Pencil Powers are randomized between the four pencils, and offer once-per-round abilities, such as treating a card as wild, treating a card as accompanied by a Railroad Switch, repeating a card, and double-counting a station. In there somewhere, however, is also a handy switch symbol that lets you split off from any station on your current line to the symbol shown on the next flipped card. Next Station: London can also be enjoyed in solo mode and o nce you have played a few times, you can move onto the advanced module that has more gaming options and tougher challenges.

Play over four rounds as you work to create the ideal metro, making sure you make the most of interchanges! Essentially, you just set one or more pencils between players and when you’d pass the pencil at the end of the round, you just give the unused pencil to the next player and place your pencil in the unused spot. There are 13 districts total: each corner station is its own district, and then there are 9 more in a tic-tac-toe pattern. Hard to say, but I’ve certainly been playing a good couple of games he’s worked on (including, most notably, The Guild of Merchant Explorers).Here is the bold statement though: if I had to choose between the two, this would stay ahead of Metro X. The box says 1-4 players, but it really could be infinite if you had enough colored pencils to go around.

If you select this option when starting a solo game, and have enabled "Share data with Blue Orange" in the game's settings, you will be dealt a solo game with a pre-shuffled deck of cards for the day. For the simple reason that I feel like I have more control in Next Station – London and I am not as hindered by the luck of the cards. I think it’s just a product of them using a largeish font size, but there’s a lot of rulebook for such a small game. Shared Objectives is a must; this gives players two different milestones to try and achieve over the course of play, and provide a little bit of direction each round. Outside of the final comparison of scores, there’s not much here that provides an extroverted excitement.Planning a new tube network offers entertainment and strategic finesse, all in a small package and with a lean set of rules. Additionally, the variability in length of the rounds will have a trickle down effect on how a game goes. It reminds me a little of Metro X, though that one felt a little more restricting because you were filling out preexisting lines and hoping for the right numbers to come up; this one is a bit more like a sandbox where you can go in several different directions. Lines can not cross another line but and must follow the pre-printed dashed lines on the sheet of paper. I appreciate the scalability of this one; I like that you always use four pencils, and with fewer than four players, you just leave some out.

Scoring in Next Station London is tight at both two and three players and the solo challenge has been a treat. I think the shifting between various pencils across the rounds is very clever, but I also like how dynamic that makes every game feel! End game scoring is based on your points from each of the four lines, the number of tourist sites visited (as mentioned above) and interchange stations. Figuring out when to use your power each round can be tough—use it too soon, and you may regret it when a better opportunity comes up later.To use the Pencil Powers cards, shuffle and deal 1 card to go with each pencil, and then reveal them.

When I first opened Next Station: London—and it is a handsome production, right down to the magnetic metal closing lid—I was worried about a few things, which turned into concerns tied to the game’s level of endurance.

As well as playing base game, there are two mini advanced modules that can be picked and mixed into the gameplay.