This is a review of the board game "The Last Spike", published by Columbia Games, designed by Tom Dalgliesh, based on an earlier game.

Columbia Games seems to think that I'm as good a board game reviewer as I am an RPG reviewer. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but since I've quite liked almost all of their truly excellent wargames (like Crusader Rex, Napoleon, or Richard III), I sure don't mind getting them.

This game is a bit different, however. It's not a wargame!  Will it be as good?  I guess we'll see.

The Last Spike comes in the same format as Columbia's other games, in a box with an attractive 'sleeve' cover depicting a picture of a 19th century train moving through a mountainous area.  As you may have guessed from the name, the thematic of the game involves the building of the American railways.



The interior of the box contains some counters, a fairly small folded board (by modern board game standards, I'd go as far as to call it tiny), some wooden tiles and counters, and some cards. Also, a mercifully thin rulebook (just four small pages long).

So, The Last Spike is a game for 2-6 players (3-5 is the ideal, we are told). In the game, players cooperate in making a continuous railway from St.Louis to Sacramento, but they compete to get the most money out of land speculation before the titular 'last spike' is laid.

Incidentally, this is not one of those all-nighter type of games (good thing, because I'm too old to have patience for those, anymore; even if I still love a good all-nighter of RPG play).  The typical game takes about 45 minutes, if the rulebook is to be believed.  I suspect that doesn't include setup time or the learning curve of the first couple of games.



The game map shows a number of US cities (significant to the railroad era), and a dozen routes that could connect them. Each route has four slots.  The counters represent sections of track laid (and have special codes to connect them to a specific spot on the board).  The cards mark the value of land, and are apportioned to each city. The counters represent money, divided into blue, red and white chips representing values of $10000, $5000, and $1000 each.

Players start with a certain amount of money, variable depending on how many players there are in total. The railway tiles are placed face down and scrambled, and players each draw a tile to determine who goes first, and then four tiles that they start with (hiding them from other players by putting them upright and facing them). In each turn, players have to play a tile, and will get a new tile at the end of their turn.

In each turn, players will lay a track tile on the map, in its designated space. They have to be played in a certain order, either next to a city or next to a track that has already been laid. Each track has a cost associated with laying it, which must be paid by the player. If you're the first player to play a track next to a city, you get the first (free) land grant for that city. If you are playing a subsequent track tile, you have the option to buy land at the price indicated (after the free land grant). When all the tracks linking two cities have been played, all the players who own land in either connected city get a payoff based on the number of land cards they own from each city.



Lands cannot be exchanged or sold between players; players can sell their land back to the bank for HALF its listed cost. If even by that means you cannot afford to pay for the cost of laying a tile, you are bankrupt and have lost the game.

The game ends when the last track is laid to form a continuous route from St.Louis to Sacramento. The player who plays that last tile gets a $20000 bonus. The winner of the game is the player with the most cash left on hand (land cards are not counted, except in the case of a tie).

That's about it. The game is pleasantly simple!  I haven't had the opportunity to play it as of this writing, but I expect to sometime soon, and when I do I'll likely post about it. In any case, I expect the game to be simple but entertaining enough that it would work either as a family game or between a group of friends. It would be the kind of thing that could be done to kill time while waiting for missing players to your RPG session, for example.

I don't really think this game matches the genius of Columbia's wargames, but given that it's a lot more approachable and will probably have a broader general appeal to more people than just those of us who are fanatics of historically-accurate wargame scenarios, I bet that it is likely to be a popular part of their catalog.  If you're looking for an entertaining game to pass the time, you could certainly do much worse than The Last Spike.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Neerup Egg + Rattray's Old Gowrie

Goodness, if I'd known we could have boardgame reviews here, I would have reviewed this ages ago. I really think there should be another place besides BoardGameGeek.

>> I haven't had the opportunity to play it as of this writing<<

Not to sound like a jerk but...geez, it's a 45 minute game, you could have played it in the time it took you to write the review.

You've gone over the components and such, so allow me to add my own few cents (sorry, been a very long day of writing for me, so I'll be brief):

This is a good and solid game, but not awesome. When it comes to train-related boardgames, the big-mac-daddy is Ticket to Ride (TTR), and if you're looking for a light train game, get that, play around 20 times, than come back to The Last Spike.

What does The Last Spike (TLS) bring to the table? The competition is a bit more cuthroat. Yes, you can hurt your opponents in TTR, but that's often an accident or pure dumb luck. In TLS, you still don't hurt your opponents, usually, but you can at least refuse to help them, which is good enough.

The train motif here is understandably light (this is a light game, by definition meaning you have to cut it some slack as a simulation). You randomly draw tracks to play, which is nothing like how real track-building is done.

The game plays a bit like Clue, as you have to use a little bit of guesswork to decide what tracks your opponents are holding back on...playing the last spike grants a bonus, and like many Eurogames, victory (by design) is usually no more than by a few points (or, in this case, few thousand dollars). He who plays the last spike, connecting the track across the whole board, will probably win from those bonus points alone.

Thus, the game usually will devolve into players (especially if there are only 2) simply holding back--you don't want to play the next-to-the-last spike, after all.

Bottom line, it's a fun game, doing a decent job bridging the gap of super-casual games like TTR, and more serious games, while doing a great job of still keeping things fast. There aren't many good 4 player games that can play out in 45 minutes or less and have real strategy in them...this is one.

I agree with you that Columbia does wargames best (although the elegant system could use some more surprises at times), but this game is a testament to the designer's raw talent, that he can take one swing and still make a hit...it's just too hard to compete with TTR, is all.

I've never played TTR. Is it as simple as this?

One of the things I can't stand about most Eurogames is that they're full of excessive complexity, like "in your round you can build structures or hire men or use a special card, or activate your general, or call for a vote in the senate; structures work like x, hiring works like y, cards work like z, generals like a, votes like b, and someone who really knows this game well will know just what to do, but someone who hasn't played before will be totally lost and pretty much doomed to lose".

TTR is kinda-sorta like TLS...and you've been playing the wrong Eurogames if you think they're that complicated.

That said, sure, the first time player will lose to a veteran; I'm hard pressed to think of any game beyond Roullette where that is not the case...and even there a veteran can have a very slight advantage, relevant if you play for hours.

In TTR, you've got three choices on your turn: draw train cards (85% of the time), lay track (10% of the time), get new routes (5% of the time...if you do it twice in the same game, you'll probably lose...and an expert that doesn't warn a novice about this is a jerk)...the rulebook is 4 pages long, and could be half that if it wasn't very thorough. The only real issue in TTR is scoring, I find I have to count the score 3 times to have a decent chance of being confident it's right.

What you do on your turn in TLS is similarly constrained, with more track building, and more decisions about buying.

Scoring in TLS is much easier, everything is either cash or worthless (except for tiebreakers, which never came up). Both games, sadly, play best with 3-4 players, and both are well designed so that 2 players really can't gang up on the third (and also well designed so that one player can't become the runaway leader before late game, if at all). Thus it is that it's difficult to discuss one game without the other.

I strongly recommend you try TTR. I (merely) recommend you play TLS, too.

As I said on the Blog, my friends and I enjoy rail games and have for years, so I can see giving this a shot.

And I think the to the "the Last Spike" sounds like a kick-ass
against-the-vampires game, or story. Clearly one where the Vampires are on the defensive like never before.