OnTheUnderground

Well, I've only played it once. It was a lot of fun and I want to give it several more plays; ask me after that :) But I suppose possible things to look at might include:

• Having a deck of express stations and a deck of non-express ones, so that all turns include two passenger moves (I guess we could try this ourselves)
  

I have never found this to be an issue, but I can see that some would.  A suggestion someone made to me is to split the deck into the express and non-express and use them as separate draw piles, replenishing to two of each.  The express pile will run out before the non-express pile, so the last six-odd turns won't have an express card, but that's not inappropriate ramping down.  I suspect that I may turn that into an official variant.  --Angoel

Possible other ways of dealing with it:

• Discard all four cards and redraw if they're the same colour; though it would make the game shorter, and more random, and I could see why you wouldn't want to borrow game mechanics from TTR.
  
• Mark the national rail station cards, and make them a third type with lower priority than normal non-express stations; so he'd go to an express then non-express, or express then NR, or non-express then NR.  Could be combined with the above.
  
• Oh, or the simplest one: If all the cards are the same colour, he moves to two stations of the same colour --SGB
  

• The white tracks are hard to see on the board, although I appreciate it's going to be hard to find ten colours with good contrast with one another and the board
  

I grant the point, but everyone comments that a different colour is the problematic one ;).  Note that there are actually eleven colours, to ensure that the numbers work out - although brown and purple are never used at the same time (and this is just as well, because they're pretty much indestinguishable). --Angoel

• It's pretty clearly in the "you don't get to do anything outside of your turn" mould, which isn't to everyone's taste, but that's a pretty fundamental design decision.
  

...That's all I can think of at the moment; ask me again once we've got our own copy and played it a few more times :) --AC

Grand.  I look forward to it. --Angoel

Oh, and "Bank!" :-)

• If the markers that indicate the stations the passenger might go to had a yellow mark or something on one end you could identify which were the express and which were the non express stations. This would make working out where the passenger was going next slightly simpler. --RobHu
  
• I'm sure many people have said it before but I would appreciate a computer program I can run along side the game that tells me what the shortest routes are ;-) --RobHu
  
• It would be nice if the website had a forum or wiki so I could look up strategies other people have put there --RobHu
  

try [here] on BoardGameGeek - there aren't any variant or strategy articles there, but that is the place people would put them if there were. --SGB

I sadly don't have the time to safely admin something like that, and suspect that the time cost in creating it would be greater than the content it received.  Boardgamegeek is therefore probably the most likely place to put or find these. --Angoel

There are a number of reasons for this, which can be catagorised as follows. --Angoel

• This stops people from building a spur of line in the direction of a station, and relying on the fact that the Passenger would have to travel there eventually.
  
• I wanted to avoid weird end-game conditions as the number of remaining stations dwindled.  Just stopping the Passenger moving avoided a lot of rules complexity.
  
• The game-play towards the end being *too* calculatable ends up producing AnalysisParalysis, which I wanted to avoid.
  

Interesting answers. The first I don't quite see, as surely that's still going to be a good strategy because the Passenger is almost certain to travel there anyway. I'm not sure either way about the second - seems like it'd be straightforward enough to keep going through the final four cards until they expire. But the third is an /excellent/ reason, so my objection is withdrawn. --AC

The first - building a spur in the knowledge that the Passenger will go there eventually even if you don't actually finish building the spur is weakened by not forcing the Passenger to go to all stations, which is good because I'm not keen on that - people should be encouraged to actually build to the destination stations.  It also makes blocking off an area and thus forcing the Passenger to travel through you to get there less strong, again something I wasn't keen on encouraging too much. --Angoel

I see. Okay, I think I mostly agree, then, although we do still reasonably often have games in which only one segment of track heads up in the Mornington Crescent direction (and no further), and its owner picks up the three or four stations up there. The point remains that the non-express stations left over at the end are very likely to not be on the tube, because they'll have been sitting there for some time while the stations that are on the tube get visited. Fair enough. --AC

I suspect that the version closest to the 'previous' version would be:  build - travel to non-express - [redraw, and if express drawn travel there and repeat]. --Angoel

Ooh, I don't think I like either of those. I like having four stations visible by the side, express and non, because it lets you connect a station whose card has come up, knowing that even if it doesn't get visited on your turn, it's very likely to get visited sometime in the next two or three turns. I do like having a bit of information about what's about to happen. Imagine a version of the game where no cards were visible, and after each turn a card or two were turned up and the Passenger travelled there immediately. Not as appealing, is it? --AC

Wow, that sounds like an interesting variant. I'd like to try it out. (I could see it emphasising the randomness of the draw deck in a potentially frustrating way, though: express stations coming up in your turn which you could have built connections to under the published rules, but now don't get the chance to.)

I don't understand "This would also give back choice about which non-express stations to go to", though. How, if there's still sometimes only one non-express in a given draw? Do you keep on discarding and replacing the express stations, before the build phase, until there are only non-express stations displayed? If so, couldn't you potentially get through dozens of express stations in one turn? --Rachael

Ah. You're quite right. I did only envisage one redraw phase in a turn, so you could easily end up with only one non-express (or none at all - has this happened to anyone in the normal game yet?) Maybe it is ok to be forced into a non-express final move. I think you should have to go to all the drawn expresses in a turn (max. three in my suggested variant), it emphasises the express nature of the destinations. The main problem is that it could get through the deck faster, cutting down build turns and might break Angoel's very fine balance. I'm not so concerned about being frustrated by expresses coming up as it will benefit those with good networks, even if the passenger walks a bit more. --Nat

I've seen four gold stations come up precisely once in ~10 games with the published version. --AC

Ooh.  That's amusing ;). --Angoel