Chicago Express Review

everybody welcome to drive to review 112 today I'm going to talk about the Chicago Express is a train game and it is probably see I'm not an expert on this stuff now so you're going to have to cut me some slack it's probably a gateway game into the 18 XX stuff okay it's not like age of steam or steam and that kind of a Martin Wallace II train game if this is actually a reprint of a what's called a winsome train game called Wabash Cannonball which is a lot cooler name no Chicago Express is pretty cool I like Wabash Cannonball which is actually like an old folk song or something I remember uh so this is game plays supposedly what is it two to six I've been played it with six I played it with two and two is formal I hate this game with two people you want to get displayed with two people don't play it oh it's not very good at all but it played with three and four and I can play to five or six but three or four seems to work really well I think I like it with four better this has come more going on more to sort of get your meat beer meat hooks into so let me show you hit play is actually very very simple game I've actually played this with I got a couple of groups of people I play with oh you know what you call seasoned gamers it'll play stuff you know more heavy things things to take a few hours and then you know my family and stuff like that and then like a lunch group and some other folks too but play this with the family and they enjoyed it for a little while but we kind of went back to airline Europe with them so ah this again it's tough I'm trying to get to that explanation let me review a little bit here it's I don't think everybody's gonna like this one I like this one quite a bit but seems like most people I talk to don't like it and I played it with and it's easy enough for the family type of group to get into and play for sure and to play relatively well I think so and I try to stay away from like strategy articles and stuff but I have dipped into that with this game so probably not a good idea you're going to play that with your family because it's like oh holy cow you could do this um so it's it's kind of a tricky kind of toes that lying um so this is a good sort of warmup I would say maybe even a filler because you can play this really quick to get into an 18 xx game you know again speculation on there not a big 18 X X guy so I would say I enjoy the game I recommend it very simple very straightforward rules like really basic and but there's a lot of you know subtleties that you can happen in the game so let's take a look at how it plays and then I'll come back and play more about it okay if somebody give you a quick sort of components overview here you've got the main board you get these different hexes here now you can see you've got four basic train companies so you got the yellow training the Blue Train the red train and then the gree train up there there's also a black train company this is the Wabash railroad you don't start the game with this in play you only start with these four so during the course of the game you're going to build track which is symbolized by these little trains here and so the yellow guy he's got to start here and then you can build when you build track you can build up three so you just kind of go out here you're connect two different cities you've always got to build adjacent to each other and you're sometimes trying to get all the way over to Chicago and that will give a nice payout bonus for whoever has the you know shares and yellow so it is a stock game there are a limited amount of stocks in the game also a limited amount of trains in the different colors so you can see on the board here we've got the Wabash guy which member isn't in play and so it's got a little board says there's two so there's the two Sox and there's eleven train so these are finite here any money that you pay into when you buy shares goes into the company itself instead of back to the bank and then there are boards for the four main railroads so you can see red has 19 trains that you can build a 19 track and then three shares and then here's a little spot to put the money in there and all of the money and everything is available for people to see there's no hidden information and that's really an important part of the game so everybody's able to see how much money is in a company at any given time as well as how much money that the players have at any time and it's got this paper money which isn't too bad it's pretty good stuff so over here you have these three dials and these are pretty cool little components here so on your turn you're going to take one action and you have three possible choices that you can take you can either do an auction action I can just sort of a building action or a laying track action when you do that you just simply rotate the little dial there to symbolize that you've taken that action so now once this gets to the red so let's say I took a building action Billy Frank and then Jessica took one so once that's in red nobody can take any more building actions for that round and then as soon as two of the dials hit the Reds let's say this guy took an auction and then which buildings then some leg track so does that hits the red and there's two of these dials that are in the red that round is going to end immediately we're going to do a payout based on how many shares people have and the value of the Train and then these are going to reset and then we'll start the next round now every time we have an end of round situation this little marker here where Detroit is is going to increase in value like so so one of the ways that the game will end is if this ever hits the 8 then that will signify this is going to be the last round so there's basically going to be a maximum of 8 rounds there are two other ways that the game can end and that is if three of the trains that are in play either run out of train tracks or run out of shares so if the yellow green and red all ran out of shares that would be the last round of the game we'd finish the round up and that would be at or if the blue green and red ran out of trains that would signify the end of the game so to start the game you can see these little colored numbers here show you the starting value of each of the different railroads so the games going to start off by auctioning off a share of red so players will start off with some money basically it's 120 bucks divided by the number of players so in two-player game each player works over 60 and then we'll auction off red whoever wins that will then get the first bid of the blue guy and the next one is the yellow one gets auctioned off and then a share of green gets auctioned off once all that's done then whoever has a share of red it's going to be a star player so you can see here yellow is actually further away then she caught from Chicago up at the top blues a little bit closer in red and then green sort of has a little bit easier time because it's going through these forested areas instead of these mountain areas where it's costing you more to go through the different terrain and yellow as compared to red let's say has more trains have 25 trains and 6 shares available or is red only has 19 and 3 so that's something have to keep in mind and that's going to be something subtle that's going to take you a few place to sort of wrap your head around and how these different railroads going to behave so first let's take a look at the auction action so let's say I have the stock and rent I wanted to take an auction action I take this flip it up now I'm going to choose a share to auction up I can auction off any share except the course for the wabash share because you can't do that yet I'll explain how that works in a minute so let's say I wanted to auction off another red share now the minimum bid that has to be for that share is wherever this guy currently is on the income so even at the start of the game you've got at least pay 7 to get this red guy so if I wanted to immediately auction off another red share i'd auction it off for seven and then we go around and basically go right around round round robin style and whoever has the doesn't pass and then has to pay that money in to remember the company so that's how the auction works it's pretty simple but this is really kind of the basically the heart of the game is knowing when to call these auctions because players cash flow is going to be limited you know you're going to see who has more shares in different companies and kind of base your decisions on that because at the end of the rounds the payouts going to go to more to the player who has the most shares in that company and let's skip the building for now and then we'll look at the Lange track action so you turn the market there and then you're going to lay track now the lay track you have to own at least one share in that company so if I had at least one share in yellow I could lay up to three trains and then pay for those tracks to be laid out of that company's charter here basically out of any money that was on the chart so remember when you buy a share it money goes into the Charter so this gives it seed money to lay future track so you can see that cost is going to vary based on the terrain so it's going to cost you a buck to lay a track in one of these planes here it's going to cost you two bucks to lay it in the forest it's going to cost you two bucks to lay this in the city but you can see the city actually has the added benefit of increasing the income of a train that was later you can see here's the - - the cost is always in the red okay but when you lay this in there you're going to actually add two two yellows income so whenever you increase a train company's income you just move this up the track there and then that's the amount of income it's going to pay out as a base value whenever you pay dividends at the end of the round now the other thing to keep in mind especially in the middle of the board here is you may have air are not Airlines but train companies that intersect each other so blue were to come in here and let's say they were like that then they got in here cheap they're able to get in there for two bucks and then four bucks for there but then if red comes along here and they place here and then they want to place in here let's say and run their track through there they're going to have to plate whatever this number is here in red two times the number of companies that are going to be in here including themselves so basically going to pay for box here or if they were going here they would pay eight so four times two so as more and more companies you know get and try to vie for they some of these cities in here some of these cities in the mill are pretty valuable it's going to cost you more out the company's charter to get in there now there's a couple of special cities here these two are in the middle of the board wheeling in Pittsburgh now normally when you connect to a city it will give you a little bump or some of these other hexes so if you connect here to Youngstown you get a bonus of plus one on your income scale but if you look at Pittsburgh and Wheeling they have these special little icons here and so if you look here we've got three cities on this track we've got Detroit which remember is just going to go up every time we have a round we have a dividend and a path so this is actually going to get worth more you know every round of the game now wheeling in Pittsburgh they're going to start off with a little bit of a bump so instead of just the normal plus one or even plus two of some of the other cities on the board this is going to be variable so the first time you connect to Wheeling let's say and nothing has been developed there you're going to get a bump of plus 3 on your income track in Pittsburgh a plus 4 so how do we get wheely in Pittsburgh to be worth more how do we increase their value on this track remember Detroit just goes up every round let's look at how we get those up and that's where we come to this building action so if you take the building action then you can basically just take one of these houses and place them on the board so if you look at one of these regular cities here you can see okay if I connect to Roanoke here I'll get a plus one but if I develop on there then this will actually bump up any other you know tracks they're already connected they're another plus one from taking that development or that building action or here in the case of this fort or a mount in an area you know you can get a plus two there whereas if you do development on wheeling or Pittsburgh then these are going to bump up this track here so you can see Pittsburgh actually bumps up two points from four and if you did it twice all the way to 8 and remember Detroit is this going to go up every round you actually won't put buildings or houses in here ever it's just going to keep going up and up and up every time you have a round so you have to remember to increase the income value of any you know railroads that are in there every time you end the round ok let's talk about Chicago here and this is a difficult place to get especially as you get more experienced in the game so if you connect there you're going to immediately get a plus 7 but it cost you 3 to place there and as soon as connect to Chicago you're going to do immediate dividend payout for the railroad that connected there and I'll talk about dividend payouts in a second the other thing that's going to happen with Chicago is the first company that comes in there is basically going to activate this Wabash railroad here so after you pay out the dividend for Chicago then you're going to auction off the share of Wabash now there's only two shares of these and there's not a lot of track the other thing though is that it's very close to Chicago already so it's easy to make a quick connection there so you can see there's just a few tracks there you know for it to connect to Chicago it's also very close to Detroit and relatively close to some of these other cities there so this is kind of it really kind of interesting mechanism of the game is he building all of these you know main companies here but then if this Wabash triggers off then they kind of you know become something else kind of comes into play kind of throws the balance off a little bit so let's talk about dividends and how they're paid out so if dividends are basically wherever this marker is on the income track then you're going to pay out that amount divided by the number of shares that are in play that have actually been auctioned off so let's say green was up here 20 bucks income and then I had two green shares and you had one green share so we're going to take that the total number of shares in play which is three let's hair let's make this easy let's say there's 21 so divided by three so that's seven bucks apiece per share so whoever had the one share would get seven and then the other person with two shares would get 14 and that's how you you have the dividend so that's going to happen remember at the end of every round whenever two of these are red and then also when Chicago is connected to buy whatever a particular color of company and that's pretty much the game all the basics of how to play okay you hope you enjoyed the overview I'm kind of two minds about this game I think this is really interesting game very very interesting so let me go in a little bit of a limb and say I think this would actually be a good gateway game in general okay now I've discussed that with some people before think I'm crazy for thinking that but I don't think so because like I said I've played this with my family group who enjoy games but they're not gamers they never really heard of BoardGameGeek other than what I've told them about it and but you know they are these are adult family not kids you know right so they you know they don't have to manage a pocketbook they know I have a man you know budget they know about sort of wheeling and dealing sort of not price fixing but you know try to get the best deal and you know a little bit of business acumen there so you know those people play games too and I think this is kind of up their alley now they have grown sort of this particular family of mine has not grown fond of it they were liked it at first and now they don't like it because there is a little bit of screws that you can do so example I'm getting in a strategy and I get a little leery of talking about this but in review but let's say I have two shares of green and I'm running that sucker out of Chicago I want to get the big payout want to activate Wabash all that goes stuff so I'm also broke and so Billy buys a share share auctions up a share of gray takes it for five bucks let's say picking the number out of thin air and then proceeds to build track on the following turn wasting my track in some random planes on the right-hand side of the board so I can no longer connect to Chicago or Detroit or whatever right and so he's in it for a fair amount seeing that I'm probably in the lead because everything's open information he's able to figure that out so that makes the game sort of vicious I would say um so I think that that kicks it out of the Gateway idea but if everybody's kind of playing it easygoing and you know you you if you're a real kind of brutal you know your gamer right you know you can kind of hold back that that knife a little bit then I think you're going to enjoy it so but the game is very well so I think which lends it towards that 18 XX family very dry very mathy very calculable almost in a way especially with less players which is what two players just nightmare because it's just oh I'm gonna have these numbers up I bid 17 for that because that's exactly the right number or whatever it is that's kind of lame but with a few more players you know three four it's fine I think and if people can play it easygoing you can get this done in under an hour if people are experienced with it and just kind of play a little bit of seat of their pants so it kind of straddles a lot of different aspects of the game I enjoy it you know but I think I'm one of the few that does I love the stock part of it I love to play games where you can leech a little bit and you know and try to take second place in everything you know that's one of things you can do in Airlines Europe is like okay well great you you're all the way up on this company and getting thirty five bucks around or whatever the thing is and but I'm getting second place in everything or something you know exaggerating but you know I love that kind of aspect of that it's sort of trying to be a little bit sly you know with what I'm trying to do and things like that and this plays into short enough Hillary kind of way that I think that's really cool and that's really sort of admirable or something it's pretty you know it's pretty cool how they got were able to accomplish it up in a game that should take you about an hour or less so this kind of fits in that same like I said Airlines Europe acquire there's some other games that implement this like Rapa Nui is a game that's really a stock game if you're interested in this kind of stuff I would check that out but yeah so I'm hard time saying you know thumbs up thumbs down I give it a thumbs up but I can see the dryness and the sort of math unis and the brutality putting people off because you know they don't want to don't think it's crude so anyway it's a good game so if you're interested in training games I would say pick it up if you've been playing I don't know to get to ride they or some other really light game then you want to sort of dip into that brutal sort of curmudgeonly auction you know thing we kind of muscle people with the auctions I really like that aspect I was kind of the auction part is really sort of the heart of the game I think in my opinion is sort of okay I'm gonna auction up this share dude you know are you low on money but you don't want to lose controlling interest in this thing or let's um you know jerk take control of a share and then screw you out of connecting to something nice but then again if you want the share you got to pay for it and so you know you're going to go lower you're going to maybe get a little bit more income on the income round but what is that work so that math in calculation kind of comes in and the brutality the kind of coldness comes in but you know oh so I probably scared like everybody way so anyway that's the game Thanks you

Channel: Drive Thru Games

Views: 23,093

Rating: 4.8823528 out of 5

Keywords: Chicago Express, board game, card game, review

Id: QMS_TxC6MMo

Length: 21min 27sec (1287 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 10 2012