Lightning Train Design Diary 3: Interactive Strategy

Lightning Train Design Diary 3: Interactive Strategy

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!

Welcome to the third Lightning Train Design Diary! Previously, we’ve looked at the bag-building fundamentals of Lightning Train, and how they play into major mechanics such as rail lines and deliveries. Today, I’d like to turn the focus towards some of the strategic aspects of Lightning Train.

Interactive Strategy

In the early stages of design, I wanted to find game rules that represented some of the train-style gameplay that I’ve loved in other games, while also injecting my own twists toward making Lightning Train unique. I wanted to put interesting strategic decisions in front of players, and in many ways, this is the toughest part of game design – it’s what keeps me energized and excited about designing games, but also when struggling, it can keep me up at night thinking about what’s going wrong and how to make it better.

There are a couple core strategic pursuits that players always have to think about: building rail lines and making deliveries. This isn’t very different from some other train games, but the contract requirements add a layer of depth to the proceedings that becomes more important the more you play. From a design perspective, I wanted players to be engaged with what other players were doing rather than just playing their own game — keeping an eye on what chips other players are acquiring can help you predict where those players will build.

If a player grabs a contract chip for the Northwest region, it’s likely they intend to build a station over there, which means they could start building railways out of it. What does that mean for you? Could their railways be useful for deliveries you might want to make, or will you race to claim the resources from cities that might be valuable to their new station?


Predicting, and — even more importantly – reacting to other players’ builds should help you with the shared incentive aspect of the game. Because deliveries always take the shortest path from producer city to the station that wants that delivery, you should strongly consider “working together” with other players to form a network that can get the job done. At the same time, you’d prefer that more of your rail lines are on the delivery route than your “partners.” Because, after all, this is a competitive game.

If Raleigh’s crops were delivered to Detroit, Green would score two points for their rail lines and Yellow would score one. (If either of them owned the Detroit station, that would be another point, but the white cube is neutral.) Yellow could turn this board to their advantage by building a crop-requesting station on Baltimore, cutting Green out of the delivery. Alternatively, Yellow could place a station on Chicago and connect it to Detroit with a rail line. This would earn Yellow more points in a crop delivery, but it would also score for Green.


Perhaps the strongest indication of what other players are up to is where they build their stations. How stations worked was something that I iterated on for many months, trying several variations. There were two important breakthroughs worth noting:

  1. In some earlier versions of the game, you didn’t need a contract to build a station. This stemmed from my fear that it would be too restrictive if you needed contracts for rail lines and stations. It turned out I was wrong, and the inconsistency was also disliked by the development team. So, the rule was changed to be consistent with building rail lines, and thankfully it felt both consistent and not too difficult.
  2. While station building was important for establishing a starting position for parts of your rail network, what really made that part of the game sing was when I added a station bonus rule for building rail lines:

When building a rail line, if you have a station in the city on either end of the rail line, you may take and use one basic train from your supply.

This change marked a dramatic shift in the way the game played out. Before this rule, the game sometimes felt rather slow to build up rail lines. After this rule was established, the game felt like it progressed to the endgame faster. In other words, this change dramatically improved the game arc.

Blue has expanded their operation in the Northwest. Due to the fact that stations provide a free train chip for adjacent rail lines, Blue has been able to grow rapidly in this corner of the board. However, isolation can be a double-edged sword — a player claiming their own “area” can sometimes monopolize the resources from nearby cities, but they could just as easily flounder by not being connected to other players’ rail networks, and by extension, the resources and cities connected to them.


Bag-Building Strategy

But there are also strategic considerations outside of the core build-and-deliver mechanics. How you build your bag can be of utmost importance. In the last article, I provided some hints at this with a list of some important icons you can find on chips to add to your bag.

One of my favorite mechanics in Lightning Train is the “plus” icon. Officially, it’s called a bonus icon, but because the icon itself is a plus sign, a lot of playtesters just use that word. What’s great about this icon is that when you’re filling your boarding area, any chip you draw that has this icon can be placed in a bonus slot instead of a regular boarding area slot. This is important because once all five of your regular boarding area slots are filled, you stop drawing from your bag. So, bonus chips are… a bonus!

Your boarding area has two columns: the two slots on the left with “plus” icons, and the five empty ones on the right. Every turn you’ll draw chips until you fill the right column, but bonus chips go to the bonus icons instead. Filling them both can allow you to play seven chips in one turn instead of five — and those two extra chips can make a big difference!


Lots of chips have bonus icons, I refer to them as “bonus chips.” But the thing is that you only have two bonus slots. After you’ve filled in both of your bonus slots, any bonus chips you draw must go to your regular slots. So, if you over-index on bonus chips, you’ll be wasting their potential. But there is a solution to this “problem” – every player board has the Industrialize railway action! 

You can Industrialize once you’ve built two stations on the board by committing two trains to the action. This flips your Industrialize board to the other side. Now, for the rest of the game, you’ve got four bonus slots! Deciding whether to Industrialize or not can be very important and depends on your bag composition.

Locomotives

This all leads me to another of my favorite mechanics in Lightning Train: locomotives. I mentioned in the last article that you acquired locomotives by acquiring chips with conductor icons. Locomotives are a powerful tool at your disposal, for two reasons:

  1. They are bonus chips, which means they (hopefully) won’t use your regular boarding area slots. In turn, this means they’re particularly good for activating railyard actions. Why? Because any train that activates a railyard action moves to your warehouse and then back to your bag. Thus, you’d generally rather cycle your locomotives back to your bag than basic trains, because basic trains can “gum up” the boarding area in a way that locomotives won’t.
  2. Because locomotives are so good at cycling through your bag and activating railyard actions, I wanted the design to also reward the player for dedicating their locomotives to the board. So, I decided to make locomotives a core part of one of the core parts of the game: the assembly of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Scoring the Transcontinental Railroad

Building the Transcontinental Railroad is a shared goal that players have during the game. Once it has been established, it is usually the reason the game comes to an end (if Seattle and/or Houston are connected to it, depending on player count). But the moment the Transcontinental Railroad is established, players score points for it as follows:

  • Determine the shortest path (using the fewest number of rail lines) from New York to San Francisco. If there is a tie, use the path that has the most locomotives.
  • For each locomotive on that path, its owner scores 2 points.

Here we see a completed Transcontinental Railroad. Blue earns a big payday from their three locomotives in the route, while purple has only one. Yellow’s locomotives didn’t make it into the scoring path, and Green didn’t even end up connecting to the route at all. Anticipating the ebb and flow of the emerging Transcontinental Railroad — and placing locomotives accordingly — can be a decisive aspect of your strategic decision-making in Lightning Train.


What this all means is this: locomotives are useful to keep around in your bag. But locomotives can also be really effective if placed properly on the board. Navigating when and where to deploy them to the board can be critical and can sometimes be a key part of dramatic victories.

Lightning Train is Now Available!

And that’s a wrap for this Design Diary! In the next (and final) Design Diary, we’ll be taking a look at the game’s solo and 2-player modes. Lightning Train is now available — be sure to secure your copy your Friendly Local Game Store or the Dire Wolf web store!

What do you think of Lightning Train so far? Join the conversation on the Dire Wolf Discord and BoardGameGeek and let us know!

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