Maglev Metro

Intriguing original game play. Confusing similar colors on the pieces.

After one play, I would give this a 7.5 out of 10 for game play and a 5 for the components. Game play (7.5): I liked the unique twists on the pickup-and-deliver genre. It was interesting trying to figure out which capabilities to upgrade, and to make a plan incorporating the passengers, stations, goal cards, and other players' plans. I would definitely like to play the game again, perhaps with the Berlin board. (We played the Manhattan board for our first game). Components (5): It's too bad about the components, since it's obvious that a lot of effort went into the graphic design to make the game "look" beautiful. (The transparent track tiles with colored stripes are indeed beautiful.) Unfortunately, it was too difficult to distinguish the colors from each other while playing. We got the free replacements for the copper robots, but that did not help enough. The "gold" and "copper" spots on the board were hard to tell apart, and to match to the proper robots. We were using the darker copper robots, but these no longer matched the board. We kept thinking that the gold robots went into the "copper" board spaces. Also, it was confusing having both a dark blue (purple?), and a lighter pastel blue. To make matters worse, one of our players has some physical issues with distinguishing similar colors. It was even worse for him, and we could tell that he was having a bad experience. As I'm writing this, I'm thinking that maybe we could fix the color issues by adding tiny stickers to the more confusing robots and matching board spaces. A little white sticker on the center of the copper robots and matching board spaces would help a lot. Same with distinguishing the purple and the blue, and the red and pink.

Lovely game!

High quality, fun game. Love the transparent tiles, cardboard inlays, and satisfyingly heavy trains. I do wish the paint color of the wooden passengers better matched the ink color on the cardboard playmats; it's a bit difficult to tell the difference between the bronze and gold figures. I'll probably re-paint them myself. Wonderful company, though, with very prompt shipping.

Fun new creative "train" game.

I said "train", because you are actually building a magnetic levitation subway system in either New York or Berlin. It is a clever game mechanism, and has some great new things for game pieces and game boards. Great quality and mechanism makes for a great game in my book.