Did you know that I play board games sometimes? Well I do, and I recently won a great one at PAX West: Trains: Rising Sun. It is what happens if you take a progressive deck building game like Dominion and mash it up with Ticket to Ride. If that sounds at all fun to you let me assure you that it is.
The game is pretty simple to follow. Train cards have a basic value, and you use that value to either buy more cards that do all sorts of things or build your train empire on the game board. No matter what you do you seem to take on waste cards. How you manage all those waste cards generally determines if you win the game or not. Whoever has built the best train or got the best cards to give them the most victory points at the end wins.
The game is easy to learn, and there are enough card combinations that I am sure that I will not master it for a while. Trains: Rising Sun is technically the sequel/expansion to Trains, so if you already have Trains and you are just looking for more boards and cards, Rising Sun will give you more gameplay options. As someone who just has Rising Sun, I don’t feel like the game is incomplete without the original Trains. Though I am thinking of picking it up because I like Rising Sun so much that having more cards and boards sounds great.
If you like progressive deck building games or Ticket to Ride, but you are looking for something new Trains: Rising Sun gets my highest recommendation. It is a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to play it again. If you already have Trains, but you just want more, Rising Sun will do that for you. All in all AEG did a great job with Trains: Rising Sun.