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A rail game good enough to spawn a direct descendant (Santa Fe Rails)... here, thanks to Alan Moon, is a bit of history on it's design, some variants, and a little bit more. All of this is from The Color of the Wind newsletter. |
last update: October 30, 2004 | |||
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Preview SANTA FE is a game about the western expansion of railroads in the United States. The gameboard is a map that covers the area from Chicago and New Orleans in the east to Seattle and Los Angeles on the west coast. There are five railroads in the game: Great Northern, Union Pacific, Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe, Kansas Pacific, and Southern Pacific. Each turn, a player may build track for any of the railroads. Players gain points for connecting each new city on the map and special bonus points for connecting cities which were key parts of actual railroad lines. The object being to connect up the cities in which the player has an interest. Of course, since each player will have interests in different cities, players will often find themselves at odds when building the railroads. Which is what makes it a game. For 2-5 players, the average game length is about an hour. Components include a gameboard showing a map of the Western United States, 128 Pieces of Track, a Deck of 66 City Cards, 9 Double Turn Cards, 10 Branch Line Cards, 5 Engineer Cards, Money Chips, a First Player Train, and Rules. Rules Questions
Variants Double Turn Cards Equal Start Overview (by Rolf Wichmann) Two Player The First Player is not allowed to play a Double Turn Card. This prevents a player from getting four Track Laying Turns in a row, which could happen if the player going second plays a Double Turn Card and lays two pieces of track in the Second Track Laying Turn, then becomes the First Player and plays a Double Turn Card and lays two pieces of track in the First Track Laying Turn. Designer's Desk - Santa Fe (Spring 1993) When non-gamers learn that I design games, invariably the first question they ask me is, "Where do you get your ideas from?" I used to have trouble answering because I didn't think I really knew where my ideas came from. These days, most of the time it's very clear to me where I get my inspiration. What I'm not sure about now is whether that means I've gotten smarter or dumber. But I thought I'd try to share some of my thoughts on the how and why of game design, and then you can decide for yourself which way I'm going. One of the best sources for ideas is simply other games. To illustrate this point, let me describe how I designed SANTA FE. One of my two all-time favorite games is WILDLIFE ADVENTURE. There are many aspects of the system that appeal to me, but the most appealing of all is the mechanic that allows any player to move any of the available pieces in the game. If you've ever played WILDLIFE ADVENTURE, you can easily see how this same basic mechanism became the starting point in the design of SANTA FE. I decided to use a map of the Western USA because I thought I needed a large area.With that and the basic mechanism set, the first decison to be made was how many railroads to include. For no particular reason, I chose five. Amazingly enough, while I briefly considered expanding this to six during the first few playtest games, five turned out to be exactly the right number. So, at this point, what I had was a map, five railroads, and the basic mechanism. Almost too easy this far. It was then time to face the difficult decisions of how many cities to put on the map which would also determine how many cards would be in the game, and how many pieces of track to assign to each railroad. Originally, there were fewer than 25 cities and the values only ranged from 2-5. I'm not sure exactly how many different versions of the map I went through during playtesting, as sometimes only one or two small things changed between games. However, the routes, cities, and number of cards in the final version are much different from the original. The number of pieces of track changed from game to game. Originally, each railroad had a lot more pieces of track, but this made the game much too long, and made it almost inevitable that each city on the map would be connected to one or two railroads every game. The final number of pieces for each railroad puts the game solidly in the 45-75 minutes gamelength and makes it possible to connect every city on the map in some games while connecting only about half of the cities in others. I usually conduct the first playtest of any of my designs solitaire. Many games don't survive past this point. Five minutes into the first game of SANTA FE, I knew something was missing. Playing the track pieces and building the lines was okay, but there was no tension or excitement. Voila, the Double Turn Card. Now the player had a clear choice between two very different courses of play. He could either play a City Card which would produce points at the end of the game or he could play a Double Turn Card in an attempt to exert more control over the final configuration of the lines. In the first game using the Double Turn Cards, I knew they were a trap. While the player who played a Double Turn Card got to build more track and got to take a more active role than the player who played a City Card, this never made up for the points he lost. I tried to convince myself this wasn't a problem, as many players would probably fall into "the trap" on a consistent basis. But it bothered me that I was counting on people's poor play to make the game mechanic work, so eventually I knew I had to fix it. I just couldn't figure out how. I figured I'd just dive right into a real playtest with my friends and see what happened. Not surprisingly, the game was not much of a success. While the game system worked fine, it was quite dull. In fact, if now for a comment by playtester and friend Bob Scherer-Hoock, SANTA FE might have gone down into the basement. The basement, otherwise known as the dungeon, being where all the failed ideas go, usually never to be seen again. What Bob (hereafter known as Mr. Wisdom) said was, "The problem is there are no intermediate goals." Immediately, I had the suspicion he might be right (a shocking revelation in itself) . That night, after a respite of several hours away from games, I not only knew he was right, I thought I knew how to correct the problem. The inspiration was once again provided by another of my favorite games, RAILWAY RIVALS. Incorporating the bonus points system, I played a solitaire game the next day. The improvement was dramatic. A dull game had been transformed into an exciting one. As the next playtest clearly showed. Another problem cropped up almost immediately though. The problem had actually been there all along in the back of my head, but now with other things working, it took center stage for the first time. If you wound up with a horrible hand of City Cards, you were at a significant disadvantage and there was really no way to improve your situation. I fooled around with different ways of draw selection and with different options for discarding and drawing replacements, but none of these seemed to present an easy solution. It also seemed like playing a Double Turn Card was still not quite as good as playing a City Card most of the time, and I began to wonder if I could solve both problems together. Adding the extra advantages of the Double Turn Card evened out the possibilities, and turned out to be the final piece of the design puzzle. Now players were faced with a tough decision each turn. They could chooose to play a City Card which would produce points at the end of the game, but had the disadvantage of not being able to lay much track. Or they could play a Double Turn Card in an attempt to gain points right away and influence the lines more, but thereby give up points at the end of the game. Since it was apparent that it was almost impossible to win by just playing one or the other, the tension had been significantly increased. The problem of having a poor hand of City Cards was also no longer a problem as the player could discard some or all of his hand while still trying to gain points when playing a Double Turn Card. The result is, I hope, a game that combines some features of several fine games with some new ideas of my own, thereby creating a whole that is at least as good as its parts. One final, small point that seems worth mentioning concerns the title of the game. Since there have been so many railroad games over the years, good titles are getting harder and harder to find. My original title was THE RAILROAD'S COMING TO TOWN. I sort of liked it at the time, but now I cringe just looking at it. So please thank Peter when you see him for his suggestion of SANTA FE. Departures Here's some more great info on Santa Fe... as well as a link to stuff about Santa Fe Rails, its direct descendant. Boardgame Geek entry for Santa Fe Boardgame Geek entry for Santa Fe Rails The Game Report from Peter Sarrett | ||
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