Now I have unboxed the game, studied the rules, and prepared it for my board game nights of next week. I even played it in a mock 4-player game against myself to understand it better. And I am still very much enthused, and hope that the other players will equally like it. At least the game raised some interest: We often organize us on Discord to what we play, and I found 3 other players interested in just over an hour.

While Clank! and Dune: Imperium have a deck-building core, in Lightning Train that has morphed into a bag-building core. Which feels slightly different, but should be statistically the same, whether you draw a card from a perfectly shuffled deck, or draw a tile from a perfectly mixed bag. Just like in many deck-building games, part of what the tiles in Lightning Train do is provide a currency with which you can buy new tiles. There are ways to trash your starting tiles to slim your bag, so all the elements of a deck-building game are there.

Where Lightning Train is very different is on the board, in the railway building part. Some tiles are simply train segments, while other tiles (with a Lightning Train symbol) give you more new train segments. The train segments you can spend either to build a railway line, so the tiles are gone from your bag, or you can pay for other things on your player board, so the segments go to your discard pile and then back into the bag. The last important type of tile is the contracts, which determine in what region of the board you can operate. The board shows the United States during the 19th century, and one goal is to connect coast to coast with the Transcontinental Railroad. The contracts everybody starts with are on the east coast, but then you can buy other contract tiles that get you westwards.

There are several sources of points, and who has the most points at the end wins. One important part is two "mogul" cards, which either give you an upgrade or provide you with an objective that scores points at the end of the game. These are interesting, because you get them right at the start, and they can orient your strategy. If you get an objective to connect cities in the Rocky Mountains, that is where you'll want to be heading. Then you get points for building certain railway lines: The shorter and easier ones don't give points, but longer and tunnel lines give a few points, and some tile effects can double those. Finally players build stations all over the map, and these stations are the end points for goods deliveries. Goods pop up at the start of every round, and if you can transport them to the station that needs them, you get points for every of your rail lines you used, but other players also get points if you used their lines. While connections tend to be short in the early game, later there can be longer deliveries which can make quite a bunch of points.

Overall I quite like Lightning Train. But it is definitively less strategic than Dune: Imperium. The mogul and action cards, while welcome for the added variety they bring, also introduce more randomness into the game. A close game might be decided by who drew the more convenient mogul objective card. On the positive side, Lightning Train is a bit lighter than Dune: Imperium, although heavier than Clank!, and is very well suited for my board game nights in length and complexity.