On the Underground: Paris / New York

A wondrous game of transit route-building (possibly the best in the genre). I've only played the New York side of the board thus far, but it's already been such a joy every time I get the opportunity to break it out to play it that I simply haven't found the need to play the Paris side yet (one day!).

The game (at least the NY side) shirks the Ticket To Ride-style of secret route requirements in favor of an ever-shifting display of public 'destination' cards. These are evaluated at the end of every player's turn with a token on the board that attempts to reach those destinations using the fewest lines possible, encouraging more open-ended and expansive route building than TtR that a player can use to leech points even when it's not their turn.

With none of TtR's track color requirements, On The Underground is less arbitrary than its more well-known predecessor, but no less cutthroat. An urbanist's delight!

new york map does it better than the london map imo. the london map has a very obvious scoring mechanism of surrounding locations on the map, the new york map doesn't have that as much. still has the same gripes as the original on the underground (way better as an app that can compute passenger routes automatically, like on yucata.de)

edit 2024 august 1 - computing passenger routing can be considered a feature to some. i'm not that peeved by it anymore but understand not everyone has the same tolerance to this type of thing.

I've always loved the original game, but I adore playing with the New York map. As someone who has lived in NYC for ~21 years now, there's something so amusing about comparing our batshit-crazy subway lines to the actual NYC subway map. Lots of fun table talk like: "What are you doing, building the 'G' train?" and "No one would actually take this messed up '7'!"

All three mini-expansions are great, and a must-have. We always play with them. I'm just a little sad the secret objectives are only on the Paris side, as that's the one thing this game is missing: endgame scoring. The way it is now, you pretty much know who is going to win a couple of turns before it's over.

The thing about all the On The Underground games is that they pull off a genuinely interesting feat: they are train games that actually incentivize building sensible routes. There's something deeply satisfying about watching the subway system evolve on the board, given that.

At least, that's the way my [i]neurodivergence[/i] works.

It's not a deep game, but it's fun, easy to teach, and has some interesting bits of real depth.