Board Gaming - Tramways

Tramways: Paris

This game is an expansion map to the base game Tramways, and while I haven't played the base game, I will talk about it as it is the same game in many aspects.

Tramways is a deck building game, where you are building a transport network on a map. In the base game, the map is made up of a number of modular boards, but in the expansion it is a section of Paris divided across the board by the Seine. The river provides a couple of additional rules to the base game, adding an increased cost to build track over it, and a cost to travel along it by ferry.

To start the game, you're given a starting deck, and randomly assigned some undeveloped locations on the map. All the developed locations start with a passenger at the start of the game and only certain types are replenished after each round. Transporting passengers from one location to another is how to earn money and points.

^{I'm playing the green colour, and am on the upside down side of the table}

One of the most interesting and from my experience so far, unique, things in tramways is the auction mechanism. In the first phase of each round, players bid for position in a continual auction. You pay an amount to stay in, which can't be what you paid last time, and can't be the same as any player "to your left" on the auction board - that is to say, that was earlier in the turn order in the previous round. If it gets to you and you have the highest bid, you immediately take the next position in the new turn order (highest remain position). If you aren't the highest bid, and you choose not to bid, you immediately take the lowest remaining position in the new turn order. If you make a new bid, you pay the new bid and stay in another round. It can quite easily happen where the person who paid the most over the whole auction isn't the first player, and the person that paid the least isn't last. Bidding can be paid for in cash, or by using cards from your hand that contain money, but they're used for the entire round.

Winning the auction gets you the first pick from the available cards for this round, and is the main way of adding cards to your deck. Some of the cards are good, and some are not so good, having additional payments on them for when they leave your hand, and some are also just nothing cards that fill up your deck.

After the auction, everyone takes turns playing 2 actions. Each action requires playing some amount of cards from your hand to pay for the action. You can build or upgrade tracks, build or upgrade a building, or transport a passenger.

To build tracks, you need enough 'build track' symbols to build the length you want, a rail worker (which you can only have 2 of at any point), and if you are completing a connection, a symbols for one of the endpoints. When upgrading, you upgrade the entire link with the one symbol. For buildings, you need the site you want to build and the type of building you want to build in symbols. For the upgrade, you need the upgrade symbol and the type of building.

To move a passenger, you need the destination card, and a ticket to travel the trams. In our game, you also needed a ticket for each section on the river you travel on top of the 1 for unrestricted tram travel. You get $1 for each section of track you travel on, and pay an opponent $1 for each section of their track you use and you get a point for each link traveled along. In our game we also got $5 for each section of the river traveled along.

^{I think by now I'd worked out my mistake with earlier card selection due to the randomness of no more turning up until later. Having a Commerce card is important for getting other cards!}

Delivering a passenger to one of the buildings gives you a special benefit also.

• Commercial allows you to pick a card from one of the stacks of additional cards or take $5. None of these cards have negatives on them, and it's the only other way to gain cards. You need to be able to do this, which wasn't something I worked out until it was too late.
• Industry gets you a rail worker so you can build more tracks
• Leisure allows you to convert extra money into points at a far greater rate than the 1 point for $10 at the end of the game. This is where the majority of points come from, so you need to be able to do this.

^{And this is how our board looked at the end of the game. Some poor decisions and poor analysis led to me being a small network and a clear last place}

The one other thing not mentioned in all that is stress. You have to manage your stress levels. Commerce and Industry increase stress. The final location to transport a passenger to is a Residential location, which reduces stress level by 1. I don't recall anyone actually using this though, as there is a couple of cards that can be used to reduce stress in the final phase of each round.

Most of the stress is generated through card use though, as while you get to use 1 symbol on a card for free, you are also able to use additional symbols at the cost of 1 stress each. Get too stressed and you lose points. At the end of the game, you lose points based on your stress level, so managing it is very useful.

I found the game quite fun, and while it is only 6 rounds long, there is quite a bit in the game. I really enjoyed the auction mechanic because of it's difference to other auctions methods I've seen before, and while I made what turned out to be a few tactical errors early, some of them were compounded by the way our random cards came out for the auctions, with no further commerce symbols appearing in the 2nd through 4th rounds, making my decision not to take one in the 1st round much worse than it should have been.

If you made it to here, well done! that turned out to be much longer than I intended, or expected.

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^{Upgoats made by the talented @ryivhnn}