Quick Look at Ride the Rails : What's in the Box?
Published by: Capstone Games Created by: Harry Wu
I’ve been eagerly awaiting for Capstone Games’ Ride the Rails train game to go on the market. After waiting a few months, RTR finally got to my front door. Today I’ll be opening the box to see what’s in there and hopefully give you a good understanding of the game contents and component quality. Let’s slice up the box and see what’s inside.
the box
Box Wide Open
The box itself is nicely made and sturdy—very dense. It feels like it has a good weight to it. When you first open the box you’ll find a small cardboard insert. Nothing impressive or custom, but it does the job well enough. The board sits nicely into the box cavity and will not jostle around, unless you like to throw your game boxes up in the air—just don’t let it hit your head on the way down.
In the insert you’ll find a smaller compartment where the game’s wooden components, player cards and rules can be found. This is one of the few negatives I immediately found as I looked at the baggie full of trains, tokens, and friendly passengers. There is one bag for all of those components to share. The game set up demands that those wooden passengers be placed on cities throughout the board. Plus all the tokens, trains and markers will need to be fished out of the bag of goodies, separated and organized before play begins. If you have a few baggies handy, they will be needed if you wish to keep things easy for set up.
Moving on…
components
Components at a Glance
I’m happy to say that the components are top notch in how they look and feel. This is obviously up to personal taste, but I prefer wood components over plastic. All the components here are wood, save for the board, and they are shaped as trains in various colors. Tokens and player markers are also round disks, but have thankfully been colored differently from the trains to clearly separate resources from player markers.
The one negative I can place at the wooden trains and passengers is that they are rather small. The following shot is taken with a macro lens, so you might be fooled into thinking these are amply sized. They are in fact smaller than what’s pictured here. On a U.S. penny, they would sit comfortably on it, for reference.
The Six Train Types
The board is sturdy and massive. You will need an ample table to fit the main board, player boards, trains, and rule sheet if you wish to play a full 5-player game. My table sits at 38” wide and as you’ll see, it leaves little room on the sides. However, 3x4 tables should have the space needed if the board is placed the long way over the table’s own length.
The Game Board
how about that art work?
If you know who Ian O’Toole is, you’ll know you’ll be treated to some great art. Here is no different. The graphic design, box art and the strokes and pencil marks are just pure eye candy. This is a wonderful artistic production. The Irish Gauge aesthetic is fully represented here and I couldn’t be more happier.
As you can see, iconography and color palate have this synergy of a fall afternoon right before dusk that any game nerd or designer will appreciate. It flows and I could see myself riding a train on a western trail looking into the setting sun. Just fantastic.
It’s Nice
So what do I think overall? It’s a great package—with an exception. I think the mini trains and passengers could stand to be a smidge bigger, but only time will tell how cumbersome those sizes are. Ticket to Ride did put out an expansion with newly sized cards to replace those smaller mini-euro sized ones that came in the original game, will Capstone try and correct that with a new expansion? Who knows. Maybe with a few extra baggies it could mitigate that potential problem.
However, the art alone is enough of an appetizing excuse to sit down and play with a bunch of friends. Least of all, how will the gameplay hold up aside from the good looking board and art work?
That’s a review for another day.
