Next Station: Paris

• Designer: Matthew Dunstan
• Publisher: blue orange
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20-30 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link  
• Played with review copy provided by blue orange USA

Become the best metro network planner Paris has ever seen. Use overhead crossings to link the capital’s iconic monuments, all while optimising shortcuts through the central platform!  This game is the easiest version of the Next Station series, according to publisher Blue Orange Games.

Well, with the Summer Olympics now here – what better time to review a game that has you building a Metro system under the City of Light.  It seems quite appropriate this week given all the tourists, athletes and press that are all trying to get to different places in Paris.

The components to the game are surprisingly slim.  Each player gets a scoresheet to write on.  Otherwise, there are 11 station cards, 5 objective cards, and a small deck of 8 City gate cards. There are also 4 colored pencils, one in each of the colors of the subway lines on your sheet. That’s it!

Each player starts the game with a sheet and a pencil.  The sheet shows a portion of the Paris underground system, broken up by faint yellow lines into different regions. .  In each corner as well as the central hub, there is also a small 1×1 region that is separate from the larger region.. There are stations scattered around the board: circles, triangles, squares and pentagons – there are also a few monument spaces – you can use these as wild spaces.   The game will be played over 4 rounds, and in each round, players will only draw the specific line that matches the pencil in their hands.   You will also find a few crossing bridge spaces which allow you to have intersecting lines.

Each of the four rounds has these 4 phases

A] Identify your starting station.  Umm, look at your pencil and see what color it is.  Find the filled in station of matching color on your sheet.  Start your turn from here.

B] Build your line – The deck of 11 station cards is shuffled and cards are flipped up one at a time, with players deciding to draw lines on their sheet or not after each flip.  

Most of the cards show a station type (shape), and you could draw a line from any end of your current line to a station of matching shape to that on the card.  You are not obligated to draw a line if you do not want to.  You must follow the dashed line possibilities on your sheet.  You cannot cross through a previously written line (well, with the exception of the bridge intersections) nor can you return to a station already on the current line (i.e. don’t make a loop).  

There are 2 wild cards which allow you to connect to any station; still following the dashed lines on your sheet.  These cards also have the icon for the monument spaces on them showing that those spaces are also essentially wild.   If you use the monument option, you first connect to a monument and then you get one free link out of the monument as well!   You will also note that the central hub – which has 19 different tracks coming out of it – is also a wild space, so your line(s) can go in and out of the hub in many different directions – though each line can only use the hub (or any other station) once.

Finally, there is a line-switch card which allows you to make a branch.  The next card in the stack is flipped over, and you can draw a line from any station on your existing line to the type of station indicated on the second card.  You now have more options on where to grow this line in the future.

As you have probably noticed, some of the cards are light blue in background while others are pink and yellow.  When the 5th pink and yellow card is flipped over, the round ends after players resolve that card.   Thus, a round can last anywhere from 5 to 10 turns.

C] Score points for your line – you will now tally up the points for the line you just drew.  You count up the number of different districts (out of 13) that your line passes through – you may have to squint to see the super faint yellow lines that are used as the district boundary lines….  Then, find the district that has the most stations of that color in it, and then score that number.  Next, count how many monuments are on your line and score 2 points for each occurrence.  Tally the points in one column of the scoring area.

D] Upkeep – (also probably doesn’t have to be a phase on its own) – pass your pencil to the player to your left.  If you have fewer than 4 people,  there may be a space on the table to hold a pencil.  If you’re next to it, simply pass the pencil there or take the pencil from that space.  Just make sure that by the end of the game, all players have had one turn with each pencil.

After 4 rounds are complete, there is a little bit of endgame scoring.  You have already scored the points for each of your individual lines.  You will score the points for the crossings used on the map, 2 pts for one line and 6 pts if both lines are used.  You also now look at your “Interchange Stations” – that is, stations that have at least 2 different colors of lines at them.  You score 2 pts for a station with two lines, 5 points for a station with three different lines, and 9 points for a station that has all 4 lines at it – note that the central hub here counts as a single station.  Sum up your points, and the player with the most wins.  Ties broken in favor of the player with the single highest scoring line.

Once you have mastered the basic game, you can add one or both of the advanced modules.  The Shared Objectives are a set of 5 cards.  Each game, two are drawn randomly and placed face up on the table.  At the end of the game, players score 10 points for each of these objectives whose criteria are met.  The City Gates module has 8 cards.  Flip the 4 red Secondary District cards up in a column – the icon shown on the card refers to one of the four corner stations on your map.  Each of these has a yellow bonus card dealt face up next to it.  During the game, if you reach a corner station, you immediately activate the effect of the bonus card paired with it.  Interestingly, each of the Next Station games has a different bonus module, and they are compatible with all versions – though the rules recommend only playing with one of them at a time.

My thoughts on the game

So, interestingly, the publisher’s description says that this is the “easiest” game of the series.  To me, the level of difficulty is about the same, though this one probably leads to the highest scores.  So, in that sense, maybe it’s easier?  Otherwise, you’re still tasked to make the best scoring subway system with your four different colored lines.

The Central Hub is the most obvious difference – a giant wild spot in the middle of the city.  There are 19 possible ins-and-outs here, so you have plenty of flexibility when using the hub. It also counts as its own city region, so you’ll likely want to run through here if nothing else to pick up that scoring point as well as using it to instantly link to another region on the map.  Further, the hub presence usually translates into a high-scoring four color interchange hub on your map – this was a score that was most definitely not guaranteed in the previous version.

The City Monument spaces are also additional wild spaces – and this helps you be quite flexible when planning your route.  When you are able to get the bonus station when the Monument card comes up, that also helps lead to higher scores as you get extra lines on your map in addition to the two points you get for simply connecting it to your line.

Next Station: Paris is the 3rd draw and write from Mr. Dunstan in this series. Despite having a single unchanging layout on the score sheet the game still feels different enough each time it has hit the table so far.  For me, that is a good sign of longevity.  The concept of rotating the pencils each round (and likely having a different order to the pencils each game) prevents you from getting into too much of a rut strategy-wise – because how you approach each turn will definitely be decided by where the previous lines in the game were drawn (and where you start this round).

Additionally, the variability in length of the rounds will have a trickle down effect on how a game goes.  Of course, it will affect all players the same; but it means that you can’t settle on a “usual” strategy as some strategies are nearly impossible to achieve if you don’t get enough turns!

Once you are used to the game, and you start to play with the shared goal cards and the city gates expansion; this also makes you approach each game in a different manner; different enough that I haven’t tired of it yet!  Interestingly, the river Seine is on the map, but as of now, there is no role for the river in the game – though there have been online hints that a later expansion will use this detail on the map.

Though not an issue for myself or my group – this is definitely in the camp of simultaneous solitaire.  The main interaction between players here happens between rounds as you pass pencils around the table.  Otherwise, you could be in separate rooms – heck, separate countries – and play the same game.  You play your own game on your own sheet – there is no competition with your opponents on anything.  I may or may not have sent scans of the sheet to my usual remote group as we can easily play this via Zoom as I flip over the cards and show people what they are.

Rules – like the original, everything is in the rules, but not in my preferred organization.  They did a good job keeping the basic rules concise, and nearly on one page, but the actual details of the rules are in separate places.  For me, it’s easier to learn a game when all of the pieces are read together at the same time – but this is possibly just a style thing.  Plenty of game rules are now set up this way, so this may just be the concern of some gaming dinosaur who is out of touch with modern things.

The cards have one job – namely to tell me what to draw this turn, and that information is on about 10% of the surface area of the cards.  The background art is nice, but in the end, I would have liked function to prevail over form.   The blue and yellow cards have different layouts, so my anal-retentive gamer friends have all sorts of conniptions trying to figure out how to lay out the cards as they are flipped up so that the important parts can be reviewed.  However, to me, it helps that this layout forces you to place some cards vertically and some horizontally so that you can more easily track how many of each have been drawn. It’s important to know what cards have already come up so that you know what is coming and that you can calculate the odds of the round ending.

Like most of Dunstan’s roll-and-write games, this one is engaging and keeps players busy for the duration of the game.  I personally like the way that you get little status reports in your individual line scores at the end of each round, yet there is enough scoring in the Monuments,, interchange stations and shared objectives that the outcome of the game is rarely known until the final calculation.  The downside is that this one is truly simultaneous solitaire – there is no interaction at all between players other than handing them a new color of pencil.   The box says 1-4 players, but it really could be infinite if you had enough colored pencils to go around.  All of the sheets are identical, and there is no competition during the game nor blocking.  I don’t mind the solitaire aspect, but for many gamers, this will be a feature (or bug) to make note of.  Like the original, this is a delightful draw-and-write, and one that I’m happy to play any time.  With three maps now that can be exchanged with three different bonus modules – there is more variety than I could ever want.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Alan H: For me, this is the best of the series to date. I like that each game in the series plays differently and the new aspects in this game make scoring easier and higher as a result. As soon as I had played it on BGA, I ordered a physical copy and I’ve played the game at least 10 times. Occasionally I have won, but for me the puzzle that is set each time is interesting but quick to play. I’m looking forward to the next few cities worth of entertainment.

Dan B. (1 play): I think I like this about as well as London. I definitely like it more than Tokyo, which I thought made it a bit too difficult to accomplish things and consequently less fun. I’d still play any of the three but would definitely choose Paris or London over Tokyo.

Tery N: This is the souvenir I bought myself on a recent trip to Paris; I already like the other two in the series, and my copy came with the Sports expansion for the Olympics, which adds new end game scoring goals that are sports-related (swimming, baseball, marathon and running). You definitely don’t need those to play the game, but it was fun to use them so close to the start of the Olympics.   I enjoyed the twists added to this version, including the monuments and the overhead crossing. I certainly did not use them to their full potential, but I look forward to trying to do that. As with all games in this series I really enjoy the puzzle aspect and will always want to play it, even though I rarely do well.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Alan H
• I like it. Dale Y, Mark J, Dan B.
• Neutral. 
• Not for me…

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