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On The Underground Price: £31.99 Board Game, 2-5 Players, Ages 12+ by JKLM/Rio Grande The goal of the game is to build the most successful Underground lines and in doing so gain the most points. The player who has best balanced the demands by the time that the deck of destinations is exhausted will be declared the winner. ++++++++++++ Counter review ++++++++++++ 2-5 players, 60 minutes designed by Sebastian Bleasdale reviewed by Stuart Dagger A route building game based on a map of the London Underground is one of those ideas that make you wonder why you didn\'t think of it yourself, though if you had, it is unlikely that you\'d have made as good a job of it as has been done here. Each player has between 2 and 4 sets of coloured, wooden rods, which they will place in the spaces between stations to create railway lines. The rods in each colour must form a connected route. This process is highly competitive, as the number of rods that can be placed between any pair of adjacent stations is limited, usually to 1 or 2, though it can be higher in the case of a pair of important mainline stations such as Euston and King\'s Cross. Two things happen in a player turn: building and the movement of the ``Passenger\'\'. Building is simply a matter of placing up to four more rods. They don\'t all have to be the same colour, but each must be of the right colour for that particular line and must normally be an extension of one of its two ends. Points come partly from the building and partly from the Passenger. There are five types of station: National Rail, Terminus, Connection, Express and Normal. The Connection stations come in pairs, the make-up of which will vary from one game to another, and you score points if you complete a line from one member of a pair to the other. With the National Rail stations and the Termini, it\'s more straightforward: you just have to build a line into them. The other way to score points by building is to complete a loop using a single line, in which case you score a point for each station inside but not part of the loop. The Express and Normal stations are to do with the Passenger and each is represented on a card. There will be four of these cards face-up at the start of your turn and the Passenger will, if possible, travel first to an Express and then to a Normal station. The owner of each line that he uses in the process will score a point. In deciding which route to take the Passenger applies two criteria: * he doesn\'t like walking * he doesn\'t like changing trains So he selects the destination and the route which best meets these requirements. Only in the event of there being equally good destinations or routes does the player get to choose which to take. Once a destination has been visited, its card is discarded and replaced. In addition to scoring points during their turn, a player can also collect ``branch tokens\'\', which you get either by building to a terminus or by forgoing one or more of your ``four builds\'\'. You need these if you are to ignore the usual requirement that builds must be extensions from one of the current ends of the line. The game to which this one is most akin is Railway Rivals (Dampfross). In both you have to try to balance the claims of a good cross country connection with those of lockouts and areas of regional dominance, and in both you have a network testing mechanism which, while it does a good job, is not devoid of luck. In the case of Railway Rivals the way that towns are paired to form runs for the races is down to chance and here the same is true of the order in which the passenger destinations emerge. Not that this element of luck is a bad thing, for without it the map would be too easy to analyse to the point where the game ceased to be worth playing. It is the luck element that provides a significant part of the replay value. The big differences between the two games are that whereas Railway Rivals gives you more the more interesting geography to contend with, On The Underground offers you a much more varied set of ways of scoring during the building part of the game and, by giving you more than one line to play with, more options for your building strategy. On The Underground is also a better integrated game. In Railway Rivals the building part is fun, but the racing part somewhat pedestrian and a bit prolonged; in Sebastian Bleasdale\'s game everything is woven together and the movement of the Passenger quickly dealt with. All my games have been with three players and with this number the game is very enjoyable. I\'m told by those who have played with more that four is probably the limit if you want to see the game at its best. The board and the mechanisms can handle five, but with this number you are likely to become very aware of how long it is since you last had a turn. Since there is very little to think about when it is not your go, with five players that makes for too much thumb twiddling. The presentation is impeccable: top quality cards, good wooden bits and a board which is a thing of beauty, both to look at and as a piece of engineering. That and the subject matter means that the game could have a chance of breaking out into a wider market. I hope it does. It deserves to, and if it succeeds it will be good not only for a company that deserves success but for the hobby. An intelligent game on a subject with the appeal of the map of the London Underground could be just the thing to convince more people that boardgame design didn\'t end with Monopoly, Cluedo and Risk. More ...

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