Festive mini games - Day 20 "Station Yard"

This year I am sharing 24 mini games over advent, where the rules can be explained on the back of a single business card. Today's game is called "Station yard". Today is a new way to use the components of one of the most popular board games from the last 20 years. 

Day 20 "Station yard"

Players: 2-6 players

Equipment: Ticket to Ride and a hat

Concise rules: 

Shuffle blue, green, red, yellow, and black train cards into a deck, deal 5 cards face up. Mix all plastic trains into the hat. From the hat draw 4 random sets of 5 plastic trains. On each turn a player can either pick up two train cards or buy one of the 4 laid out train sets using collected cards. Replenish cards and train sets. Players score points based on collecting plastic trains of the same colour, combining them from multiple sets. Scoring follows Ticket to Ride normal rule (3 trains = 4 points etc). 

The first player to score 30 points wins.

Notes:

I made up this game after reading lots of James Earnest's work in making games from components people often already have. Why would anyone choose to use these rules instead of the normal rules for ticket to ride. Mainly for variety. It has some similar rules to standard ticket to ride but has some more competitive choices that are familiar to players of Splendor. But another reason you might want to play it is if you have a small play area where you cant unfold the full board or you just fancy a slightly more simple game. Simple doesn't mean easy, it is still a challenge to beat your opponents. You need to both collect cards to maximise your points whilst also trying to prevent your opponents collecting too many trains of the same colour. 

I really like the idea of multi use board games and I wish it was something game publisher would consider more. Maybe it cuts against their business model but it is an area of game design I hope to explore more in the future. If you want to read more about James Earnest and his Crab Fragment Lab I recommend giving it a look and all his back catalog of Cheapass games. 

The jpg below shows the print file used, the print company requires the sections to be embossed in gold to be pure black.