Depart & Derail: A Cooperative/Competitive Railroad Building Game by DrEvilBrain
Depart & Derail is a 2-4 player cooperative/competitive railroad building game. The players are engineers building a circular high-speed public transit line. For the sake of efficiency, this transit line operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with no breaks for railroad maintenance. Therefore, players must constantly be working together to lay down new tracks and demolish old ones. Every player should be careful to avoid derailing the train, because of course we want to avoid that at all costs. But, maybe we actually do want derailment to happen?
Unlike most rail lines, each player represents different corporate interests in this public transit contract. Unofficially, the government contract was subcontracted to four rival companies. In a corporate directive to increase profits and slowly take over rival companies, each player must work to have the most passengers stop at their own train stations. In order to do so, the players can demolish their rivals’ train tracks or sabotage their plans by placing tracks in the way.
Want to play this game online? Try it out with the Tabletop Simulator module. Alternatively, you could try hosting it in a Roll20 campaign page using a square grid and importing the track tiles as tokens.
I may make a Vassal module for this later as well.
Change Log: * Oct 5, 2020 - Added Tabletop Simulator module.
Ratings
| Overall | 221th | 3.571⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 171th | 3.6⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 52th | 4⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 443th | 3.275⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 176th | 3.026⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 10🗨️ |
- During the setup, where are the passengers? Are they distributed among the stations or are they all aboard the train?
- Is the speed of the train constant during while it moves? I'll try to explain myself with this example: Let say the train has a speed of 6 and is 3 tracks before passing through a station. Once it arrives the station does it boards 1 passenger (constant speed) or 3 (because its speed decrease at each track it's moving on)?
- What's the point of passing your turn? I can't see why a player would want to do it.
I can't promise anything, but I'll try to play your game with some of my IRL friends.
Anyway, it's a nice take on the theme. Good job!
* At the start of the game, the train's speed is 1, so you will have 6 passengers in the train. Passengers aren't a resource that you have to manage. They're just the scoring system.
* Moving through tiles does now make the train slow down. Speed is just how many tiles the train will move during the turn rather than how tiles it has left to move that turn. If the train enters a train station with 6 speed, it will always have only 1 passenger board.
* Passing your turn is something you would only do if you don't want to put down a track tile, remove a tile, or change speed. Very situational.
i.e. is it for speed -> passengers
a) 1->6, 2->3, 3->2, 4->1, 5->1, 6->1
or
b) 1->6, 2->5, 3->4, 4->3, 5->2, 6->1
Thanks!
We found it basically impossible to do anything if the speed was above one and we ended up with a situation where we would have all have drawn on 6 passengers (from a single time through each station) unless we just played a new tile to keep the train moving somewhere.
The game then ended after only one more pass through a station as that player just set it up so that the train ran off the tracks on the next players turn without them being able to stop it (there was a two space gap that of course couldn't be filled in a single turn).
The concept sounds good but it sounds like it needs some more mechanics to make it fully work and to stop the two situations above from ruining the game.