All Aboard the Lightning Train!

A new strategy board game is pulling into the station at Gen Con: all aboard the Lightning Train!

Steer your railway company through a land of strategic opportunity in Lightning Train, a new bag-building train game from the creators of Clank! and Dune: Imperium. Build your bag to improve your company’s resources, then place your chips to open stations and train lines across eight regions of North America. There’s a fortune to be made by delivering goods to the cities that need them…but will you work together, or look to cut out the competition? Which stations do you need to secure a route to victory? How can the powerful lightning trains accelerate you past your rivals?

All aboard the Lightning Train!

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From award-winning designer Paul Dennen (Dune: Imperium, Clank!, Wild Tiled West), Lightning Train is a fun new twist on beloved train games, where you draw chips from a personal bag to determine the resources available to your railway company. Purchasing new chips opens up new strategic opportunities – but always at a cost! – and getting the most value out of the deliveries available requires balance and careful planning.

We’ll have a limited number of copies of Lightning Train available early at Gen Con, along with learn-to-play demo sessions running throughout the weekend. Conditions in the board game industry are changing rapidly, but we’re currently anticipating a pre-order this summer, with retail release after Labor Day, and we’ll have more to share as those dates draw closer.

For now, keep an eye out for Lightning Train during the Dice Tower’s Summer Spectacular, and if you’re making the trek to Indy, be sure to add Lightning Train to your Gen Con event wishlist!

Next station…strategy!

A note about tariffs and distribution:

We don’t know what the future holds when it comes to the impact of the crippling import taxes currently imposed on American businesses – too much has been changing too quickly over the past few weeks for us to have confidence in what will be true six months from now, next month, or even tomorrow.

That said, we believe in Lightning Train and look forward to sharing the game with players, even if that involves us doing things differently than previously (or than we would prefer) when it comes to distribution.

We’re still a few months away from Lightning Train arriving at US ports, and we can’t even speculate on what the tariff conditions will be at that point. In the meantime, we’ll be continuing to investigate how we can adapt our distribution network to find realistic and cost-effective ways to get games to players, while we hope for a sensible end to the administration’s taxes that threaten the American board game industry.

If you’re in the US and would like to help, contact your representatives, and – wherever you may be – please consider purchasing a game (and not just one of ours!) from your Friendly Local Game Store.

Thanks for your support; we’ll let you know more when we can.