How to play Night Train

A turn is one of three things, never two

Take two carriage cards, or claim one line on the map, or take on more tickets. That is the whole turn and the whole game, and it is why a table of five moves quickly despite the board being large.

Cards come from five face up or from the top of the pile. Sleepers are the wild card and spend as any colour; taking a face-up one costs your entire turn, which is the price of taking the thing everybody wanted.

A line costs its own colour, and its length

Every line on the map is a number and a colour: four moss, three brass, six of anything at all on the grey ones. Pay it and the line is yours for the rest of the game, and the longer the line the better it pays — a six is worth sixteen and a two is worth two, because six matching cards is five turns of holding on while other people build.

Six of the lines are water and the fare has to include a Sleeper, whatever else it includes. The carriages went onto a boat and somebody had to have a berth on it.

The screen tells you which lines you can afford before you press anything, and when you press one it lists the ways of paying — three brass and a Sleeper, or four brass — as sentences rather than as a colour to work out.

The tickets, which are the part that can go wrong

A ticket names two cities and pays you for joining them by any route at all. You start with four and keep at least two, and you may take on three more at any point in the game.

It is not free upside. A ticket you fail to connect takes the same number of points back off you at the end, so a long one taken on in the last five minutes is a real gamble. That single rule is where the whole game's tension comes from: everything else is arithmetic.

The last lap, and the reckoning

The moment anybody has two carriages or fewer left, everybody gets exactly one more turn and the game stops. Somebody building short lines fast can therefore end it before the person holding out for a night haul has spent anything.

Then the tickets come face up. Every one you joined pays, every one you did not takes its points off you, and the longest unbroken run of your own track is worth ten more.

Questions people ask

Is thirty minutes really thirty minutes?

Yes, and it is the only game on this shelf that long. The clock is the carriages rather than a timer: everybody starts with thirty-six and the game ends one turn after anybody runs down to two. A table of two finishes faster than a table of five, and a table that spends every turn drawing cards can drag — which is itself a thing the other players can do something about, by ending it.

Can I play it on my own?

Yes, against as many as four travellers, and they want genuinely different things rather than being one opponent at three volumes. One holds a single colour and waits for a long run, one builds something every turn wherever it is cheapest, one plays its tickets and nothing else, and one takes the crossings and the pinch points before anybody can. You can see which is which from the board alone.

Do I need to know the map?

No, and knowing Europe is worth surprisingly little. What matters is which lines are still open and how many carriages you have left, and both are on the screen. The city names are there to be read rather than recalled.

What happens if somebody takes the line I needed?

You go round. Every chokepoint on this map has a second way past it — that was a rule the map was checked against rather than a happy accident — and the second way is usually longer and needs a Sleeper. Being shut out entirely is not something the board allows; being made to pay more for the same journey is the game.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Night Train?

No. It runs in the browser everyone already has open. One person opens a room, reads out the six-character code or pastes the link into the channel, and everyone else is at the table in a couple of seconds.

Do we need accounts?

No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address anywhere in the flow. You pick a name when you sit down, and that is the whole of it.

How many people can play Night Train?

1 to 5 — best with three or four. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Night Train take?

About 30 minutes, which is the length of a coffee break rather than the length of a games night. Nobody is the host in the sense of holding the controls, so a round finishes whether or not everyone is still looking at it.

Does it work over a video call?

That is what it is for. The game is on the screen and the talking is on the call — nobody has to describe a board to anybody, and the parts that must stay private stay on the server rather than being read out.