I looked that up at the time and found it had a decent discount, so I checked out a couple of reviews the next day and decided to pick it up. “Out of stock” said Book Depository. “Would you like to be notified when it’s back in stock?” I was going to decline this on the basis that it wouldn’t be on sale once it was back in stock, but then changed my mind and put in my email address. The next day I was notified that it was back in stock, at the sale price :)
Anyhow it turned up today and I’ve played three games solo (scoring 95, 84, 103), followed by a couple of games of Village Green for comparison. I didn’t even notice that the V.R. box says “2-4 players” until I’d played it twice. That does explain why its manual omits any kind of solo score assessment/target, but honestly it’s a bit confusing as you can absolutely play it solo, and I think it would’ve been pretty easy to make that official.
The puzzle in V.R. is a bit more complex than V.G. (which may or may not be a desirable thing), but the price for this is a fiddlier game, with more components and things to set-up, a large deck of small cards, and the requirement to regularly slide the queues of “market” cards along the table to make space for new ones (because they increase in cost to buy, so they need to stay in sequence). It’s not excessive, but if you like like the complexity of V.G. exactly the way it is then it’s something to bear in mind. You can reset both games quickly to play again, so if you’re going to play it a few times in a row it’s much of a muchness; but if I wanted to play one of these just once as a single quick game I’d lean towards V.G. for its faster set-up and pack-up time.
The extra complexity comes largely from the fact that the railway lines in V.R. vary in shape and, consequently, length (whereas each scoring rule/constraint in V.G. is for a straight line of 3 cards). Compensating for this, you can place any card in any position (in V.G. adjacent cards must be compatible); but figuring out which scoring rules to try to purchase for each railway line is definitely complicated by not necessarily understanding what the final shape of those incomplete tracks is going to be.
If I was going to keep only one of these, it would probably be Village Green, but Village Rails is another small box (a little taller than V.G.) and differentiates itself enough in gameplay that I’m sure I’ll keep both.
So much cat hair.