Folks - I’m really digging On the Underground. So I’m pitching to see if anyone else wants to give it a go?
Rules are almost Knizian:
- There’s 8 or 9 different subway lines. Divide by number of players (2-4) to figure out how many you, personally, will be controlling.
- Each round you lay four pieces of track - any combination of your lines. The only other choice is to replace a track action with “take a branch tile” - and then two branch tiles can be turned in to let you build out from the middle of your line rather than an endpoint.
- Then a single passenger takes a trip on the subway, to one or two pre-determined locations based on a deck of cards.
Her route is somewhat constrained:
- Least walking trumps all, so she will take the route that requires moving along the fewest trackless segments.
- Fewest rail lines - she’ll ride halfway around the city if it means fewer transfers, even if a 3-line path is much more direct than a circuitous 2-line path.
- Active player decides between any ties.
You get one point each time the passenger rides your rail. And you get additional points for reaching or connecting other points on the map.
And it all works in a delightful, frustrating tangle of competing priorities and rival track segments.
Yucata has good QOL here as well, as the interface is nothing but the board, and Yucata does the route calculations and keeps track of cities that are already discarded.