54) Empire Builder

This game is neat because you get to draw on the map with a crayon (and erase for multiple plays). Your building (drawing) routes on the board to connect cities and moving your train along the route to pick up and sell goods to make money. Once you connect certain cities and have a certain amount of money you win.

Ready to build an empire

Goods need shipping

My starting supplies

A turn full of disaster

End game map

This game was really fun, but tended to drag towards the end. The speed of play did increase once people had the majority of the routes drawn, but the $250 million end game was way to high. Additionally, we were all frustrated about the inability to plan ahead for your turn. On turns when a player sells a resource they then draw a new card and before completing their turn they need to figure out what to do with the rest of their turn, which largely depends on what new card they draw. This can lead to a few minutes of one player sitting and thinking while everyone else waits. This is ok once or twice in a game, but it happened all the time and really made the game drag. For future plays we'll consider a few house rules to decrease the amount of down time. But, despite this you're still drawing on a board with crayons. I think that trumps so many negatives and makes this a fun new experience.