Blue Orange | Next Station - London | Board Game | Ages 8+ | 1-4 Players | 25 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

If you zip across the map and cover 9 districts but only hit one station in each one, that’s only 9 points. The cards are randomly assigned to pencil color at the start of the game, and the particular card travels with its pencil for the duration of the game. The challenge is, some of my gaming friends often leave my markers out to dry, so there’s really no winning, here.

Your aim is to score as many points as you can by optimising the routes of the four underground lines on your map of London.

It also made it a lot harder (for some people) to get a lot of interchange stations because of the paucity of stations on those short lines. Each player is given a sheet featuring an abstract map of London with thirteen districts displayed as a grid. Here’s what I do (Gloomhaven): rather than having 1 coin be worth X amount (based on scenario level), I instead put that many there. When playing with my seven year old Max, we tend to leave out scoring the connections so there is less complexity. Your actions are simple: starting from your current pencil color station, and viewing the action’s current card shape (circle, square, triangle, or pentagon, aligning with the station shapes on each player’s sheet), players must draw a single line along the gray pre-printed lines from one shape to one matching the currently flipped card.

The learning curve grows with every game you play and encourages you to try and do even better next time. Although it is easy to miss that you score the leftmost uncoloured number when scoring your tourist attractions. Lines can not cross another line but and must follow the pre-printed dashed lines on the sheet of paper. I kind of like that from a consistency standpoint, and it makes them all look good together, even if they have very different styles. There’s been excitement at our table when a card draw doesn’t go our way, followed by a moment of silence in times where the draw prohibits a legal move thus necessitating a missed turn.The map is divided into thirteen districts, including cheeky single square districts in each corner. Most of the cards show a station type (shape), and you could draw a line from any end of your current line to a station of matching shape to that on the card. There are only 12 cards to flip in the game, but each card number represents a different shape that needs to be drawn. In Next Station: London, everyone has their own copy of the same map of London, but only one of the four colored pencils available to a player each round. The game ends after four rounds, when everyone has built an Underground line in each of the four colors.

It’s a peaceful co-existence, where no-one can disrupt your efforts and everyone is responsible for their own risk management. If you can’t or don’t want to draw a line, you could pass, but your score will likely take a hit as a result. When the 5th Station card is flipped, you each tot up your scores for the round and then the pencils are passed around from left to right (or any unused pencil from the right in a 2 player game). With any fewer than four players, you just set aside the pencils that would be used by those players on their turn if they were in the game.We are a group of passionate individuals who share our love of board games through written and video reviews, articles, and humor, so that others can join us in our journey. This makes it much easier to double back and fill in more Stations in a particular district or to go after Tourist Sites (or cross the Thames multiple times). Granted, you’re not really optimizing for tourist comfort, but you’ll get them there eventually, and that’s what urban transit is all about. When the 5th Underground card (pink and yellow background) is flipped, it signals the end of this round.

But, as mentioned, that’s just a quirk of the solo game; it doesn’t have anything to do with multiple players. You’re faced with a real dilemma: on the one hand you want to expand as quickly as possible but, on the other, you don’t want to get forced into dead ends.For me, it’s easier to learn a game when all of the pieces are read together at the same time – but this is possibly just a style thing. Optimisation and efficiency is key to creating a streamlined yet effective network which traverses London to visit the sights and uses the tunnels that pass under the River Thames. The Tube is the world’s oldest underground railway, launching in 1863, and is now one of the most recognisable features of London as a city – and one of the most distinctive soundscapes in the world. This list has wallet-sized and wallet-friendly games; games for the first timer and for friends who have been playing for years.