From Train to Streetcar – Ride a Train: San Francisco Game Review

The series of train games has been enriched with another box. This time the Rebel publishing house takes us to the west coast of the USA and changes the titular means of transport.

 

Get on a train is a board game known even to those who do not deal with this hobby on a daily basis. The latest installment is Spectre , which was released just before Halloween and is intended for the youngest. However, just before it was released a version in which we ride trams around San Francisco.

Tram to Alcatraz

The box is smaller than the standard one, there are fewer connections on the board and they are shorter. Instead of carriages, we have the mentioned trams and we move around the city, not around the country or continent, as in most previous titles. According to the publisher, the game should not take more than 15 minutes, and indeed my games did not last long.

The general rules are the same as in other versions, i.e. we collect cards in our hand and discard the appropriate colors to create a connection on the map, and when we manage to redeem a ticket, we get points for it. What sets San Francisco apart is the tourism tokens. After preparing all the components, there will be 7 places in the city where you can get pucks. We will get them when there is a token in at least one of the two stops connected by trams. If we don’t have such a color yet, we take it to us. At the end, according to the table in the instructions, we will score points for a set of different colors.

But that was it

Is another box in the series needed? Not me. I mentioned in the Spectrum review that I don’t like this series. And while the children’s Halloween version is cute and I will definitely play it with my child, I don’t see a future for San Francisco on my table. Although the games are more dynamic due to shorter routes and a smaller map, nothing has changed mechanically, except for the chips that we collect by the way. So they don’t have much influence on our moves and we can win without them as well.

Of the pluses, I definitely have to mention the performance. A smaller box, decent molding and nice components are definitely the advantages of the game. It’s good that the publisher added a few spare trams, because after a few days one of them left for an unspecified place in my apartment. I also consider the game time to be an advantage, which has been shortened to 15 minutes, and it is the boredom of over an hour of collecting cards in the original that rejects me so much. Still, it’s not enough to encourage me to expand my collection with another train game. For now, I bet on Widmo as the simplest, prettiest and most atmospheric version. However, I’m still waiting for a release that will allow me to say with a clear conscience that train games are not boring.