Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
“Hey, does anyone want to play CATAN tonight? How about Ticket to Ride? Wingspan, anyone?”
Core tabletop hobbyists know that questions like this never work out when you are sitting with other longtime gaming veterans. Just the mention of Dixit in my 10-years-and-counting Wednesday game group made one player shout “I’m not playing Dixit” because just the concept that we would play an older gateway game you can still buy at Target was too much for him.
“I’m cool playing some older games, but Dixit? Come on, man…you might as well have asked me if I wanted to play CATAN.”
I still love CATAN. But getting it to the table is impossible with gamers, so I usually try to push it on my extended family (most of whom are muggles), since most of them have not played a new game since Trivial Pursuit came out like 40 years ago.
The same thing happens with Ticket to Ride. No one I know will play it, unless it’s one of the new versions that upends the formula, like the Ticket to Ride legacy game that came out earlier this year.
What if you want that Ticket to Ride feeling in a game that you could get in front of gamers? Friends, I have a solution: Station to Station, 2024’s Ticket to Ride-adjacent experience published by Alley Cat Games.
Oh My Goods!
Station to Station is a 2-4 player pick-up-and-deliver game that features “recipe fulfillment” and contracts in the form of route cards that can be used to guide players around a map of the United States. It’s the Steam Age, so let’s call it the mid-to-late 1800s. Players are tasked with running a railroad business that has to buy goods in certain markets then run their train to various cities to deliver those goods and fulfill orders for cash, coal and points.
Over the course of a single year, players will replace empty spaces with new order tokens, which also drives the game forward from summer, to fall, to winter, before a final round is completed and scores are tallied. Like games of yesteryear, Station to Station has one of my favorite features in gaming: essentially zero end-game scoring. You get a few points for leftover cash and coal, and that’s a wrap.
Station to Station is light enough to be a family-weight game, and just interesting enough to work for your core gamer friends who won’t play Ticket to Ride any more. That starts with a board that is fantastic, with bright, easy-to-read iconography and a turn summary in the southwest corner of the board.
Each player has a large train token on the board, representing their business. At the start of a turn, a player can buy coal, or cargo carriages that are added to the back of their engine (displayed on a personal player board), with space to hold up to eight pieces of cargo. Then a player takes the travel step, moving one space along connected rail routes to the next city, or going farther by spending one additional coal per space moved.
Wherever a player ends their movement, they have a choice: fulfill the tile they land on, or take the Work action to get $5, or two coal, or $2 and a single coal. Most map tiles are orders that can be filled by spending cargo—take cargo pieces away from your personal board, then get the reward listed on that tile.
Some tiles are straight-up free: take cash and/or points. Others provide an ongoing discount on future orders, representing one of the game’s four goods. You can add any number of these extra railcar tokens to the side of your player board, and these are incredibly useful later in the game when the cargo orders get bigger and bigger.
When an order is fulfilled, it flips and becomes a ticket that can be spent to acquire Crew cards. Each player can hold up to four Crew, and these give the owner a once-per-turn power that provides an asymmetrical way to score points and earn additional cash.
Route cards also give a player chances to score points and earn cash, and these are simple to administer. When you go to one end of the route shown on a card, a player will drop a cube on that card to show that the route has officially kicked off. Whenever they make it to the second city, the card is fulfilled and the owner can grab a new route card to replace the old one. Making efficient use of the routes while fulfilling orders along the way has been the key to victory in each of my plays.
Turns are quick, and my games have all lasted about an hour regardless of player count. With a simple teach and gameplay that flows this fast, Station to Station is a very easy game to get to the table.
Solid, Steady
Station to Station scratched the Ticket to Ride itch quite well. The lack of “wow” moments hurt the final rating for this review. No one ever stands up and congratulates an opponent on a well-executed turn, for example, and no one yelped with a “yeah, baby!” at any point either. This is just a very solid, light-to-medium-weight experience that anyone in my house or in my gaming groups could enjoy.
As a hardcore train gamer—I’d like to think my 18xx bonafides shine through by now—I am always happy to get a lighter train game into the mix, and Station to Station checks those boxes too. I have groups for my cube rails nights, but Station to Station works for nights like those as well as nights with my kids. That level of flexibility is vital for a person who keeps their game collection pretty tight.
Like other Alley Cat Games at my house (including Amun-Re: 20th Anniversary Edition, Autobahn, and Tinners Trail), the production here is solid. I love the chunky train tokens, and you can read every card and every city from any seat around the board with ease. The city spaces are huge, unnecessarily so, which means it is perfect for my needs as a man of a certain age. The back of the manual served as a player aid, and while I would have preferred a personal player aid that detailed all the icons on the Crew cards, I made due by keeping those pages open to refer to those regularly.
The production makes one minor misstep and a second that left players divided. The first: the Oklahoma space is missing the word “City”, which one assumes is a mistake since all the other locations on the map are major US cities. The second one is weird. The cargo tokens fit on top of the player board, but if you are holding the maximum number of allowed tokens (eight), they do not all fit on top cleanly.
The player boards are otherwise excellent, with comfy storage areas for coal, cash, crew cards, tickets, and route cards. And the cargo tokens look great at the top of the mat. It’s just weird that the boards aren’t like half an inch longer, but then that throws off a lot of other things since they just barely fit inside of the square box.
Beyond that, Station to Station was a fun time at the table. I can already imagine this turning into a system I would enjoy…Station to Station: Japan is an imaginary game I could get into, with some tweaks to rules and routes that generate more combos to create that “wow” factor. Give Station to Station a look if you are trying to get your game group to play a friendly neighborhood train game!
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