Blue Orange | Next Station - London | Board Game | Ages 8+ | 1-4 Players | 25 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

You are awarded points by the Mayor based on a number of things; how many districts your line passes through, how many stations you connect into in your busiest district, how many colour based interchanges you establish, and how many tourist sites you pass through.

The challenge is that you cannot connect the same two Stations more than once (with one line, at least), so you need to make sure that also doesn’t push you into a corner. Pencil Powers are randomized between the four pencils, and offer once-per-round abilities, such as treating a card as wild, treating a card as accompanied by a Railroad Switch, repeating a card, and double-counting a station. Everything is done very professionally with this company and always lets you know every step of the process.Connecting to stations with spiky outlines (Tourist Sites) will let you cross off the leftmost symbol on the bottom of your player board. You never know how long a round is going to last, but with only ten cards of each color (the eleventh card being a junction option), players can easily press their luck by knowing which symbols are still in the draw pile. The maps are not the most attractive thing you will set your eyes upon, but it’s beauty comes from its functionality and very clever layout. After each round pencils are passed to another player and after four rounds and each player has drawn networks of all four underground lines, the game ends and points are awarded.

Weeks before the pandemic hit, I was plotting a course to visit the UK with London as a central destination. For each site passed, cross off one circle on your tourist site track at the bottom of your score card.The shared objective cards mix up the play and stop you formulating a similar plan each time and I like the way these mix up the strategy. The Railroad Switch card and the two “Joker” cards (which give players the right to use any of the four station symbols) are easily the most important ones in the game to provide flexibility, so if they show up, scoring bonanzas may occur.

I think it’s just a product of them using a largeish font size, but there’s a lot of rulebook for such a small game.If you’re trying to reach all 13 districts, you may find it harder to have high values for the “stations in a district” part of your score. These also have fun little illustrations showing commuters at the various stops, along with some London landmarks in the background of the street-level cards.