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Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Mayfair Games |  Hell Rail Hell Rail Price: £13.50 (RRP = £15.99) A unique combination of card game and rail game. Players compete to deliver the most lost souls before the brimstone runs out, using diabolical powers to hinder each other. Are you evil enough to win. +++++++++++++++++++++ Counter Magazine review. +++++++++++++++++++++ 3-4 players, 60 minutes designed by James Kyle reviewed by John Butitta You probably thought that if you didn\'t make it to Heaven but got sent to the other place, it was eternal misery -- end of story. But it turns out to be more complicated. First, Dante tells us that there are nine different circles of Hell where the damned could be assigned to spend eternity depending on their transgressions. But did Dante, or anyone else for that matter, think about the mundane matter of how these lost souls get to their assigned place of Doom? It seems that the answer is they are not being moved very efficiently. So the dark powers decided to improve the transport situation by starting a railroad! It is your job, as an engineer in Hades, to get these doomed souls to their proper destination. But it is not that simple. Hell, it seems, is a chaotic place. These transgressors are scattered throughout the underworld and there is no track connecting these 9 circles and the Gates of Hell! The Nine Circles and the Gates are each represented on square playing tiles with a circle in the center and a link of track leading out to each of the 4 edges. They are set up with the lower corner of one tile touching the upper corner of the next tile, roughly in the form of `V\' with the top of the right diagonal of the `V\' bent inward. The track segments on each tile lead to a dead end at the start of the game. Each player gets a train that starts at the gates of Hell and a hand of 3 cards. The cards are tiles of the same size as the circles but they have many uses. Each tile presents you with 4 potential options: laying or upgrading track, adding it to your train as a load of souls to be delivered, moving your train or discarding to draw new tiles at the end of your turn. Each tile contains various types of track segments. The tile can played to create rail line routes that can connect the ends of the track from the Circles of Hell to each other. Any train can then move along the track to pick up and deliver their cargo of the damned. Tiles can also upgrade previous segments of track to add more connections. You may be interested to know that the rule, which seem common to many rail games, that says when upgrading track you must at least maintain the previous track segments in the same position, is in fact an immutable, cosmic, unchangeable law of the Universe that even applies in Hell. Also on each tile is a train car listing the number of lost souls and what their sins were eg 6 Misbelievers, 5 Lustful, 4 Voracious, 5 Gluttons, 7 Backstabbers etc. This part was a learning experience. We pulled out the dictionary find out why being Edacious, Recusant or Apostate was enough for a permanent trip down under in this game The card also lists at which Circle the train car can be picked up and to which Circle to which the car must be delivered. If you choose to use the tile as a load of souls, you simply add it to your train when you are at the proper circle to pick it up. When your train arrives at the destination circle to deliver the souls, you place it face down to use in scoring. Whoever delivers the most souls wins. The number of souls on each car also is the movement value. If you choose to use the tile for movement, you discard it and move your train a distance equal to the number of listed evil doers. The last number on the bottom of each tile is the Brimstone value. The number of cars in your train must be less than or equal to the Brimstone value on the card in order to use it for movement. Alternately, you can use the tile to ``Fan the Flames\'\' by discarding it and drawing an number of new tiles equal to the Brimstone value as the last action of your turn. This is important as you can do as many actions per turn as you have tiles in your hand. You draw one tile at the beginning of each turn so it is very easy to have no tiles left in your hand at the end of a turn. This can be a definite setback for your quest to be the hottest Train Engineer in Hell. So you need to race around picking up souls, delivering them and building track to get your train to from one place to another. That all sounds very nice -- but this is Hell, not the other place so some nastiness is in order. Each circle of Hell gets a randomly placed event token that activates when a train enters that circle. They allow such standard darkside fare as thievery, deliquency (placing markers on key sections of track to try to force long trains to go around them), gluttony (steal a card from another player then you must play all your cards), false path (rotate any rail tile), heresy (allows you to change or ignore a circle effect), lust (trying to steal all the cards in players hand of one brimstone value), the Abyss (discard any tile played as a track segment) and of course Chaos (take all the circle tokens and randomly redistribute them). And what would Hell be without event tokens for Geryon (if you are lucky you can make an immediate delivery), the Boatman (the boatman takes your train across areas where there are no track -- apparently all travel is by the River Styx until the railroading started) and putting Cerberus on guard duty at a Circle (You must discard cards from you hand with a total value of souls greater than the circle number that Cerberus is guarding). If a train is in your way, you just ram it and move it ahead of you. If you run it off the edge of a tile, it is derailed and loses all its cars. If your train has a Soul Catcher on the front (another random event Circle) you lose the Soul Catcher but the train you rammed loses its last car. If that sounds tough, remember railroading is a tough business, especially in Hades. When the draw pile is exhausted, you ``Recharge the Brimstone\'\' (the discard pile is reshuffled). The ``End of the Line\'\' comes when the draw pile and discard pile are exhausted. Each player turns over his delivered souls and counts them up. Whoever delivered the most is the winner. There are optional rules for experienced Hellrailers that suggest secret circle effect tokens and alternative starting layouts. The game is for 2 to 4 players but it is most fun with 4. It lasts about an hour once you know the rules and are familiar with the circle event tokens. We have had great fun with this game. Most gamers catch on immediately although not all have and some seem a bit confused at first by all the options. Since you will have the opportunity to go through the deck several times, I thought that the luck of the draw played less influence than in many card games. There was a lot of strategy in how and when to use the multiple options each card gives you. Since there was no limit on how many cards you could play each turn, hand size management was a key strategic issue. I give it a high recommendation for fun, originality and playability. 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