I was excited to learn that Eden Studios is bringning Mayfair’s board game, Rail Empire: Iron Dragon to the computer. Then I downloaded the demo and my excitement vanished pretty quickly.
I’ve never played the board game version, but it’s got quite a following and a fascinating premise: build a railroad across a fantasy continent complete with dwarves, trolls, dragons, gold, gems, etc. Railroads are cool and building one across a Tolkein-esque landscape sounds like fun.
The problem is that the computer game is a straightahead conversion of the board game, down to the onscreen shuffling and drawing of event cards, etc. Boring. Maybe that would have been interesting 6 years ago, but today what’s the point? After all the reason cards and other abstractions are used in board games is precisely because they are not computer games. There are limits to the amount of information that can be cramemd into a board game as well as the sort of interactions that can occur and still have the game be fun.
The upshot being that what might be a lot of fun playing with a bunch of friends over a table usually stinks big time when adapated as is for the computer. I was hoping for more of a fantasy version of Railroad Tycoon. If all Mayfair wanted was a straightforward translation of the game on the computer, there are already a number of programs out there that do a good job of letting people play board and wargames over the Internet to which could have easily adapted the Iron Dragon ruleset.