:strip_icc()/pic181225.jpg)
/pic158561.jpg)
TransAmerica, which is for 2-6 players, debuted in the early 2000s from the German branch of Winning Moves, with this design being a redeveloped version of Delonge's game Iron Road, which was released as a limited edition item from Winsome Games in 2001.
The game lasts multiple rounds, and in each round your goal is to connect with railroad tracks the five cities on your cards as quickly as you can. Each player starts with one random card in each of the five colors, and each color corresponds to a different part of the United States: green for West Coast cities, red for Southern cities, orange for East Coast cities, etc. As a result, the cities you want to connect span the breadth of the United States, which means you need to cover a lot of ground to connect them all. Thankfully, your fellow players will help make that happen — sometimes without them even knowing it.
:strip_icc()/pic6248416.jpg)
On your first turn each round, you place your cylindrical station on the board at any intersection, whether in a city or not. On each subsequent turn, you place one or two railroad tracks on the edges of the triangular spaces of the game board — but all tracks you place must connect to your station, either directly or in a network that can be traced back to your station.
As a result, each player starts as their own island in the ocean of the United States, but as you build outward, you connect to the networks of other players, and as soon as your network connects with another player's, you each can build anywhere off that larger shared network because no one owns the individual track pieces. For example, if you built to Washington because that's your secret orange city, then we connect networks, I can place a single track to connect Washington to New York — which means you did the majority of the work to get me there. Thanks, pal!
In short, TransAmerica is a game built on mooching. You want other people to do as much of the work as possible, after which you'll swoop in to link your cities to everything else. The problem, of course, is that everyone else wants to mooch, too, which means they'll be looking for you to do the work. You could simply place your tracks in a spiral around your station, akin to someone pacing back and forth on a street corner before going up to a friend's apartment to borrow money, but that will almost never help you be first to connect all your cities.
:strip_icc()/pic25010.jpg)
Four people averse to connecting (image: Bun Sham)
No, you need to place tracks effectively in order to move in the right direction, but at the same time you want to keep an eye on what everyone else is doing. If you need to connect to Houston and someone else is building south toward Dallas, hold off on playing anything on that branch until they get there — then add the two tracks needed for Houston.
If I were the one going to Dallas, however, I might refrain from playing that final track as long as possible, and this brings us to the subject of track management. I mentioned that you can play one or two tracks per turn, and why you might play only one track is because going over a mountain or river segment requires both of your track placements for the turn. If you're passing through mid-America — Cincinnati, St. Louis, Kansas City — or messing around in the southwest or even just humping it over the Appalachian Mountains in the east, you want to ensure that you don't waste a placement by having room for only one of your two track placements. Ideally you'll cross a river on one turn, then place a track to bring you adjacent to the mountain or next river while also placing a track somewhere else useful. New players often overlook this issue and find themselves throwing away a placement, which effectively puts them a half-turn behind other players.
Another aspect of track management involves more mooching. If it seems like your network is going to merge with another, ideally the other player will place the track that connects the two of you because that's effectively like you placing a bonus track for free — but they're probably thinking the same thing and you might find yourself in a kind of standoff. This might be happening in the image above as the yellow player probably could have connected earlier at St. Louis, but didn't, while the green player has connected to two yellow cities and is heading to Bismarck despite already going through Chicago. Sometimes it's most efficient to pass through a city you don't have, but try to avoid it when possible! Don't voluntarily mooch for others if you don't have to!
Kansas City ist verboten (image: Tim Mossman)
TransAmerica works well at all player counts, with the cities marked with black-and-white circles coming into play only with five and six players to reduce the uncertainness of who might be trying to go where. With two players, you have a fascinating game of chicken, with you trying to decipher something from every track placement. A single track to the southwest might signal Santa Fe or Phoenix, so if you have Los Angeles, you might place a track or two to the northwest to trick them into thinking they won't help you by going to Santa Fe or Phoenix.
With more players, the game feels more chaotic and random, but I played lots of TransAmerica on online gaming site BrettSpielWelt years ago, and some players would win 50% of the time in six-player games, so you can bend the chaos in your favor by paying attention to others. Placing your initial station can reveal something about your hand, so pay attention to where others start and try to figure out where they might be heading.
A round ends as soon as a player has connected all five of their cities in a single network, then all other players lose points equal to the number of track placements they would need to make to connect all of their cities. The game lasts multiple rounds, ending when someone passes the scoring barrier (when played by the rules) or someone falls into the Pacific Ocean (when played at Eric's house), at which point the player with the highest score wins. I've seen multiple games won by people who have never won an individual round because if you're close to going out, you'll lose only 1-2 points, which can keep you near the top of the point chart while others fall 4-6 points.
I rave more about this simply delightful game in the video below, noting how I always use it as an opener when I'm meeting people for the first time because everyone is playing together in the same space, and you have multiple rounds of play, which allows for goofs in the first few rounds when you're still figuring out what to do.
:strip_icc()/pic6201568.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic6161801.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic4482222.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic6134533.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic6240238.jpg)
