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Australian Rails Price: £28.99 RRP - £29.99 Board Game, 2-6 Players, Ages 12+ by Mayfair Games Rail fans can experience the thrills of owning, building, and operating railroads in the land down under! Explore the outback, build your rail empire across mountains and deserts to build a fortune. But beware dangerous sandstorms and flooding rivers as you stretch your rails across this vast continent! Australia Rails is part of the award-winning Empire Builder series of games, but is a complete stand-alone adventure in the world of railroading. Using a specially designed board, you will use crayons to draw your rail lines. Since you decide which cities to connect and where your routes will go, you alone decide the course of railroading history. Demand cards will help guide your decisions, showing you what resources and goods are in demand in various cities. Since there are more than 100 cards and 45 different cities, you will never see the same game twice! Rail fans have enjoyed building railroad empires for years. Now it\'s your turn to master the land down under as you gather a railroad fortune, all in a single afternoon! ----------------------------------------------------- COUNTER MAGAZINE REVIEW: ----------------------------------------------------- Designed by Darwin Bromley et al Reviewed by Kendall Johns What\'s this Sport? Mayfair have produced another ``Rail\'\' game so soon after Russian Rails? Well not exactly - Australia Rails is a re-issue, the original being one of their tube games. I have not played the original, but I know a man who has, and in his memory there are no major game play changes; the only ones seem to be in design, but more of this anon. (From a picture on the Geek an obvious one is, that Tasmania appeared as an insert, and placed centrally beneath Australia; while on the new board, it has been placed in a more geographically correct position. The result of this is that, both it, and Australia, are smaller, so perhaps it is not an improvement!) Australia is not the world\'s most densely populated country. Much of the land mass is desert, particularly in the central regions, an area that was once described in a book as the G.A.B.A., (``Great Australian Bugger All\'\'). Here there is little habitation, (Alice Springs of course, but little else), which necessitates long builds; (you start with $60,000). In other games, Iron Dragon for example, when the `Deserts Flood\' card appears then all deserts are affected; however, in Australian Rails (AR), it happens by region: i.e. a card for deserts in Western Australia and another for South etc. Also, for the sake of game play, certain towns seem to have been given an importance somewhat above their station - no pun intended. I am told that, even Australians, may have difficulty recognizing some of them - not so a much `one horse\', but rather, `one man and his dog\' towns. Additionally, all but one of the major cities are in the South East. The exception, Perth, is on the west coast. If the more usual conditions of victory applied, i.e., link all but one of the major cities, then players would rarely bother to include Perth; so in this game you need to link it, and all but one of the others. This forces a transcontinental link. If you start roughly in the center of Australia and go north, stopping before you hit the ocean, you will have passed Darwin, a medium city, on your left. According to the rules, this, historically, had a great importance in the development of railways in Australia. To reflect this you are allowed to build out from it at a cost of `1\' - similar to major cities. Unfortunately, in the games we have played, even with this proviso, Darwin often does not get visited. At roughly the same latitude, but further east, on the `point\' of Australia, is Weipa - which usually does. The difference is that Weipa is the only source for Bauxite, while Darwin has nothing! If the game wanted to encourage visits to Darwin then, perhaps, it should have had a unique load, or even allow it to act as a major city for victory conditions. As it is, players only seem to build there, if they have multiple deliveries. Most of the loads/symbols are the much the same as the others in this series. On the Geek, is a review of AR, where the reviewer states that artifacts, (only from Alice Springs), are a load ``unique to this game\'\'. This might have been so for the original - but Lunar Rails also has them - albeit a different symbol. An genuinely unique feature is `dry\' rivers and lakes. These appear in brown on the board and each costs an extra `1\' to build over. When the `Rainy Season\' card is turned over, they become normal rivers and lakes with the usual building costs applying for the remainder of the game. Like Russian Rails, AR has named loads (on cards and chips), wide rivers, a grid and `9(2) to 12(3)\' trains. Game play is much the same as in the others, although, mainly due to the long builds/runs, it can take longer to play than some. I\'m not sure if I would recommend it for beginners but fans will certainly enjoy it. More ...

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