Lightning Train Design Diary 1: The Beginning of the Railroad

July 28, 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!

Hi, I’m Paul Dennen, the designer of Lightning Train, which is now available on the Dire Wolf store. I started work on this game back in December of 2022. At the time, I was interested in expanding the deck-builder board game hybrid designs that we’re known for at Dire Wolf (Clank! and Dune: Imperium) into exploration of a train game design.

I’ve always enjoyed a good train game and enjoy a wide spectrum of complexity within them. I enjoyed 1830 and Iron Dragon back in the 90s; then in the 2000s, I played some of Alan Moon’s great train games like Union Pacific and Ticket to Ride. I also enjoy Steam, Railways of the World, and several more. I also played Hisashi Hayashi’s Trains in 2012 which I believe is the first game where “deck-building meets train game.” I obviously wanted to try a different spin on the mash-up, but at the time, I didn’t realize that it would ultimately shift away from deck-building to bag-building.

The Beginnings of Lightning Train

I’m a big fan of games that have strong thematic integration, and I think the train genre provides some of the most natural thematic integration of any board game genre. When you’re learning a good train game, I think the rules tend to be a bit more accessible to people, because they build on a foundation that most of us have understood since we were young. I find that, as a player in a good train game, the process of building rail lines is intuitive and immersive: the decisions you’re making don’t feel wildly different from the decisions you can imagine were made by train company operators of the past.

For Lightning Train, I started with the shared rail network delivery model I’d greatly enjoyed in some other train games. At the same time, I intentionally avoided a “shares of company stock” method seen in some of those games. My design philosophy attracted me to the former while pushing away the latter for the same reason; I highly prioritize game mechanics that are strategic, have a relatively high “ease of use,” and I tend to steer very clear of games that have a lot of math and calculation required to make good decisions. Put another way, I much prefer individual elements to be relatively simple but that combine to form something more complex. Ideally, players are put in situations where they generally use intuitive decision-making rather than number-crunching to make their decisions.

To that end, I ended up narrowing the game down to a few core concepts. If you haven’t read our previous article, An Introduction to Lightning Train, you might want to check it out now. In that article, you’ll learn how your options for rail building are determined by the chips you draw from your bag each turn.

A Railway Empire Built on Chips

For rail building, I decided to limit “where” players could build to create a core part of the game experience. I borrowed the “you are what you eat” concept from Dune: Imperium, using a contract system roughly analogous to DI’s agent icon system. You can’t just build a rail line anywhere; you must have a card with a contract for a particular region to build there. Here’s an example of a card in one of my earliest prototypes:

When played, this card would give you 2 money (generally used to buy more/better cards), one train, and the ability to build in the West map region.

Fast forward to late January 2023 when I’d revamped the game from a deck-builder to a bag-builder, and this same kind of gameplay was now presented to players as chips that could be purchased and added to their bags. Chips that look like this:

This chip provides you with a contract to build in the Midwest. It also generates 2 money and one lightning train when you play it. And those markings on the bottom indicate that its starting price is 6 money. (Think of it like tally marks, where the long bar signifies a 5 and the short bar signifies a 1.)

By contrast, this simpler chip’s starting price is only 2. It provides you with no contracts, but it also provides you with a hefty 3 money whenever you play it.

There are a lot of implications to discuss here, so let me tackle some of the most important pieces:

Money and Starting Price

Of these five chips, three of them generate 1 money, giving you 3 money total to spend on new chips at the market.

First, I really wanted to depart from a traditional mechanic of accumulating money common to a lot of train games. In many of those games, you manage your stash of money and decide how to spend it to build out a rail network. I was interested in finding an approach that was less potentially punishing. Make one math mistake in planning out a route, and you can tank your entire game. In a longer-running train game, knowing your company is essentially bankrupt in the early-to-mid game can end up being pretty demoralizing. So, I went with a more abstract approach to money.

The money you generate on your turn (by playing chips) lets you buy new chips from the market. The market always offers six chips to players. When a chip is purchased, a new market chip is revealed and added to the market, based on the matching the markings on the bottom of the with those on the market’s compartments.

If a compartment is full when a new chip is revealed, those chips get pushed to the left to make room for the new chip. Thus, chip prices can fall over time based on player decisions. The price of an overlooked chip can easily fall once or twice during the game before someone pulls the trigger to buy it.

Lightning Trains

As the titular mechanic, you might already be guessing that these are important. I wanted to differentiate money strategies from building strategies by using some abstracted and separated mechanics. I didn’t want money to be the source of everything because that wouldn’t have made for interesting chip purchasing / bag-building decisions. Chips that generate a lot of money represent your company’s operations and investment activities outside of rail-building, while contracts and lightning train icons are important for building rail networks.

One viable strategy in Lightning Train is what we called in playtesting the “big money strategy;” an approach that can be important if you decide to go public with your company, but if you take this approach, your actual rail networks might lag behind your competitors. Big money strategies can also allow you to buy powerful chips, essentially investing in the future. The trick, similar to a lot of deck-building games, is to decide when to make an investment vs. when to take an immediate benefit. Built into the market at the 7- and 8-money thresholds are opportunities to convert your cash into lightning trains. This is a nod to the fact that cash provides powerful flexibility and can be deployed in a variety of ways. Whereas lightning trains and various other mechanics represent your company’s already-committed infrastructure and ability to build out its rail lines.

Lightning Train is Now Available!

There’s a lot more to talk about to paint a full picture of the game, as well as some of the design challenges that had to be overcome to develop the game into a finished product. Next time, we’ll get into how players can deploy trains to the board or to their personal railyards.