Naturelich Games

Alan R. Moon has revealed additional details as a comment to the original Boardgame News post. Click here, to read his full comment. The major highlights are:

1. There are 46 Tickets divided equally into two decks: Long Tickets valued 12-22 and Short Tickets valued 5-11. At the start of the game, each player draws four Tickets in any combination from the two decks or all from one deck. You must keep at least two.

2. Most of the Tickets are for north-south connections, especially the Long Tickets.

3. The west side of the map is mostly generic (non-colored) short routes. The east side of the map is mostly colored long routes. There are 7 space routes in the east.

4. At the start of the game, Berlin receives four Tokens valued 7, 6, 5, 4 at the start. Major cities receive three Tokens valued 4, 3, 2, Big cities receive two Tokens value 3, 2, 1, and Small cities receive one Token value 2 woth 18 points.

5. Each player gets three Passengers. When you Claim a Route, you can place one of your Passengers in either city as long as it doesn’t already contain a Passenger. At anytime later in the game, you can spend your whole turn to move one of your Passengers that is already on the board. You can move the Passenger any number of cities along your own routes, and you pick up one Token in each city you enter. You score a number of points equal to the total of all the Tokens taken. The Passenger is removed once scored, so you have a maximum of three Passenger moves per game.

6. There are two new cards in the deck:
1) There is a 4+ Locomotive. You can draw this like a regular card. You can play it as part of a set to Claim any route 4-7 spaces.
2) There is a Passenger Card. You can draw this like a regular card. When moving a Passenger, you can play any number of Passenger Cards and use one route belonging to an opponent for each card played.

7. There are two very different basic strategies in the game. One, you can take Long Tickets and build long routes on the eastern half of the board (which should especially appeal to the USA fans). Two, you can take Short Tickets and build short routes on the western half of the board where there are more Tokens, and try to make lots of Passenger points. Of course, the winning strategy will probably combine aspects of both of these strategies in most games.

(via Boardgame News)

This sounds really cool!!

In addition, Eric Hautemont (from Days of Wonder) has added another comment predicting that 2006 will offer two new DoW games IN ADDITION to the already announced Märklin edition of T2R.

Well, let us please skip Christmas and immediately move forard to 2006. This is such great news. Can you feel the anticipation levels rising? I certainly can... ;-)