As a two player game it’s quick, doesn’t take up too much table and is simple to keep an eye on each other. Hexagonal plains present a frank but practical view of gameplay (even though the ‘Mountain’ areas clearly look more like forests) and the wooden cubes players place to establish dominance convey…railism…in some aspect. Every time you pull a move that will climb you up the Victory Point ladder, you get a ‘Waste’ card added to your deck. If you’ve thought about Dominion, but weren’t really intrigued by it’s dry theme, you should really give Trains a shot.

There are two means to eliminate Waste from your deck: you can skip an entire turn to eliminate any Waste in your hand or you can purchase cards that allow you to eliminate Waste cards without skipping your turn (these cards may or may not be available depending on the Randomizer cards drawn during set-up). The most complicated cards in the deck, and the ones to cause the most annoyance amongst your friends, are the discard cards.

Players continue to do this until either the station tokens run out, a player runs out of railway tokens, or four sets of cards from the common pool have been depleted.

Also, when laying down your ‘train routes’ on the board you are just using tiny colored wooden cubes. Trains is not a game of mind-bending strategy, as any deck builder’s mechanics will rely on luck in some way or another. Trains’ is the sort of game that begins training montages glaring at pictures of Dominion stuck to its mirror.Trains Map Pack 1 is a 2-sided expansion board with maps of Germany and Northeastern US, and these maps are much different from the Osaka and Tokyo maps included with the game. Any unused cards at the end of your turn are discarded, so it behooves you to use as many cards as you can during your turn.

Regardless, you definitely won’t mind the gap between your turns - there is very little downtime in Game of Trains. In the event of an impatient wait at a restaurant or something similar, I would consider bringing it out to pass the time.While you still have you main currency (reflected as trains), you now have the Lay Rails and the Station Expansion cards, allowing you to lay the rails towards cities and build stations in those cities to net you the most points. In fact, I would argue it's one of the lightest, smallest and least expansive games I own, but it's also one of the most fun. There is no official solo mode, but crusador84 came up with his rules which can be accessed using the link. Clear instructions and icons on the cards mean that there’s very little confusion during play and it’s easy for newcomers to pick up and get to grips with the systems. Some of the game’s juiciest decisions come from having a hand that allows expansion but trying to get the most out of your resources.

It packs a lot into a small box and has the dubious honour of being one of the few games that all three members of Polyhedron Collider own.

Also, I have really enjoyed playing it with Caitlin (my 10-year-old) she picked up how to play straight away and we played four games in a row with her winning one of them and wanting to play more the next day, but the timing wasn’t right. Rather than attacking monsters or erecting a smithy, you will be laying train tracks and building stations – actual wooden cubes on an actual board!