Next Station: London by Matthew Dunstan is another game in the X-and-write genre; in this case, a flip-and-write (I prefer the Finnish catch-all term “coupon-filler”). Each player has a fairly abstract map of London in front of them and must draw four underground lines to generate as many points as possible.
The tube lines are built one by one. Cards are drawn from the deck of pink and blue cards until the fifth pink card comes up. Each round can thus be 5–10 turns long, depending on how the deck is shuffled. On each card, there’s a symbol that tells where you can draw your next line (there are also two wild cards and a card that lets you fork your tube line). The tube lines can be extended from both ends. The lines cannot cross outside stations.
Once the round ends, that tube line is scored. Multiply the number of regions visited by the number of stations in the region where you have the most stations for that line and add some points for each time you cross the Thames. Then choose another colour and repeat four times. In the end, bonus points are scored for visiting important sights and creating stations where many tube lines cross.
This isn’t a bad coupon-filler game. I’ve played it twice and found it perfectly harmless. The way the tube lines are drawn gives the players enough flexibility, and conflicting goals of extending to many regions and getting lots of stations in the same region (and getting all the lines to meet each other on the stations) mean the game can be tough. You’ll start fine but end up failing in many ways.
