An Introduction to Lightning Train

July 24, 2025

Full steam ahead! Lightning Train, the new bag-building strategy game from designer Paul Dennen (Dune: Imperium, Clank!) has pulled into Friendly Local Game Stores across the US and is now available for purchase, both on retail shelves and the Dire Wolf store!

All aboard the Lightning Train! Hop on board as we take you on a tour through the game’s fundamental mechanics, goals, and the bag-building mechanics central to the many actions you can take.

The Object of the Game: Railway Dominance!

In Lightning Train, your railway companies will build networks of rail lines across the country to bring North America into the age of steam, ultimately working towards the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. The completion of this link — spanning from New York to San Francisco (plus a couple of essential cities) — is what triggers the endgame.

That being said, the object of the game is to surpass your opponents by becoming the most successful rail company in the land! This means having the most victory points at game’s end!

While victory points can be earned in a variety of ways, the lion’s share of your prosperity as a railway mogul will come from the following two tasks: building rail lines, and making deliveries by moving goods through them.

Goal #1 – Building Rail Lines: The steam engine won’t be changing the world if it has no way to move through it, and that’s where rail lines come in. Now, your rail-building efforts aren’t entirely altruistic — any deliveries made using your rail lines pads your pocket with victory points, and that’s why you and your competitors will be racing to build as many as possible throughout the North American frontier!
Goal #2 – Making Deliveries: Once rail lines are in place, you can put your trains to work by transporting goods from one connected city to another! Each rail line that’s used in any given delivery will reward its owner points, which means you have some interesting decisions to make: will you work together and share the wealth, or will you try to go it (mostly) alone and hoard the deliveries?

Taking a Turn in Lightning Train: Bag-building Your Way to Victory

Lightning Train is a bag-building game, which means that you will randomly be drawing chips out of a bag every turn, and those chips will determine which options you have available at your disposal. Though the pulls may be random, you’ll be the one deciding what goes into your bag, so it’s up to you to tilt the odds to your favored strategy and set yourself up for success!

Let’s take a closer look at an average turn in Lightning Train, and how bag-building plays an important role in your strategic decision-making.

Load Your Boarding Area with Chips from Your Bag

Your turn begins with five chips pulled randomly from your bag, placed on the Boarding Area of your player board. Let’s imagine that you’ve drawn the five chips above, and explore what you could do with this set of chips in a single turn.

Use Trains to Build Rail Lines OR Play Railyard Actions

First, let’s focus on train chips. You can never have enough of them! That’s because they’re used for two very important purposes: building rail lines, and playing railyard actions.

RAIL LINES

With three train chips, you could build from Raleigh to Atlanta, but not Raleigh to Louisville. The latter requires four chips, and you can’t build incomplete rail lines!

As mentioned above, rail lines are useful because your lines will grant you points every time any player uses them for a delivery, but you’ll also (usually) get a one-time point bonus for constructing them! To build a rail line, you must be able to fill every slot of an unbuilt rail line on the board. With three train chips, for example, you could build a rail line from Raleigh to Atlanta.

With that said, trains aren’t the only chips you’ll need to build a rail line. The chip you see above is a contract, and contracts determine where you can build each turn. No contract? No building! This contract shows “A” and “NE,” representing the Atlantic and Northeast regions. That means you can build your Raleigh -> Atlanta rail line. As long as you have a contract for one of the regions your rail line touches, you’re good to go!

RAILYARD ACTIONS

You can play a railyard action once you’ve filled each of its slots with train tokens, but you don’t have to do so right away. Use your train tokens to “charge” up your railyard actions over multiple turns, or save them for decisive moments!

Those other empty slots on your board are railyard actions, and you can play them once you’ve played the required number of train chips to their spaces.

Railyard actions can open up opportunities and improve the efficiency of your rail company. For example, Use Explosives and Secure Contract expand your options for building rail lines, while Build Station allows you to place a station on the board, which serves as a hub for building new rail lines and also grants points when it accepts deliveries. For some extra peace of mind, Line Storage allows you to save a train chip for later!

Make a Delivery

Detroit is requesting crops, which could be delivered from Raleigh. In this delivery, Yellow and White would both earn 1 point — White for owning the Detroit Station, and Yellow for having 1 rail line. Green would earn 2 points because he has two rail lines on the delivery route.

Remember when we talked about making deliveries earlier? You’ll need a chip with a delivery icon to do that, and spoiler alert: you won’t find that in your starter chips! However, each player does get two “free” deliveries per game, represented by one-time-use tokens.

There are two different types of cities on the board: those producing goods, and those that request them. Producer cities are accompanied by resource tokens, and cities with goods requests will house a station. To make a delivery, you’ll need a city with a goods request and a producer city, both connected by a series of rail lines. If these conditions are met, you’ll move one of the goods to its new destination. But more importantly, each rail line used in the delivery scores a point for its owner!

Acquire New Chips

A dollar sign on a chip represents money generated for the given turn. This money doesn’t carry over from turn to turn, so spend wisely! At any point during your turn, you can spend your money to buy new chips from the Market. These new acquisitions will initially go to your warehouse (similar to a discard pile in a deck-building game) and eventually be loaded into your bag to be drawn on future turns.

Reset for Next Turn

After each turn, you’ll ideally have played your train tokens to choice actions, acquired new chips, and leveraged the benefits from the rest of your chips the best you could. At this point, it’s time to reset for your next turn! The chips in your boarding area are moved to the warehouse, and you’ll place five (or more!) new chips on your board, locked and loaded for the next round.

At any point where you run out of chips in your bag while you’re placing them, you’ll take all of the chips in your warehouse and put them back in your bag!

But What’s a Lightning Train?

There’s still quite a bit more in Lightning Train that we haven’t covered here, from special cards to those little plus signs on your player board. Those are topics for another day, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to talk about the game’s namesake: Lightning Trains!

Remember how you use your train chips to build rail lines? Well, this means you’re always using up your trains, and you’ll have to continually acquire more. That’s where Lightning Trains come in! Every time you trigger a Lightning Train icon, you can pull one train chip from your supply and place it in the lightning zone of your boarding area. This train is immediately usable, and doesn’t take up any of your boarding zone slots!

Every player starts with one Lightning Train icon on one of their starting chips, but there are many more to be found across various chips, cards, and even permanent high-cost market spots. Lightning Trains are the ticket to your success as a rail mogul, so always be keeping an eye out for them!

All Aboard the Lightning Train!

In this preview, we’ve looked at the big picture goals you’re chasing in Lightning Train, the actions you can take during your turns to achieve them, and how those actions are shaped by the bag-building mechanic at the heart of the game. There’s still plenty more to talk about, so be sure to check out the Design Diaries linked below to learn more!

Lightning Train is now available at Friendly Local Game stores in the US, and online on the Dire Wolf store. Follow us on Bluesky or join the Dire Wolf Discord to stay updated on all things Lightning Train, and join the conversation on BoardGameGeek!