n Hellrail, players take on the roles of condemned
souls who've been let out of the lake of fire to serve
as conductors for the trains that take new souls to
their places of punishment. There is a great deal of
competition to be the best, for only the best get to
keep working on the railroad. It's back in the lake
for all the others.
The game begins when 10 Circle Cards are laid out on the
table in a spiral, beginning with the Gates of Hell
and winding down to Dante's infamous Ninth Circle.
Each player begins with a locomotive and three Rail
Cards.
Rail Cards have many uses. The most basic is to
represent a passenger car containing sinners. Each
card features the sin the passengers committed (from
Hypocrisy to Apostasy), a victory point value, the
location where they can be picked up and the location
where they will spend eternity. To score the points,
a player picks up the car at the appropriate location,
transports it down (and it's always down) to the
appropriate circle and then adds the card to the
player's Score Pile.
The Rail Cards can also be played to create track to
link the various Circles together (each is illustrated
with an interlocking pattern of railroad tracks); to
make the trains run (if the card's "Brimstone Value"
is as high as the number of cars in the train); and to
"Fan the Flames" in order to draw more cards.
Extra randomness is introduced to the game through
Circle Effect Tokens. Nine of these (out of fifteen
total) are dealt out to the various circles each game
and feature "special effects" that a player can invoke
each time their train visits the appropriate circle.
Play proceeds with trains zipping from circle to
circle, unleashing infernal Circle Effects and
occasionally just ramming each other.
The game ends when there are no more cards to draw,
i.e. when they're all serving as tracks, sitting in
score piles or being held in the players' hands. At
this point all players reveal their score piles and
whoever has the most victory points worth of cars
wins.
Diabolical fun with deadly sins
Physically, the game is similarly wry and understated.
The components feature black-and-white illustrations
very reminiscent of Gustave Dore's classic
illuminations of Dante's Inferno, except that
some are updated to a 19th century-Industrial
Revolution sort of background. Charon the Boatman,
for instance, appears to have acquired a steamboat.
In general the illustration is sparse, but is
completely serviceable and was no doubt kept simple in
order to keep the price low.
Gameplay becomes very easy once the rules are
absorbed, with turns going by quickly as a few basic
decisions are made (i.e., which cards to pick up, which
to turn into track, which to save for their Brimstone
Value). The Circle Effects add a nice extra dimension
to strategy, with players routing their trains through
certain circles just to take advantage of the effects.
These effects include those directly affecting other
players (siccing Cerberus on them or twisting up the
track in front of them) and others that improve the
trains (adding a "Soul Catcher" to push sinners off
the track or a "Brimstone Tender" to keep the fuel
coming).
The game has a winning simplicity about it, and the
economical use of game pieces (for instance, of the
Rail Cards that do just about everything in the game)
is little short of ingenious. This very simplicity
can be something of a downfall, however, as the game
lacks any real plot to make players emotionally
invested in it. More illustrations and more extras
like the Circle Effects would have been welcome.
But adding extras might have compromised the whole
concept of the game: a cheeky, simple, competitive
game that can actually be played in the advertised "45
to 60 minutes." And you can never have too many of
those.
The whole idea of turning souls into tracks and
burning them as fuel put me very much in mind of my
favorite widely despised role-playing game: White
Wolf's Wraith: The Oblivion.
— Bob
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