Hellrail: 2nd Perdition

From: Galloglass Games List Price: $17 Players: 2-4 Playing Time: 30-45 minutes  Type of game: Card Skill level: 5 Complexity: 4  Reviewed by: Matthew Baldwin, Issue 23, April 2000

"Hellrail is devilishly clever!" "This is one wicked game!" "You'll have a hell of a good time!" I thought I'd do us all a favor and get the Hellrail puns out of the way first, so we can focus on the game itself. And it's certainly worthy of focus. Designer James Kyle put the trolley from Streetcar on a collision course with the train from the 18xx games, and the result is a macabre spectacle. You know you should look away in horror, but you'll still find it perversely fascinating.

So let's start with the bad news: you're dead. And I'm afraid it gets worse: you won't be shooting pool with St. Paul anytime soon. For one reason or another the Big Guy sent you a Cosmic rejection slip, and now you are doomed to the lake of fire for the rest of eternity. Bummer, man. But there is one bit of good news in all this. You've been given the task of transporting the dead to the nine circles of Hades, and if you convey the most souls your eternal damnation will be postponed by a single day. Sure it's only 24 hours, but under the circumstances it's the best you could hope for.

Intrigued? Fortunately, Hellrail isn't a case of "Great idea, mediocre game"— the creativity that went into the theme extends to the mechanics as well. For your $15 you become the proud owner of 48 Rail Cards, 10 Circle Cards and 4 tiny pewter engines. Before play begins the Circle Cards are placed on the table in such a way that there are yawning gaps between them. All players put their pewter engines on the Circle Card labeled "Gate", they receive an instruction card, a hand of five Rail Cards and play begins.

The Rail Cards are a paragon of economy. There is only one type of card in the deck, but this one type serves as track cards, point cards, cargo cards, movement cards and more. The four sides of the square cards are connected by railroad tracks in various permutations and each corner of the card bears a different type of information.

On a turn a player draws a card, and then may take as many actions as he is able. One action is to build track, which is done by taking a rail card and placing it in any vacant space on the table. Because all sides of the cards are connected by rail and the playing area is considered unbounded (similar to the playing area in The Very Clever Pipe Game), any placement of a rail card is legal— you needn't worry about creating dead ends as you would in Streetcar. But as in Streetcar you are also able to "upgrade" track by placing a rail card directly on top of another, so long as all original routes are maintained. Once the necessary tracks are in place, you can move your train by discarding a card from your hand and moving your engine a number of spaces equal to the card's Car Value. The rails on each card are subdivided into three or four spaces, so it typically takes a series of movements to get from one Circle to another. Once in a Circle, you may pick up or drop off souls if you hold cards with the appropriate values. When picking up souls, you simply place the corresponding card in front of you to show it is now part of your train; when dropping off you take one of the cars from your train and place it under your Engine card— it's now money in the bank, so to speak. Players continue to shuttle around the "board", picking up and delivering souls, until the draw deck runs out. At that time, everyone totals the Car Values on their delivered cargoes, and whomever delivered the most souls wins.

I'm a fan of Streetcar and I'd probably be an avid train gamer if train games didn't take so long to play. So combining the two genres into a game with a playing time of around 30 minutes couldn't make me happier. Better still, Hellrail appeals to nongamers as well, which isn't always the case with, say, Streetcar or Empire Builder. It's much lighter than those other games, but manages to pack the best of both into a great little package. I don't mean to imply that there aren't tough decisions to be made in Hellrail, though. One thing I haven't mentioned yet is the use of the Brimstone Value. You may, as your final action of a turn, "fan the flames" by discarding any card and drawing a number of new cards equal to the card's Brimstone Value. Often a player will use all but one of his cards, then fan the flames in preparation for his next turn. But because all cards are used for all actions, deciding which to use for what is a bit tricky. A card with a high Car Value can be used for a long movement, or you can hang onto it in the hopes of delivering that cargo for lots of points. And a card with a perfect track layout could quickly get you to another Circle, but if it has a high Brimstone value you might want to use it to draw lots of new cards.

Each Circle has a special power, which a player may opt to activate when he first enters it. One Circle allows you to rotate a number of Rail cards in play, which you can use to convolute the routes of your rivals. Another lets you draw cards from an opponent's hand. Each Circle power is unique and powerful, but most have the potential to backfire. Choosing to evoke Circle Effects is therefore one more decision you'll face as you go. Unfortunately, the Circle Effects are the one element of Hellrail that I don't much care for. They are interesting the first few times, but they inject too much randomness into a game that is already pretty luck-dependent, and they lengthen a game for which brevity is one of it's greatest attributes. And most players stop using them about halfway through a match, because they don't want to prolong the game, they fear the backfire, or they'd prefer to not interrupt the rhythm of the game by stopping and calculating the card's ramifications. I would have been happier if the folks at Galloglass Games had double-printed the Circle cards (with empty Circles on one side, Power Circles on the other) and relegated the Circle Effects rules to an 'advanced' or 'variants' section. I usually skip the Effects the first time I teach a new group of players the game, and I find the game more enjoyable without them.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and perhaps that's the case here. Hellrail is obviously a low-budget affair, but maybe it was these very budgetary constraints that spurred James Kyle to pack the bulk of the game into a single 45 card deck. Circle Effects aside, the things mesh together remarkably well— it's downright (dare I say it?) "German" in its elegance, with enough theme to please the masses. Perhaps the best testament to Hellrail's popularity in my Gaming group is the fact that two people went and purchased a copy for themselves, despite the fact that it's not sold in any stores! (As far as I know, you can only order it from the Galloglass Games website). My gaming buddies rarely buy games that I already own (since they routinely borrow mine), so the fact that they felt this one was worthy of purchase— and via the Internet, no less— is high praise indeed.

And that, friends, is why I squandered all my "hell" jokes in the first paragraph: so the readers who skip right to the last sentence could quickly see my final verdict. And that verdict is: highly recommended. Puns be damned.