Packed In for Extra Fun: Adding New Layers of Strategy to Lightning Train with Mergers & Acquisitions

October 15, 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!

Lightning Train captures the essence of building a transcontinental empire – securing trains and contracts, constructing shared rail networks across North America, and planning elaborate deliveries for maximum points. With Lighting Train now available on store shelves, there’s a surprise waiting for you right inside the box that will add even more layers to your rail-building endeavors: the Mergers & Acquisitions mini-expansion!

This optional add-on is a seamless enhancement that injects fresh strategic possibilities into Lightning Train, making every game feel like a new adventure of corporate cunning. Let’s take a look at how it works!

What is Mergers & Acquisitions?

Mergers & Acquisitions is a mini-expansion to Lightning Train – included in every box at no extra cost – that introduces a twist to route-building: during setup, you’ll select a handful of rail lines on the map, and block them off with tokens representing rail lines from private companies. These blocked rail lines will often land on high-traffic paths that cross vital regions, or connect to bustling cities, creating new decision points with each and every game.

Evoking the age-old rivalries of railroad barons, there is one way to get rid of these tokens: buying out your competitors! Every private rail line can be acquired at a price which, once paid, allows you to replace the token with your own trains.

When you acquire a private rail line, you immediately replace its token with the corresponding number of trains. These trains come from your supply rather than your bag, giving you opportunities for expansion regardless of the chips you draw on your turn. You can even include a locomotive!

Private rail lines aren’t beholden to the normal rules of building rail lines. No contracts? No tunneling? No train chips drawn from your bag? No problem! As long as you’ve got the money (and a connecting rail line), you can acquire private rail lines and replace them with your own. These can also be built in addition to the one rail line you can usually build on a turn. The downside? You won’t score the points shown on the given route, but that can be a small price to pay for rapid expansion!

Here are some of the ways that private rail lines can be impactful to your game:

More Options

Private rail lines can provide more choices on those turns where you don’t draw any trains from your bag. Normally, the only thing you’d be able to do with this hand would be to buy a new chip — but since this player is connected to a private rail line, they could buy it out instead and get four trains on the board in a vital connection between two regions!

Even the most well-built bag won’t give you exactly what you hoped for 100% of the time – that’s just the nature of bag-building! But in those turns where your chips just don’t quite give you the opportunities you were hoping for, private rail lines can be an appealing way to get some value out of your turn, so long as you’ve drawn some money. They can also be used for powerful combos: private lines can be used for potential surprise plays and rapid acceleration across the map, due to the fact that you can build them in addition to the usual one rail line you’re allowed to build each turn.

Big Money

7 money can do a lot for you — it’s enough to acquire the most expensive private rail lines in the game, such as the one shown here, which would allow the Green player to beat Blue to the Winnipeg station. It can also trigger powerful bankroll effects, which can be seen on one of the market chips up top: 2 points for generating 7 income!

The purpose of money in the base game is to purchase new chips from the market, but with a secondary avenue for spending in the form of private rail lines, some interesting new questions are raised: is acquiring a private rail line worth the opportunity cost of not purchasing a new chip? How will this change the value of money in the later game, where the odds of being able to use your newly acquired chips get lower and lower? Do the value and locations of the private rail lines justify a “big money” bag-building strategy? Mergers & Acquisitions redefines the role that money plays in your games of Lightning Train, giving you entirely new factors to consider in your bag-building strategies.

Never the Same Game Twice

With this setup, this game is already off to an unconventional start: it’s not easy to go westward outside of the mountain tunnel paths. Players will need to either invest in tunneling early on, or go north or south. Alternatively, they could prioritize a money-heavy bag-building strategy in order to seize control of those valuable rail lines!

With different lines getting cordoned off every game, each combination encourages new experimentation in the way that you plan your rail lines. You can set up the private company tokens according to combinations in the rulebook, or decide as a group where they go. Expensive private lines at the heart of the East Coast can dramatically change the way the early game plays out, whereas on the West Coast, they might just paint a picture of the hotspots that players might race to later. The only thing you can be sure of is that every game will feel different!

At least one route will be blocked entirely when playing with Mergers & Acquisitions. No paying your way through this one, you’ll just have to find a different way around!

Locomotive Locomotion

Both players have viable paths to the end of the Transcontinental Railroad, with just a private company token in the way. Normally, blue’s path would be prioritized in scoring the Transcontinental Railroad because it has more locomotives — but if purple acquired the private line and added a locomotive of their own, they would get to decide the tiebreaker and cut off blue’s route!

Mergers & Acquisitions gives you the opportunity to play trains straight from your supply when you acquire private rail lines, and one of these can be a locomotive! Given that the Transcontinental Railroad (when completed) scores extra points for every locomotive in its path, this can change the way that you approach its construction. Could it be worth saving some locomotives in your supply if there are private company tokens sitting on viable Transcontinental Railroad paths?

All Aboard!

Mergers & Acquisitions is also playable in solo and two-player mode!

Mergers & Acquisitions turns your railway adventure into a story of ambition and conquest, where spending money to acquire exclusive lines will make you feel like a tycoon, keeping an ever-watchful eye on your rivals and turning bottlenecks into lucrative new opportunities. But even more importantly, it adds strategic new layers to Lightning Train, enhancing replayability with a map that charts a different destiny for North America in every single game.

Lightning Train is now available at Friendly Local Game Stores, and online from the Dire Wolf web store. Get your copy today, and for all other things Lightning Train, join the conversation on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and BoardGameGeek!