News"Free travel": building routes for city trips

"Free travel": building routes for city trips

Whether alone or with family: In “Freie Fahrt”, gamers can ride the train across Europe.

As the publisher describes the game: Around the end of the 19th century, a steadily growing network of railway lines in Europe emerged. In this way, people could travel to European cities and admire the buildings influenced by historicism and art nouveau. In “Free Ride” you take over the construction of these railway lines. Connects the cities of Europe and brings passengers to the desired cities. You can use your own and the nationalized railway lines free of charge. But if you want to drive on the railway lines of the other players, you have to pay them money in order to nationalize their lines for everyone.

Choose travel routes from an open display and complete them to get victory points at the end of the game. The aim of “Freie Fahrt” is to visit as many different cities as possible in Europe. “Free Ride” also offers a challenging solo game!

“Freie Fahrt” is always about these decisions: Are you going to build more railway lines or do you take the train? Are you waiting for better travel routes in the display, or do you snatch the best travel routes from others?

“Free ride”

Game designer: Friedemann Friese

Publisher: 2F

Age recommendation: from 10 years

Number of players : 1–5 players: inside

Playing time: 60 min.

Price: approx. € 45.00

Hunter & Melli Review: Green, Green, Green are all of his games. Friedemann Frieses games have already impressed many board game fans in their striking green garb. His latest creation is no exception: “Free Ride”, a competitive route building game. A demanding solo version is included in the set of rules for ambitious players. Track construction is a popular game theme, with which authors always come up with new, unique mechanics. In “Free Ride”, the players travel to major cities on the Eurasian continent to marvel at the imposing buildings of the 19th century.

In the card display, the players repeatedly choose new travel routes that they expand. Before doing this, they have to arrive at the departure station with their train. If the destination station is then reached, the player (s) drives: to another city that is required for the next route. If you can tactically combine the best routes, you save time. It’s always worth visiting new cities. After all, every building should be admired. Whether the city with an existing route network or a new one with arduous route construction makes more sense must always be weighed up.

A move is used either to drive or to build a route. The procurement of further parts of the route must be paid for, otherwise it will be suspended in order to preserve them. Because time is everything, otherwise the important routes are quickly sold out. Another trick: If a route is already built on by other players, you can nationalize the route against payment to the person concerned and make it usable for everyone. That brings with it an exciting dilemma: Do you want to build the longer detour route or nationalize the shorter one?

With “Freie Fahrt” Friedemann Friese has added a wonderfully fresh variant with new challenges to the railway genre. Thanks to the simple basic mechanism, the game is suitable for the whole family without any problems and is a real alternative to the long-running hit “Ticket to Ride”. Only the spelling of the city names in their national language is initially confusing – e.g. Kyiv for Kiev or Bucharest for Bucharest. But this is due to the international edition of the game, and you can even improve your knowledge of internationally used city names while playing with your railroad through Europe.

The series: The game experts Johannes Jaeger and Melanie Iwanecki regularly present board games in the FR. Video reviews of all the games presented here (and more) by Hunter & Friends are available at: hunterundcron.de and youtube.com/user/hunterundcron.

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