Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/6652396/isle-of-trains-all-aboard

Designers: Seth Jaffee, Dan Keltner
Publisher: Dranda Games
Artist: Denis Martynets

I’m not going to lie, we aren’t big train game people; this honestly may be our only train game besides Ticket to Ride. Regardless, this is a great addition to our collection! It’s pretty thematic, as you are building a train and using it to deliver passengers and goods. Each card represents a part of the train you can construct, so you do feel quite immersed in the world overall.

Isle of Trains does hand management in a cool way: each card has a cost to build, and to construct it, you must discard cards from your hand to pay for it. If you’re upgrading a certain type of train car vs. newly building one, you get to subtract the cost of the existing card making the upgrade cheaper. The twist: you don’t draw cards at the start of your turn. You have to use actions to draw cards and/or other actions can potentially help you draw cards. Besides building and drawing a card, you also have the option to load passengers or cargo or deliver passengers and cargo to gain benefits and score points. Like I said, it’s honestly pretty thematic for a card game.

In the solo game, you are trying to maximize your points as usual, but instead of competing against someone, it’s actually a race against the clock. You have exactly one deck of cards to complete as much as you can. At the start, the deck seems so big! You feel like you have so much time, but it depletes incredibly quickly! Also, my favorite aspect of this game is that there are ten solo scenarios included that provide unique goals and stipulations to make each game feel different and to create interesting puzzles. They are wonderful! Some of them are quite tough, but they’re still fun.

The art is nice, the components are decent, it doesn’t take up much table space, has quick set up, clean up, and gameplay, and the box size is reasonable and quite small. The game overall is pretty light in terms of complexity, but there is still strategy involved and it’s more crunchy than it seems when you read the rules. It’s very streamlined and straightforward, but there is still a good decision space in terms of the required card and hand management.

Besides the solo scenarios, there is a lot of randomness of the cards, the passengers, and the ticket tiles related to each location, so this game has decent variety lending well to increased variability and replayability.

Overall, Isle of Trains is a nice, quick, small box game that’s easy to teach, especially with the thematic integration, and that’s still very thinky and fun. It’s not perfect, but it does what it sets out to do very well, and I look forward to more plays, both solo and multiplayer!