Great Western Trail: Rails to the North Review
Traveller: Where does this train go?
Conductor: North.
T: But, where?
C: The North.
T: No, which cities!?
C: …Northern ones.
Players: 2-4
Time: 75-150 mins
Designer: Alexander Pfister
Artist: Andreas Resch
Publisher: eggertspiele
We don’t often review expansions on Creaking Shelves. With so many new games hitting the streets it’s hard to play any big Euro game enough for an expansion to really seem justified. But if there was ever going to be an exception, it would be for my favourite cow management game, Great Western Trail.
On the road to Kansas City, Great Western Trail integrates rondels, deck building, engine building and objective chasing in ways you’ve never seen anywhere else, to the extent that they are barely noticeable as such. It’s a wonderful game, beautifully structured so that long term, medium term and short term goals flow smoothly into one another and the simple question you are asked each turn: which space do I move to next? It is one of my absolute favourite games.
Now, it does come with a somewhat painful teach. There are a lot of elements to talk through, even though new players rapidly get in the swing of it after only a turn or two. With that in mind then, the idea of expanding Great Western Trail seems like a bad move: making an already complex game more complex. And yet the actual rules overhead created by Rails to the North is astonishingly slight given the dramatic impact it has on the game. To the extent that teaching it to a brand new player is not beyond the realm of possibility. Indeed, I’ve done so multiple times.
The secret to this is that, in terms of immediate gameplay changes, Rails to the North adds a single auxiliary action. It even needs to be unlocked, forcing you to decide the extent to which you want to explore this new element of the game. But because auxiliary actions are widely usable, you can pursue it heavily if you want. It is a very elegant means of expanding a game.
This new action is all about branchlets, the cute offspring of railway lines we all fawn over in the spring. They are represented by little houses that you’ll spread across the new board extension to access the many cities off the main train route East. Performing the auxiliary action once lets you place one house into one of the locations which is connected to either one of your existing branchlets, or to a city you have delivered cows to (or just to Kansas City). This links cattle delivery to the expansion – you’ll sometimes want to deliver to certain cities to open up new areas for branchlet building.
This works both ways. Certain branchlets open up new cities to which you can deliver on a later trip through Kansas. Including San Francisco! The very structure of the deliveries line has been broken up and reconstructed to maximise the impact of this expansion board. (A board that is delightfully designed to slot over the top of the previous track) This makes the San Francisco delivery objective card rather more involved. But the really bold aim for Montreal, worth a mighty 15 points. The new options come at a cost of fewer, and more punishing, delivery options on the main board, encouraging and nearly requiring at least some investment in the new branchlets.
It’s not just a restructuring of the deliveries market though. Nestled throughout the web of Northern connections are smaller towns offering bonuses for those who connect to them. Many individual spaces offer little bonuses or discounts, rewarding players who get there first. There are even new stations that you can become master of. The expansion adds a bunch of new station tiles to mix things up, more in fact than can fit on the board. So New York, final stop on the main delivery line, lets you take one of the spares as a reward.
All of these little changes add nuance and opportunities. Playing is like discovering a path through the mountains and coming out above a familiar valley from a whole new direction. You know it, and you’ve barely had to learn anything new, and yet your entire perspective on the game has shifted. I couldn’t have believed anything could make me enjoy Great Western Trail more. Yet this has. Rails to the North is a perfect expansion.
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