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For BGG.CON 2021, I brought Friedemann Friese's Free Ride, which I had played three times earlier in November, loved, and wanted to explore in more depth. I played the game five times during the show, which on one hand seems like a lot and on another like not much at all.
Free Ride gives me everything I want in a game: simple rules that involve a dose of luck and that create a shared gamespace in which your (tiny) actions directly affect what other players can do — not to mention what you can do — and in which those actions create something that serves as a record of play. Here's how our board looked near the end of our first game:
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That yellow player dominated central Europe, so much so that he probably hurt himself in the process since he limited his ability to deliver goods anywhere outside his area and the thicket of yellow rails discouraged the other two players from offering money to nationalize that track. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Let me describe the game so that you know what I'm referring to.
In Free Ride, players collectively build a rail network in Europe with the general goal of visiting as many different cities as possible. At the heart of the game is an abstracted pick-up-and-deliver challenge that resembles randomly created tickets from Ticket to Ride. City cards are laid out in columns of three cards, and within a column you can (1) start your route in the city on the top card and end it in the city on the middle card or (2) start your route in the city on the middle card and end it in the city on the bottom card.
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In the leftmost column, you'd greatly prefer to travel from Bruxelles to Marseilles to complete a route, but that's not an option! No, you have a giant dogleg in the middle that takes you to Oslo, whether to deliver or pick up, and that option might be so unattractive right now that you'll look elsewhere for a route to complete — but it partly depends on where you've already built track.
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My storage system is on full display here
In this case, I already have track through Stockholm and reaching Prague won't take too much effort, but first I have to deliver one of the loads I already have on board — and the actions of the game are all contained in this single sentence. On a turn, you can:
• Put track on the board. As in TransAmerica, you have two placement points with which to place track. Most spaces require only one placement point to place track, but you must spend two placement points to claim tunnels or ferries.
• Move your train. You can move your train 1-2 links regardless of their length, with movement over your own link or a state-owned link being free and with movement over an opponent's link costing you a coin, which is worth 3 points at game's end; after this payment, this link becomes state-owned, so no one needs to pay again.
• Get more track. Take five track from the supply if you have only 0-1 pieces of track.
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Another 2p game, with us being far more in your face this time
As you move your train, you'll drop off a load, then (likely) go somewhere else to pick up another, with the loads consisting of nothing more than the city cards themselves. The first time you collect a city card, it's worth 5 points, whereas the second or third time you collect that same city card, it's worth only 2 points. Thus, you are encouraged to go broad, but that requires you to build up a larger network or pay to use the track of others. Pay in time or pay in money — that's the dilemma you face continually all game.
An interesting aspect of the column system of ticket generation is that the central card must be part of the route, but the unchosen card at the top or bottom of the column is removed from play. You want diversity in your routes, but a city card you want might be discarded thanks to someone else choosing a route — which means you need to keep an eye on where everyone is on the board, whether they have empty space in their train car, and whether track exists that will allow them to scoop up a route ahead of you. All too often I'm one turn away from, say, Athens for a delivery to Moscow only to find that I overlooked someone in Helsinki who will pick up in Moscow for delivery in Copenhagen. Yoinked again!
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The pace of the game works wonderfully, with players having one train car that holds a single load. You want to focus on short routes so that you can build, move, build, move, but of course everyone else also wants short routes, so those are claimed quickly...as long as track to those pick-up locations exists. If you're not careful, though, you'll build track to a city in order to pick up on the next turn only to have someone else use your track first to snipe you — and if you do move to pick up a route without having exit track already in place, someone else might build that track first to try to get you to pay them to use it.
Once you finish the first deck of city cards, with each of the 45 cities appearing once, you start the identical second deck, with each player getting a second train car, allowing you to take advantage of what's already been built by carrying two loads. When you enter the third deck, your train speeds up, traveling up to three links on a turn, and since much of the board will be developed, your focus is much more on hitting targets quickly, adding new cities to your collection, and trying to time deliveries so that you have good choices. You don't know which cards will be flipped in a column, of course, but if the current choices aren't good for you and others will likely pick up first, then perhaps new ideal routes will be revealed.
The game plays with chance in an entertaining way, allowing you to gamble on which cities might show up where in a column and what they'll be paired with, and you need to smartly assess not only how valuable a load will be for you, but what might be available once you have more room for another load.
Decisions are tiny and numerous, with consequences that aren't always clear until many turns later. After eight playings on a review copy from 2F-Spiele, I'm winless and not sure how to play well or what I'm doing wrong, but I love the challenge of the game and still want to play more to try to improve.
I go into far more detail about the game, including rules elements that I've ignored in this summary and how I'm fighting myself as much as other players, in this video:
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