Skip to main content

Yardmaster

Game ID: GID0395642
Collection Status
Description

The freight is rolling into the yard and it's up to you, the Yardmaster, to organize and manage it making sure everything is where it's supposed to be and readying the trains for departure.

In Yardmaster, 2-5 players compete to build trains comprised of railcars of different goods and values. However, players are restricted in connecting railcars of only the same value or good type, so if you grab a railcar you can't use, it needs to wait in your sorting yard until it can legitimately hook up to your train.

Players start with five cargo cards in hand, and four railcar cards are laid out into the Arrival Yard. Each player has one exchange token, representing one of the five cargo types, and whoever is to the right of the start player has the Yardmaster Token. On a turn, a player takes two actions, repeating an action if desired; whoever holds the Yardmaster Token takes a third action on his or her turn, then passes this token to the right. Players can:

Draw a cargo card from the deck or from the top of the discard pile.
Buy a railcar by discarding 1-4 cargo cards of the same color as the railcar, with the number determined by that railcar's value.
Swap your exchange token for another one; you can discard two cargo cards matching the color of your token to represent one cargo card of the proper color when buying a railcar.

Five cargo cards provide bonus actions during play, such as paying less for new railcars or drawing free cargo cards. The first player to reach 16 points in a 2-3 player game or 18 points in a 4-5 player game wins.

Year Published
2014
Transcript Analysis
Browse transcript mentions, sentiments, pros/cons, mechanics, topics, quotes, and references.
Total mentions: 1
This page: 1
Sentiment: pos 1 · mix 0 · neu 0 · neg 0
Mentions per page
Top
Showing 1–1 of 1
Video wF9w1EUwcaQ Watch It Played top_10_list at 0:12 sentiment: positive
video_pk 5062 · mention_pk 15036
Video thumbnail
Click to watch at 0:12 · YouTube ↗
Overall sentiment (raw)
positive
Pros
  • Stark, effective graphic design
  • Set collection focus
  • Two-player suitable
Cons
  • Artwork replaced in newer edition
Thematic elements
  • railroads
  • trains
Comparison games
  • Lost Cities
  • Jaipur
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Mechanics unknown.
Video topics + discussion points
No key topics recorded for this video.
Quotes (from this video)
  • board games are diverse but card games really could feature anything
  • players are all doing this simultaneously and so you want to be the player that stays in the longest
  • if you turn over to many matching cards then you end up with nothing
  • auction games are are well served by the sort of card game mechanisms
  • play very quickly for three to six players
  • an excellent excellent game
  • take that card games or I think the most combative sort of card games
  • totally silly extremely random but essentially we're playing cards to attack other players
  • still one of my favorite games
  • each card is a floor on a building
  • there's a whole genre of what we call take that card games
  • you could place bombs or or murderers into these buildings or the police can then take away a murderer
  • Seven Wonders was the sort of figurehead for the cloud drafting games
  • sushi go has been an enormous hit
  • now the figurehead for the genre is probably sushi go
  • deck building was created really by the game of Dominion
  • there's something delightful about the simplicity of a game like Dominion
  • you can teach to people really easily and play very very quickly
  • a form of set collection again
  • classic tableau builder would be something like San Juan
  • this is a fantastic card game
  • buying cards laying them out in front of us and they're going to keep generating us money
  • this really is one of my favorite genres
  • anybody can play these games and not everybody can play them well
  • I love speed games I think it's a fantastic category of card games
  • trick-taking games very very straightforward in their basic format
  • the basic mechanism can be turned into all these different games
  • all tweak it slightly in different ways
  • my top ten card game mechanisms
  • hopefully I've given you a broad picture of the world of card games
References (from this video)
No references stored for this video.
Transcript Navigation
Top
Showing 1–1 of 1
View on BoardGameGeek