Base price: $20.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 25 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 7
Full disclosure: A review copy of Next Station: Paris was provided by Blue Orange Games.
Alright, here we go again. I’m frantically writing reviews ahead of PAX Unplugged since I’ll be doing that for a bit and then it’s the holidays, which isn’t particularly useful from a focus time perspective anyways. I don’t think I’ve had a not-busy month this year, which probably means I need to think through what I’m doing and why, again. It’s all a process, but it’s such a busy one. We’re working on it. But hopefully I’ll see some of you at PAX Unplugged! I’d say to say hello, but I can occasionally get skittish in crowds since the whole COVID thing. Would still love to say hi, but I apologize in advance if I’m weird or a little listless. It comes with the territory, I suppose. Instead of analyzing my own psychology, though, why don’t we talk about Next Station: Paris?
In Next Station: Paris, players are once again architecting a transit network through a bustling metropolis. Each round, each player gets a line assigned to them of one of four colors. You can advance in two directions as you expand your line, flipping different Station Cards to indicate where you can move next on your turn. Just be careful! You can’t cross lines or visit the same Station twice with the same line, so you’ll have to plan ahead. Optional objectives and more can switch up your game, and Paris offers new advantages and challenges. There are now Monuments, which can be reached with any Station Card (and offer some points for the trip), and Crossings, which explicitly allow multiple lines to converge (provided you do it right). Both are new ways to score, made much easier by the wild district smack in the center of Paris. So flip and write to your heart’s content as you try to expand your network through this historical city. Will you manage to turn your transit line into an arc of triumph?
Overall: 8.75 / 10
Weirdly, I think Next Station: Paris is my favorite one in the series. I think there’s a nice set of differences between the three. Next Station: London is the original. It’s the simplest and has the best feeling of balance between freedom and challenge. Next Station: Tokyo is the most challenging. It has a lot of negative points and a lot of constraint, but that really lets strategy shine through. Next Station: Paris is the poster child of freedom. It adds monuments, which are essentially wild spaces that give you bonus points and, if you use a wild card to get there, you get to take a bonus move. That’s a bargain at twice the price, or whatever people say. Add in a wild district in the dead center of the board, and you’ve got a game that you’re almost certainly going to see higher scores in. I like that! It’s a nice palette cleanser after Tokyo offering a huge challenge.
We are starting to hit the point where I’m wondering how much more Next Station they’ve got in the tank, but I can hardly complain if this is the result! I really enjoyed this game. I think my major complaint was that the pencils didn’t really show up that well on the paper, sometimes, and that’s a high-tier nitpick if I’ve ever heard one. I’d love to see if the Olympics challenge pack they made for the Paris Olympics is more widely available, as well. It’s on Board Game Arena, which is where I first learned how to use it, but I still think that’s a fun tie-in. I’ll look for it at a convention or something.
I think the Next Station series has been pretty consistent, but while I like this version the best, I think you’re going to not see the kind of wave that the original version made for a variety of reasons. The closest analogue I can point to is the recent Zelda games. Breath of the Wild was a game-changing entry in a venerable series, and Tears of the Kingdom was even better, but Breath of the Wild made more of a splash because it was so distinct. Next Station: London was a very big hit when it first dropped, and while Paris offers players more freedom to execute on their strategies, it’s still very much a Next Station game at its core. Is that fair? Not entirely, but there’s some psychology to justify and explain that. I really like teaching this one after Tokyo, though, since Tokyo forces players to really grapple with the strategy and then Paris gives them the freedom to do a ton of cool stuff and earn a ton of points for doing it. I never feel like I can’t do something useful in Paris, which is always nice. It may not be the thing I wanted to do the most, but it’s still meaningful progress, and that appeals to me a lot as a player. If you’re a fan of the Next Station series, you’re a Parisian aficionado, or you just want to flip and write a transit system, you’ll probably enjoy Next Station: Paris! Like I said, it’s my favorite in the series.
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