22: Essen Wishlist ).
I said it looked like a silly and stupid dexterity game. ( Whether that sounds like a positive or a negative, i leave it entirely up to you :P )
Well, did it live up to what i had expected of it ? Let's find out !