This afternoon, our latest crayon rails game acquisition arrived – Martian Rails.  My apologies to our Oregon family who may not have the same exposure to this genre of games, although the first crayon rails game that I purchased was British Rails, which I got while in Oregon visiting Lori’s family (and Lori) during the Christmas season of 1986.  (This prior sentence was a run-on sentence and my lovely wife will have something to say about it when she reads this post).  (And when you have an entire sentence in parenthesis, does the punctuation at the end go outside or inside of the ending bracket?)  Anyway, I have memories of one of the first games of British Rails being with Grandpa Ron (back in Dec 1986 when he was “Mr Goertzen”).

The map board wraps east-west to provide a circular planet experience.

The city (and goods) names are based on classical science fiction written about the red planet.  Some interesting terrain as well (please excuse the weird flower like pattern – that was from the random effects app that I used to upload the photo).  Just as an example – the dotted brown lines cannot be built across until the appropriate action card is drawn at some point in the game, somewhat constricting access to this area.

The building cost for volcanos is 5, making building into and out of Olympus a spendy proposition.  Looks like Danaya ran out of money in this case.

On the loads front, there are some old familiars (machinery, imports), but also some rather unique ones – Roddenberries, and probably my favorite – Bachelor Chow (made by the fine purveyors of Dog Chow and Monkey Chow).

Anyway, hurrah for Amazon Prime (free two day shipping on anything).  We’re trying the Amazon subscription service to buy some grocery staples on a monthly basis; we’ll see how that goes and how long it takes the UPS driver to get sick of delivering to our house.