We have come to the final scenario deep dive in this series covering the Deluxe Master Set! Technically The Isle of Man is not part of the Master Set but I’m including it as an honorary member: It was released in an associated pack with cards to fix some of the misprints in the Master Set. This scenario is on the adventurous side, boasting two railways each with their own weather and work rate tracks. New ship cards let you amass multiple powerful effects while water and flowers return to add additional resource considerations. Let’s see how it all comes together.

Two Tracks

The starting station in this scenario is actually in the middle of the track in Douglas. It then extends out “South” along the white cards and “North” along the black cards. Your surveyor starts in Douglas on a side of your choice. You can only excavate and lay track on the side your surveyor is on. Each side also has its own independent weather track and work rate. Each station also has a “wide” space at the bottom that can only be built if your surveyor is at that station.

This doubles the number of possibilities and opportunities at play. But you can only maneuver through them slowly due to the limitations of your surveyor.

The Surveyor

Because your surveyor dictates a lot of your excavation, track laying and building, they are organically a very important part of this scenario.

You have 3 options when taking the G action. You can:

1. Move your surveyor one further down the line they are on

2. Pay a coal to move them to any station

3. Move your surveyor back to Douglas If you own a ship (more on those later)

The first thing to note is that this is the only way to change which side of the line you’re excavating/laying track on. But because it’s attached to the G action,  it necessarily comes after all the B, D and E actions, forcing you to plan 1 or 2 turns ahead.

As for each of the G options themselves, moving just 1 space isn’t that efficient, but is good if you want the specific wide building in the station you move to. Moving the surveyor using coal is costly but offers maximum flexibility, it also allows you to quickly get to the rewards you want. Returning to Douglas is useful as a cheap, reliable way to adjust which side your surveyor is on if you need to switch sides.

Stations

Excavation spaces and buildings are all stronger than normal here so try to capitalise. The buildings using rubble are great value if you haven’t found rubble contracts.

The water and flowers however I think are all a bit of a trap. Water is worth 1 VP each at the end of the game and can only be obtained by building in Port Erin or Ramsey. Flowers are worth 3VP each at the end of the game are obtained when building stations  that cost water or the first time you reach the end of a line with your surveyor. This means building the tempting 24VP station gardens costs: 12 VP in flowers, 3VP and 3 actions spending water to get the flowers, another several actions (and possibly coal) moving your surveyor around… for only 8VP profit overall. It’s nowhere near as efficient as the stone, rubble, iron ore and steel spaces. You’re better off just keeping your collected water and ignoring the flowers unless you’re *really* desperate.

The wide spaces are otherwise pretty strong, often “refunding" your worker or giving you an opportunity to build one of the very powerful ships on offer (See below). Don’t burn too many actions moving your surveyor into position though as that will quickly decrease the effectiveness of these spaces.

Ships

Ships are unique to this scenario. There are 4 ships available each game. They function like trains with a few exceptions:

1. They can only be built using the 4 wide “shipyard” station spaces.

2. They cannot get you your temporary labourer.

3. They are immune to train maintenance

4. There is no limit on how many you may have (and you may also own one train as normal).

Each ship gives you:

1. The option to return to Douglas using the G action

2. A permanent ability (most of which improve the A action) 

3. An amount of VP multiplied by each ship you own (including itself).

These benefits scale exponentially on two vectors with each boat you build: Their VP bonuses all compound on one another and all the A action abilities stack to make every stockyard visit immensely valuable.

Owning all four boats could get you as many as 48VP while offering many extra actions and resources. Put simply, you do not want to allow a single player to amass more than 2 of these. That said, if other players are fighting for the ships and they split relatively evenly, then that creates a strong window of opportunity for you to snap up the other great station spaces they’re neglecting.

Trains

The 500cc Manx Norton is very strong. An extra G action whenever you gain your temporary labourer means you get two workers for the price of one each time you use it! There’s lots of incentives for moving your surveyor in this scenario and the two weather tracks means one  of the lines should always be good to take extra actions on. It also gives you the first player marker at an unusual time, meaning you can take it from someone before they can actually use it!

Contracts

These contracts are all pretty good for the most part. There are 2 new requirements here: The North/South tags require those stations to be from that respective side of the line and the surveyor icon requires you to build the wide spaces. Building was already favourable in this scenario and these contracts emphasise that further.

The most interesting ones here for me are 5 and 29. 10 buildings for 31VP is strong but it uses a lot of ownership markers and thus limits your capacity to score other contracts. Thankfully, it comes with a bottom half that allows you to swap it if it’s not working making it a great pick. Contract 29 gives you 9 VP and 2 resources for 1 action, which is ludicrously good, but it demands you don’t have any ships. This trade is likely worth it, so long as none of your opponents are getting three or four of the ships.

Jaya’s Design Thoughts

Once I got past the fair few rules that aren’t entirely clear from the rulebook... I enjoyed this scenario a lot. As a more experienced player, it’s great fun to be pushed to look multiple turns ahead on the weather tracks and decide which side of the line to be on. 

I really like how many parts of the scenario are neatly threaded through the surveyor also. The excavation and track laying are neatly done and the wide station spaces are the cherry on top making the spatial puzzle richer. Ships connect to the surveyortoo  both in how they’re acquired and the new movement option they offer. 

The ships’ compounding elements make them an omnipresent consideration throughout the scenario that confidently separate them from just being “more trains”. This scenario definitely requires more experience with Snowdonia to fully appreciate though, I would never play this with a newbie.

This brings us to the end of this series covering all the scenarios released prior to Special Edition and Grand Tour. This is not the end of Train of Thought however, so stay tuned for more! As always, I’m curious for your thoughts in the comments. If you were to rank all the scenarios, which ones would rise to the top, which would fall to the bottom? What does a scenario somewhere in the middle look like? Where would the Isle of Man rank among them?

Jaya Baldwin