Members of the Board's Eye View team have been fans of Sebastian Bleasdale's On the Underground since the very first edition was published by Rio Grande and JKLM in 2006. We were excited when LudiCreations announced they were bringing out a new edition of the game in 2019, and we featured that game on Board's Eye View four years ago. In addition to revisiting the London Underground that was the focus of Sebastian Bleasdale's original design, the 2019 edition of On the Underground added a Berlin U-Bahn map. This didn't just look different, it played differently too and with new ways of scoring: giving us two games in one. When we reviewed that game in 2020 we mentioned that the designer had made available a print'n'play Paris map download back in 2012 and we speculated that there was scope for more city expansions further down the track. Now On the Underground is back in a new standalone edition set in the Paris Metro and New York Subway. Artwork is again by Viktor Csete.
The Paris Metro map has similarities with the previous edition's Berlin game in that there are again set collection bonuses for sets of landmark tokens. The Paris game also gives players hidden objectives that give additional points for connecting specific locations; similar, in that sense, to the tickets in Ticket to Ride (Days of Wonder). This new edition also gives more alternative uses for spending branch tokens.
There's no landmark set collection with the New York Subway map but the key difference when you play with this map is that the Manhattan passenger is more manic! In all On the Underground games, the passenger meeple moves to different destinations and scores players a point every time he uses their lines but with the New York map, the passenger races around to two stops each turn. Coupled with the other changes in the scoring, having the passenger rush around at twice the speed certainly changes up the dynamics of the game.
On the Underground: Paris/NewYork takes 2-5 players but, as with the London/Berlin edition, LudiCreations have also published an Underground Challenge mini-expansion co-designed by David Turczi. This adds the option for solitaire play, where you have to compete against pre-existing underground lines...
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