One of my non-gadget hobbies is playing board games.  There's a series of Railroad games called "Crayon games" where the players actually draw track out on the board.  Cleaning up the board is a post-game ritual.  The original crayon game, "Empire Builder", covered the United States, but other crayon games came out with Europe, Japan, Great Britain, and others.

The most unusual crayon game is Iron Dragon, which is set in a fantasy world.  The engines are tamed dragons.  Some of the routes are through the underground, controlled by the trolls.  And now the game has been turned into a PC game by Eden Studios, and it's a winner.

Game play is fairly simple--there are about 40 cities.  Most cities have commodities that you can pick up for free, but each commodity is only available in a few cities.  Ale can only be found in the underground and armor and weaponry can only be found along the west coast, for example.

You get three contract cards, each with three options of a commodity, a city and a price.  If you can get to that city with that commodity on your train, you can trade the card and commodity in for that many gold pieces.  So, if I arrive at Nordkassel with spells, I can get 59 gold pieces.  This means I have to build track to Ozu-Kareth (the only city city with spells) , go there and get spells, then build traffic to Nordkassel and go there.  Nordkassel and Ozu-Kareth are almost on the opposite ends of the map.  On the other hand, Saadah is a lot closer to places where you can get steel.

Goal is to get to 250 gold pieces first.  Since you're spending money to build track, this takes some planning.  It'll take practice, but you'll get the hang of it, and soon you'll be able to become a medieval millionaire.

You can play against the computer (up to five computerized opponents), and the computer player is competent.  You also can play online against others as well.  It's a gorgeous game.  I've got only one serious complaint, and that is that the options aren't saved from game to game.  They play music that got on my nerves, but you can lower the volume of the music.  You just have to do that every time you run the program.  There is a configuration file you can edit, but c'mon, guys, this is what the Windows Registry is for.

Iron Dragons is available at www.irondragon.org (NOT www.irondragon.com , that's a martial arts site).  You can download a demo for free, it lets you play 15 turns.  The full game is $35.00.  I give it 8 Ooos (it'd be9 if the preferences saved).  If you like strategy games, or if you like trains, you want to check this out.

Donald Brown