Tracks to Telluride

Tracks to Telluride is a railroad board game centered on the construction of railroad track, and servicing mines along those railroad tracks. The setting of the game is in southwestern Colorado during the mining boom of 1873 through 1888. The game was developed by John Bohrer with playtesting by the Edgewood Gaming Group and the Pittsburgh Smoking Engineers. The first release was called Colorado Rails.

In the early 1980s, John Bohrer played a lot of war games. "One guy brought by a game he had gotten as a gift from his girlfriend called Rails through the Rockies." They played the game and found some shortcomings. Bohrer researched railbuilding in that region and era. He significantly revised the rules, used the Rails through the Rockies map and called the new game Rocky Mountain Rails. After further research I developed my own map; it eliminated eastern Colorado so that I could concentrate on western Colorado's mines and geography. I combined this map with probabilistic pass completion system [sic] and further research on the mines to arrive at Tracks to Telluride. The historical event deck contains actual events, and I used this as a vehicle to illustrate the trials and tribulations these CEO's had in building the railroads, and to help the struggling railroads (1/3 of the deck) and to offer character building experiences (1/3 of the deck) to the powerful railroads. Some gamers call this the "hysterical event deck". I have kept it out of Advanced Tracks to Telluride at the request of the tournament players. AT2T will give them other acts of God to contend with, not the least being the weather. The game board is copyrighted 1992. Tracks to Telluride is copyrighted 1994. Advanced Tracks to Telluride is copyrighted 1995. Tracks to Titicaca is the second game in the Tracks series. It is set in the Andes between the years 1870 and 1930.

The game is played on a map of southwestern Colorado between the cities of Denver, Grand Junction, Dolores and Trinidad. The map is four sections of laminated paper riveted together in the center. The map is assembled by interlocking the tabs at the edge of the map. All of the mine cards are then shuffled together. The top seventeen are dealt out as the initial set of open mines. The remaining mine cards are separated out into four stacks by type: gold, silver, coal and varied (miscellaneous). The season indicator card is set to summer. Play order is determined randomly using the turn order cards. In turn order, each player decides on his starting city: Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo or Trinidad. In reverse turn order, each player then decides on narrow or standard gauge track. Each player starts with $20. Play proceeds at the Determine Railroad Order stage.

The game ends either when one railroad is connected to both Denver and Grand Junction, or all of the historical event cards have been played. At the end of that season, draw one more mine event card and close all mines listed on it. The winner is the player whose railroad receives the most mine income at the end of the game. Remember, standard gauge railroads receive twice the income from each mine that a narrow gauge receives.