Designers: Helmut Ohley & Leonhard “Lonny” Orgler

Final Score:  (1.6 out 5 Stars)

When it comes to worker placement games there are lots and lots of options and lots of variations on the mechanic , proven by the countless designs that have flooded the board game market in the last few years. Worker placement games and games with worker placement mechanics have become practically a staple go too mechanic in design today, in fact there are so many that I will be doing a top 10 worker placement game list in the near future.

Russian Railroads definitely caught my interest very early on but I was very wary of the reviews of this game because while it scored high with most reviewers, the common underlining comment was that the game had virtually nothing to do with railroads thematically. Being a big theme guy, this really was a bit of a turn off but thanks to the wonders of digital platforms and the magic of Yucata.de I was able to play many games of Russian Railroads online and it’s now time to review this beast in all its glory.

It’s important to note however that this will be one of the first games I review based on digital (online) play only and while I personally think this makes absolutely no difference with the exception of discussions about component quality, some might differ in opinion about that so in the interest of full disclosure, well, there you have it.

Overview

Russian Railroads puts players in the role of a train company manager using a very classic and very standard worker placement mechanic. In fact, Russian Railroads as a game can be described without any extra wording as a worker placement game as this is what it is, nothing less and nothing more. To win you must score points, the abstracted representation of success and to score points you must wisely use the wide variety of worker placement spots to advance your railroad business. Whether its upgrading your trains, hiring engineers, building tracks or advancing your factories, most elements of a railroad business is represented here. Abstracted to be sure and without a game map commonly found in Railroad games, Russian Railroads is like many worker placement games, a race for victory points through resource management. Your main resource being of course your workers, the lose representation of your workforce and effort as a company. Sounds pretty thematic on paper, but does it hold up in play?

Components

Verdict:
Tilt: 

Pros: Colorful art work, streamlined easy to understand iconography.

Cons: The art work goes to waste on a game which fails to connect its theme and gameplay rendering the thematic art work pointless.

Again, since I did not ever hold the actual copy of the game in my hand, I can’t comment much on the quality of components here other than the art and aesthetics of the game. I have confirmed with several friends and colleagues who told me they were very satisfied with the components, calling them sturdy and built to last. No real surprise as component quality has become less and less of an issue with published games from well-respected companies like Z-man games.

I don’t ever place much emphasis on game components when it comes to worker placement games, typically you’re dealing with cubes and meeples and Russian Railroads is no different. What is absolutely vital for Russian Railroads is the art work, it’s vital because this is the only link to the Railroad theme the game has as many reviewers point out and I can confirm.

The only real connection between game-play and theme in this game is the fact that the pictures on the components, depict, railroad stuff. You have engineer and train tokens, there are pictures of railway tracks and components that look kind of like railroad blocks. Suffice to say however while the art work is good, it’s insufficient to carry the games theme without the thematic connection to the gameplay which I will cover more in the theme section of this review. The important thing to note here is that the art is creative, colorful and the iconography clear and streamlined to relative simple identification once you get the jist of the iconography patterns. It doesn’t take long before you can easily identify the meaning of everything on the board and card and or deduce the meaning. In this regard Russian Railroad does a great job and I certainly give it credit for making this simple.

The components can be said to pass with flying colors and on par with what you can expect from a great company like Z-man games. I put very little weight in this part of the game reviewer and so its impact on the final score is very minimal but I’m very happy to see the days of Euro games with ugly artwork and flimsy components is well behind us.

Theme

Verdict:
Tilt: 

Pros: Railroads are a cool theme that doesn’t scare off casual players.

Cons: The theme is just a ruse; this game has very little if anything at all to do with Russia or Railroads.

While again I would not place theme in the forefront of a worker placement game, when you choose a popularized theme like Railroads you are in essence banking on players choosing this worker placement game over others because of the theme. In a sense there is a bit of trickery here because Russian Railroads has about as much to do with the railroads thematically as a railroad themed deck of poker cards. Sure there are pictures of trains on the cards and game board, but mechanically speaking the game is so far removed from the theme it actually makes it feel a bit scandalous to use it.

Suffice to say this was a huge disappointment for me in particular since I love train stuff and I’m always on the lookout for an interesting take on railroad themed games. Russian Railroads is so focused on being a worker placement victory point puzzle that any element of the railroad theme gets virtually washed away and really even the game board itself from an artistic stand point is quite unclear what exactly the abstractions are supposed to be representing. You place workers on spots like 3 black spaces which allow you to move your black colored track, which I guess mean that you are building a section of the rail and the different colored tokens are different speeds or quality of rails? I don’t know, it’s all quite fuzzy even as an abstraction it makes little connection to the theme and even the manual makes little effort to explain or justify any element of that theme.  Its a all business Euro, you put down meeple workers to score points, what anything represents has little explanation or point to it.

At the end of the day, the theme here is almost completely non-existent, this game is a worker placement puzzle, you will not get to do any fun train stuff you might hope for given the cover and the claim on the box where “Players compete to build the largest and most advanced railway network”.   Given that the extent of competition is that you are denied a spot to put a worker when someone else already put one there, its hardly a competition.  Yeah ok, abstractions are abstractions, but I guess what I’m saying is that there is no sign of the economic, construction or chu-chu part of the railroad theme here. It’s a game about railroads because there are pictures of railroads on the game board and that really is the extent of the connection.

I think the disappointment comes mostly from the missed opportunities to leverage such a great theme.

Gameplay

Verdict:
Tilt: 

Pros: There is considerable variation in how the game plays with different amounts of players remaining as interesting with 2 players as it is with 3 or 4.

Cons: Very bland and basic worker placement mechanic with very few dynamics or surprises.

One would hope that a game that lacks theme makes up for it with great gameplay, in fact as far as worker placement games go, traditionally this is the case. Unfortunately Russian Railroads is banking largely on the popularity of the mechanic so heavily it fails on every other level to innovate or even make use of more updated existing innovations of the mechanic. It basically takes the core concept from its earliest conception, placing workers on spots that score points and takes it no further.

Before I start bitching, the good stuff. This is a solid implementation of the classic worker placement mechanic as far as the options you get. It feels tight and every action you take really counts, so you are put to some fairly difficult choices at times, though this sense of tough choices is short lived. It is a puzzle and a fairly complex one, which offers players plenty to experiment with and explore, which in turn makes the first few games of Russian Railroads pretty interesting for fans of worker placement games in particular. In fact, this may be the most complex and involved victory point mash I have seen yet and while it fails to inspire a theme or innovate in its genre by adding something new to the table, it does what it does very well.

Unfortunately that is not enough to carry the game,  it really landed very flat with me. In fact I think if you have played Voyage of Marco Polo, Lords of Waterdeep, Pillars of the Earth, Stone Age.. even Caverna, you will find the worker placement element of this game fairly bland and uninspired both from gameplay perspective and an objective design perspective. Sure it’s an interesting puzzle as all worker placement games generally are, but there isn’t a whole lot more to it, there is no dynamic or shifting options from game to game,  what you see on the surface in the first game is all there is and all there ever will be. Once that puzzle is solved, there really isn’t much else to draw upon.

The game really does boil down to you placing down workers and collecting victory points, there is almost nothing else going on in this game. Worse yet is that there are obvious patterns of play every round, where one player will grab the first player spot, one player will grab the money spot and one player will grab the available engineer, elements of the puzzle you will catch onto quickly in particular when playing with experienced players that know what they are doing. This pattern repeats itself in a round robin circus as this is the one and only good opening move to make in almost all cases and your order in this sequence determines which of the three choices you will make.

Sure there is some variance, occasionally an engineer is not worth taking, or you might be better of grabbing one of the other spots over going first next round or taking money, but in as a whole there is a sort of sequence of uninteresting events that open most rounds. From there you’re really just grabbing whatever spots are available that enhance the strategy you chose pretty much at the start of the game. Which brings me to the other problem, in almost all games once you figure out what Engineers you will get based on the round robin sequence you can calculate in advance you will know what strategy you will go with to the conclusion of the game and in essence prioritize what spots you will take each round with your workers. The strategy really then becomes about trying to figure out what your opponents strategy is (or will be) and taking beneficial action when you can and taking action to deny your opponent beneficial actions when you can’t take one for yourself.  I guess this is what qualifies as competition in Russian Railroads, but it feels less like a competition between Railroad Barons and more of a competition between two mathematicians.

Sure there is some interesting choices now and again and certainly when playing with experienced players this puzzle can become fairly complex and sometimes even dynamic. It isn’t enough to carry the game though, in particular since any choice you make will have some form of alternative so while you can sometimes slow opponents down you really can’t stop them. Experienced players will generally focus on simply finding the fastest route to their method of scoring and among experienced players the game really becomes more of a race.

This may draw some interest at first as you try to figure out the pattern in the novelty of it all, but after a couple of games you will have unlocked the puzzle and the game really becomes a monotonous game of choosing from many choices with one very obvious best option you must clearly make each time your action comes up. You feel neither like an operator of a railroad or like you’re making decisions and more like you are working according to a pre-ordained plan adjusting only when someone does something unexpected, typically when a less experienced player makes a mistake or a more experienced player catches on to your strategy and diverts his attention to blocking you rather than doing something beneficial for his own strategy.

The novalty wears of quickly with Russian Railroads. It’s unfortunate that Russian Railroads did not leverage some of the more interesting worker placement mechanics that came before it like Lords of Waterdeeps quest cards and Lord cards which could easily be adapted in Russian Railroads as Baron cards and mission cards just as an example. Instead Russian Railroads went with the very stuffy and largely uninteresting ultra-simple worker placement mechanic with little else driving it or evolving through the course of play. Other than the very limited engineers you don’t unlock anything interesting, there are no deviations, or randomized elements to mix things up and for the most part there is kind of a packing order of devolving options, getting less interesting with each passing round. Very dry stuff.

One of the big failures of Russian Railroads as well is that it’s really tough to catch up and very unfriendly to beginners, if a player gets ahead on points, in particular on the points earned per round where its cumulative, a game can be effectively over halfway through. This is something that happens quite easily in particular when experienced and inexperienced mix making this a poor choice for mixed groups.

You ultimately want to play with already experienced players, but as you’re showing people how to play they are going to have to drudge through 2 or 3 games before the strategies kind of click into place and they can offer something that resembles competition for you. Worse than that though is that the game is not intuitive despite being very simple, so it takes a couple of games before you have any idea how the engine works and it’s easy to make a mistake that will take several rounds to correct by which time, again, you are so far behind that the game is effectively over.

In the end the conclusion is that pretty much every worker placement game I have played in the last 10 years has better game play than this one and no one is more surprised than me because this game rates so high with so many reviewers and gaming communities. I was really kind of hoping to have found a gem in the rough. In particular something coming out of Z-man games.

Replay ability and Longevity

Verdict:
Tilt: 

Pros: You can play it for free on Yucuta.de with a wide variety of opponents of different skill levels allowing you to explore replay-ability of this game to its fullest extent.

Cons: You discover the game has virtually no replay-ability and thank Yucuta.de for saving you some money.

Another huge fail in my opinion and as a worker placement game this will have the greatest impact on the game’s final score. In short, there is very little longevity here.  After you have played this game 2 or 3 times there really is nothing of interest that will either surprise or delight you. I played this game at least 20 times to be sure, in fact I kept hoping that at some point I would discover some new strategy, some new puzzle piece or string to pull on but in the end it really is kind of a shallow game. I can’t recall a single memorable moment or a close game that wasn’t pre-ordained early on, In fact by round 2 or 3 I knew whether I would win or lose in most games and the final rounds where players largely just going through the motion.

I suppose the one nice element of the games replay-ability is that the game really changes a great deal when you play with different amounts of players. It’s a very different puzzle as the boards themselves are actually different for different player counts with 2, 3 or 4 players, so you could conceivably extend its life and explore the new challenges different amounts of players produce. In the end though, there just isn’t enough variation in the game to sustain multiple replays, given that there are so many wonderful worker placement games with innovative and interesting mechanics, a simplistic and straightforward variant like this really just doesn’t hold up.

Conclusion

Russian Railroads is a highly acclaimed and often well-spoken of game but like many Euro games I have a tough time explaining why that is. Like Settlers of Catan, Agricola, and Puerto Rico it just falls into that category of games where most people seem to love them and I just don’t. I really think as you read this review you have to consider the reviewer. If you love Agricola and Puerto Rico and don’t understand why someone doesn’t, Russian Railroads might turn out to be a great pick for you. I do think it’s worth pointing out however that there is a difference between disliking a game and objectively believing it’s a mediocre design. For example I do believe Agricola and Puerto Rico are or perhaps better to say were innovative designs for their time, If I reviewed them I would expect them, despite my dislike for them, to get good reviews from me. I guess the point I’m making is that I didn’t just look at Russian Railroads and decide I don’t like it and gave it a bad review, I think it really does lack the elements that great board games have. Whether I like it or not.

Russian Railroads is neither innovative, clever or interesting and I believe very objectively that it’s just not a very well designed game.

Sure it has good structure, it’s streamlined and balanced, but that’s not a selling point of a game in today’s world of designer board games, that is an expectation from every game. These are automatic. A great design must be innovative, must add something to the genre, must have some dynamics and cleverness to it. None of those descriptive terms can be applied to Russian Railroads, it is by very definition of the word a very status quo game, relying on the most basic elements of worker placement game design. Worse yet its implementation is so far removed from the theme, there is hardly a point of pretending that its somehow relevant to the game.

I can’t recommend this game, even to worker placement fans. The list of fantastic worker placement games is long and distinguished, Russian Railroads is just not among them.