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Cube Rails
If you haven't heard of cube rails, it's a whole genre in itself, best known for titles like Chicago Express, Paris Connection, and Irish Gauge. These are relatively simple games that aim to finish in an hour or so and place emphasis on mixing up the player incentives. Usually, in these kinds of games, you wouldn't own a rail company, but you'd own shares in several companies, as would the other players. It leads to questions like, do you really want to improve the red company when another player will earn more money from it? Cube rail games are thematically and mechanically similar to the granddaddies of train game, 18xx games, but are vastly easier to get to the table!
I'm a long-time fan of cube rail games and train games in general, and decided one day I wanted to make something of that ilk. I don't remember every detail, but I'll share what I can and give you a peek behind the curtain into the process of creating and publishing Luzon Rails.
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The final game!
Designing Luzon Rails
Well, step one was to pick a place to set the game! I would have chosen Ireland, seeing as I live there, but Irish Gauge was big news at the time. My wife is from Luzon, The Philippines, and we try to spend most Christmases there, so it seemed like the natural next choice. Luzon is a beautiful tropical island with mountain ranges, wetlands, a wide open section in the north, and a tighter winding peninsula in the south — all features that make it perfect for a train game! And bonus points that Luzon has its own interesting rail history to dig into.
The core mechanisms came together quickly after picking a location. This was helped by the game coming from a long and established tradition of similar titles. By the time I had built the map for a prototype, I had an inkling of what I would do to make it stand out and be compelling in its own right. I decided to use a card-driven system, inspired by some war games I was playing and enjoying at the time (and particularly inspired by the excellent political game, Wir Sind Das Volk). This means that each round, players will have a shared set of cards that dictate what actions are available. On a given turn, a player picks a card, implements the action as they see fit, and discards that card. I really liked this idea because I thought it could simulate doing business in non-ideal situations. For example in some rounds, various actions will be abundant, or limited, or not available at all, and this could feel like a year with a poor stock market, or a steel shortage, or a generous government issuing grants to anybody willing to take them.
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The dice are never rolled; their position tracks company value, and their face is the future potential of a company
The game board is the center of the game, so I wanted to make it oversized, even for the playtests. I printed it on eight sheets of paper (it's massive!) and got it ready for my local fortnightly playtest group, Playtest Dublin. I raided a copy of Iberian Rails for components and headed in to test things out.
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A late playtest
The first playtest went well. Everybody was happy, engaged, and trying to channel their inner Andrew Carnegie — but something was missing. I was happy with the core of the game, but it needed more kick to make it stand out.
In search of this, I simplified the game. I had a system whereby players could become company directors if they owned the most shares in said company, and this would create various opportunities and incentives, but truth be told, this was distracting from my main aim in the game. I wanted players to be ruthless moneymakers, unconcerned with the health of a company and concerned only with the dividend potential and their own personal coffers. I didn't want players to feel like they owned a company — they just own the shares! So directors were out. Instead, if you own a single share in a company, you have the right to develop it on your turn. Easy.
Next, I wanted players to do more interesting things while building track or otherwise developing a company. And I wanted the game to more closely match its setting! I wanted each of the five companies to start in a different part of Luzon, so a variety of the island would be developed. But what I saw was that players were just racing the companies to Manila to get bonuses, then kind of floundering with them. How could I get the companies to build in more interesting ways and to interact (and block!) one another?
This was a surprisingly tough nut to crack. When you see a finished game, especially one that looks quite simple, it often looks like everything must have been so straightforward. This was far from the case! I tried introducing all kinds of player incentives, with a variety of location types, abilities, actions. I even tried an ill-fated pick-up-and-deliver system.
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Pick up and deliver was decidedly UNFUN!
I settled on a system that reflects a real difficulty rail investors in Luzon would have faced: that it already has a shipping system made out of boats! I broke the various locations in the game into "coastal cities" and "production cities". As a player builds track for a company, it will connect with these different locations and the value of said locations to the company will depend on what kind of network the company already has. The final version of this is that a production city adds only one point to the company value, then a coastal city adds a number equal to the number of production cities the company is connected to. So a healthy company would spread out across the map, try to hit as many of the production cities as possible, then search for coastal cities, and finally make a mad dash to connect to Manila before the game ends! Way more interesting!
Publishing and Manufacturing
I started working on Luzon Rails in March 2019. It was finished by October 2019, and I began showing it to publishers. Nobody was biting. Remote pitching in the early days of the pandemic didn't help! But it was a game I wanted to see made, so I decided to bring it to Kickstarter. The initial plan was to hand-make each copy and to limit the number of those copies to 100 or so — a fairly well-worn tradition among train games. The game was going to have a paper "board" and come in a zip-lock bag instead of a box.
In order to support the theme, I wanted a Filipino artist to work on the board and cards, so I commissioned work from Jessi Cabasan. Once that was ready, I posted the game up on Kickstarter in October 2020. Within a few days, the modest goal was smashed and enough people were interested that I decided to mass-manufacture the game instead: mounted board, telescoping box (for which another Filipino artist, Tiffany Moon, came on board), a mini-expansion, etc. Not a big deal, I thought, I've had games manufactured before. I hadn't really calculated that making a game in a pandemic has some unique challenges!
There were some factory delays and shipping issues, but my contact in the factory was very helpful and patient. The games left the port in China JUST as Evergreen got stuck in the Suez Canal. The stress of watching a giant ship get stuck in a canal while I knew my own modest crates of games were coming up the rear was something I don't want to relive! My project also missed the current shipping crisis by a whisker! My freight costs were only 30% higher than planned, not the 400%+ that a lot of creators are currently facing. That's something that nobody expected and few creators can accommodate.
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Money! Money! Money! (Not legal tender, not useful for paying freight costs!)
Solitaire
One thing the delay did offer me was the time to develop a solitaire mode for Luzon Rails. I had heard claims that it was impossible to create a compelling solitaire mode for a cube-rails game because the genre relies so much on players' shared and conflicting incentives. I devised a system in which a non-player bot takes company shares over the course of the game and earns money when dividends pay out. The bot forces the player to diversify their own portfolio and consider how best to develop the companies on offer so that they don't throw too much money in its direction. While it's not a replica of the multiplayer game, it's a fun puzzle, and I'm pretty happy with it!
Another backer and BGG user was extremely gracious and designed a two-player variant — something I hadn't even looked at!
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Shares, track, and private companies!
The Private Companies Expansion
Funding a game on Kickstarter has its own challenges but is also a super exciting way to get life into a project. As backers come in, they bring ideas and enthusiasm with them and really spur me on to do something special. I decided to create an expansion for the game to create more variability in each play by diversifying each of the five companies in the game. The Private Companies Expansion is a set of fifteen mini-companies. At the start of the game, each of the five rail companies acquires one of the mini-companies, granting them some benefit or ability. Maybe the rail company acquires a Jeepney company (a kind of private bus) which makes inland cities more profitable, or maybe they get a smaller railway that grants a few pieces of pre-built track. Touches like that, which make the starting offers in the game unique.
Set up and ready to play!
And now Luzon Rails is here! It's a real thing I can hold in my hands and play and show people. I was always proud of the design, and now I'm super proud to have other people play and enjoy it. Thank you to everybody who helped me get it to this point!
Robin David
[Editor's note: David has copies of Luzon Rails for sale in the BGG marketplace. He did not notify me of this or ask for this link to be included. I wondered about availability myself and discovered it listed. —WEM]
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