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In Yardmaster Express, two to five players compete to have the highest valued train after a set number of rounds. The game starts with the first player drafting a Railcar card from his hand, attaching it to his train, then passing the rest of his hand to the player to his left. This draft continues until all players have added one Railcar to their train for each round of the game. The trick is, while each new Railcar must match the resource type or value of the one previously played, players always have the option to play any card face down as a Wild Railcar; the Wild Railcars don't have much value, but they can be used to save a player in a bind or to thwart your opponents by "hiding" a card they need.
Yardmaster Express plays in ten minutes and consists of just 32 cards (no tokens, no cargo cards).
- very quick game
- part of the pub series like Council of Verona
- completely different where Yardmaster is hand management set collection
- shares the same art and the same core mechanic of how the trains attach
- has wilds
- two cards on each train
- drafting out of a common hand
- there's a lot of confusion around it
- some people are confused
- Yard Masters
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Drafting — A 5 to 7 minute drafting game.
- Hand Management — Shares this core mechanic with Yardmaster.
- Set Collection — Shares this core mechanic with Yardmaster.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- My name is Rodney Smith and one of the best things about coming to these kind of events is I get to talk to fun publishers and friends like Patrick, very good friend.
- So our our newest uh game is Dead Drop by uh Jason Petarski. Uh he's a very talented designer. And Deadrop is a memory deduction game.
- Yardmaster was uh the 2014 ion award winner uh in the light games category and Yardmaster has been uh performing exceptionally well.
- Yardmaster is almost out of print. So Yardmaster, if you have it, great. If not, get it soon or it's going to be gone.
- So, David Short, who's an phenomenally talented designer, ground floor, skyline, uh, planes by AEG, uh, was one of my developers on yard master.
- So Yardmaster Express is a very quick game part of my pub series like Council of Verona. It's a 5 to 7 minute drafting game.
- Tory Neman is the famed designer of Alien Frontiers. And Peter um is performing very well in distribution.
- You know why I came back? It's because this game is familiar to me.
- So, we broke ground. We did break ground.
- Patrick, thanks again for taking the time to show me all this stuff and showing all you guys.