Cretaceous Rails Board Game Review
As I noted in our components review and overview of Cretaceous Rails, I honestly wasn’t expecting much when I perused the games Kickstarter page. Once again, this is a strong lesson in not judging something by pictures or overviews. I admitted I was wrong about the production quality in that article – it is top notch! – and I’ll admit I was wrong again as we discuss this game in detail – this is a fantastic experience.
Cretaceous Rails is exceptional, and I think it’s not until you handle all the amazing pieces and get the game down to the table that you really begin to appreciate how much it offers. In a world full of bland board games lacking theme and direction, Cretaceous Rails provides this in spades. The theming is excellent – who doesn’t love dinosaurs – but it’s the turn-to-turn choices that makes this game so much fun to play.
In Cretaceous Rails, players will be building railroads, capturing dinosaurs on trains, and taking tourists deep into the jungle, all in an effort to score points and have the most successful dinosaur and rail empire. The game is driven by a grid system of actions that changes each round. Players will use their pawn to straddle two actions in the 4×4 grid, allowing them to complete both those actions on their turn.
The actions allow players to build railroads, cut down trees, capture dinosaurs, and more. My first positive for this game is how this grid changes round-to-round, forcing players to constantly adapt their strategies depending on what is available to them. It’s also a game where being the first player is pretty important, providing you the MOST choice at the start of the round.
A majority of the system is driven by colors – attempting to match colored tourists with colored dinosaurs. Planning your routes, for the most part, will depend on what dinosaurs you want to catch, but also which tourists you plan to tour through the jungle. The issue is that tourists cannot see the wild dinosaurs if there are trees blocking their views, so you’ll also want to plan some deforestation efforts if you want to score points for matching those colors.
Want another wrinkle to consider? Your train only has so many cars and doing all these actions requires space on the train. Cut down a tree? You’ll need a train car to put the tree on. Capture a dinosaur, or want to take a tourist through the jungle? They will need individual train cars too.
Taking tourists and capturing dinosaurs is important as you’ll unload them off your train and use them for other purposes. Tourists not only move your makers up different color tracks, but they, along with dinosaurs and trees, can be used to play cards in front of you that provide additional bonuses, and end game points as well based on your tracks.
I could write at length on how to play the game, but I suggest watching this video from Let’s Table It to learn how it works!
Games that capture my attention when I have zero interest are always fascinating. We all look at games with inherent bias, and for our gaming group who played this numerous times, I was the only one who was aware of what it was. It made me think long and hard before putting pen to paper: how did this game grab my attention? Why do I want to keep playing it?
I think it all comes down to the card play – it’s what sets this game apart and makes it unique. Not only are cards providing benefits and points, but they also get placed in a grid, 3 cards tall. Depending on where you play that card in the grid depends on the benefit you get out of it. Deciding what should go higher on the grid (more beneficial) and what should go lower on the grid (less beneficial) is another key strategic element that needs to be considered when playing turn-to-turn.
What I love here is that there is another reason to play a lot of cards! Dinosaurs you capture and place on your player board are only worth half the value of where that colored star ends it’s movement at the end of the game – if you use them to play a card, though, you’ll earn the full points.
It might sound like a lot of things are happening, but it is all so seamless. Doing A helps B, and when you complete B you’ll benefit from it when you do C, and so on. There are opportunities to diversify your strategy, as other players might throw a wrench into your plans. The player interaction here is quite high, which I’m finding less and less of in board games year over year. And the interaction is fantastic.
Reading other players is pretty important as you decide what to do and in what order. For example, it’s great to take down a tree so that on a future turn you can tour guests through the jungle; however, what happens if before you can do that, another player captures the dinosaur thanks to your deforestation efforts?
And that brings us full circle to the action selection grid. It is so satisfying when you can get two actions that work so well together. In the above example, it doesn’t matter if you deforest a tile so you can run a tour, if you run the tour right away using your second action. Those moments, when everything falls into place and rewards your patient and strategy, just feel so good and impactful.
As I said off the top, this wasn’t a game I was expecting to love, but I knew I was interested enough to write some content around the game when the Kickstarter campaign launched. Now that I have it, it’s a game that will live amongst my modest collection, and that is huge praise. GamesReviews reviewed and/or played over 100 games last year, and only a fraction of those get to stay in the collection – this is a keeper, and might become my game of the year at this point.