Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. The Railroad Switch card makes things interesting, as long as it arrives after the second flipped card. Each color pencil is assigned a once-per-round power that can be used to score extra stations, use a wild Joker symbol in a pinch, or even adding a second section of track on a single turn.

If you cannot or do not want to draw a section during a turn, you can ignore it and wait until the next card is shown. And the map is shared, creating a comedic list of issues as players’ routes all run into each other. There are a total of 11 Station cards: 6 Street cards (blue background) and 5 Underground Cards (pink and yellow background). Interchange Bonuses are pretty helpful, though, especially if you can get three or four lines through one Station.You will be balancing getting your route into as many of these districts as possible while getting as many stations in each district too. The one thing that would be nice (as with most games that use pencils) is if it included a small pencil sharpener. Connecting to stations with spiky outlines (Tourist Sites) will let you cross off the leftmost symbol on the bottom of your player board. And you could be forgiven for presuming that it plays too fast and seems too simple for there to be many strategies involved. Scoring in Next Station London is tight at both two and three players and the solo challenge has been a treat.

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. When the 5th Station card is flipped, you each tot up your scores for the round and then the pencils are passed around from left to right (or any unused pencil from the right in a 2 player game). If you can’t or don’t want to draw a line, you could pass, but your score will likely take a hit as a result.

Next Station: London was designed by Matthew Dunstan and published by Blue Orange Games, with illustrations by Maxime Morin. Working alongside The London Sound Survey, we collected field recordings from 55 stations across the London Underground network over the course of three months, adding in sounds from our respective archives. And while I’ve not had the opportunity to revisit these plans, the idea of getting out into the world and traveling internationally again has continued to enter my mind. The BGA option allows for me to introduce it to friends around the world which has been great as we’ve all enjoyed it.

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.There’s a temptation to traverse a lot of distance by drawing big diagonal lines between connecting Stations, but you run the risk of cutting off a lot of the board by doing that. I’ll probably just bring some markers with me if I bring this game places, rather than dealing with pencils (and possibly-broken pencils). Multiply the number of districts you’ve connected to times the largest number of stations you’ve connected to in a single district. The burning question therefore is: does Next Station – London earn a place in someone’s board game collection when others that appear similar already exist? In the station cards, there’s one of each shape in blue and pink, one wild in each color, and then the blue track split card.

Players must build from either end of their Underground Line (their first line must be built from the Departure Station), connecting to a station with a symbol matching the flipped card.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.