Santa Claus Takes the Intercity

A fast-playing train game of guesses and surprising reveals, suitable for festive family get-togethers as well as a feature in an evening of 18xx, cube rails and other train games.

I discuss Santa Claus Takes the InterCity and its relationship to its younger sibling, [thing=1278][/thing] here: https://thetrainrush.com/2024/12/22/driving-home-for-christmas-santa-claus-takes-the-intercity/

Content warning: episode not suitable for children born outside of the 1980s or 1990s.

09.2024

GAMEPLAY Flip a location card and then players simultaneously choose and reveal one card from their hand (each player has one suit from a regular 52-card deck). The high card wins but, if there’s a tie, the tied players cancel each other out. The winner places a cube on the matching space on the DIC board, and then the winning card, the highest card, and (possibly) some of the low cards are removed from the game. The game either ends when the location card deck runs out or a player plays all their cards. The player with the highest scoring contiguous network wins.

THOUGHTS As a huge fan of Raj, I had a strong suspicion I was going to like Zoutkaartje and I was right. One friend calls it “Raj with consequences”. While I think Raj has consequences too, Zout adds the pressures of the networking building while also needing to deny opponents their opportunities to connect/form a network. That said, it’s simple, silly fun that (just like Raj) produces lots of groan-chuckles when multiple people flip the same card.

It's a lot like a harsher "What the Heck?" with some light spacial element. As long as you are fine with 20 minutes of harsh blind bidding, it's worth it.

A fun game of bidding and hand management. The Dutch rail net is fairly accurately represented, and makes for a good game.

Simple, cute, harmless diversion of a simultaneous bid game. Ties get funny, especially in 3p, like when two face cards tie and the 3rd player wins a route with a 2, snickering away into Dutch Christmasland. The inception of Dutch Intercity is quite vivid, and thank goodness for that.