When a Japanese friend I’d met in Treasure Abyss invited me to try A Bit Lucky‘s “Lucky Train“, I thought immediately of the legendary train sim “Densha de GO!“. The description sure sounded like it. Build trains and send them from your town to those of your friends, past country scenes you design. I was absolutely there.
Well, I was close. You do build trains, and you do send them from your town, but you don’t go with them. Lucky Train is a fairly simplistic city sim, except instead of built around a town hall or castle, it’s built around a train station. As you progress, you raise a town and later a city around that train station. In your city, the only thing anyone wants to do is leave — by train.
Where DO all these people come from? They must sneak in while you’re away. Each building can contribute potential train passengers. Your town will start with some really cheap passengers who barely pay for their fare. As you earn money by getting these cheap folks out of your town, you’ll be able to buy (with the in-game gold or via the cash shop) better buildings that attract a better class of passenger.
The heart of Lucky Train, though, is in the trains themselves. Trains can have more than 20 stops (depending on your level), and unlike most every other sim game, these stops do not all have to be your friends. Any two friends can set up a train route between themselves, but either can extend the route to friends the other doesn’t share. And those friends one degree removed can send that train on to THEIR friends, and so on. By the time a train comes back to your town, it might have gathered a dozen stops with people you don’t know. You can click on their portrait in the route to visit their town, perhaps ask to be their friend. It’s probably the most purely social sim game I’ve played.
You can upgrade any train (even a route started by strangers) that stops in your town to a faster train, or one with more cars, or one of the specialty trains occasionally available (as of this writing, a skeleton train and a ghost train are available for Halloween — luckily, some of your passengers will arrive in costume for a special extra bonus). Better trains give you more money. Trains on routes with more stops give you more money. Once you find a friend who plays, you’ll be encouraged to spam them to join any train that comes your way.
Gameplay is entirely a clickfest. Putting the best fares on the best trains is about the extent of the strategy. Most buildings can be upgraded after a certain number of passengers have escaped; upgraded buildings give more passengers or better fares, or both.
Lucky Train is a fairly enjoyable variation on the city sim social game. If you like playing with trains, you’ll probably like it. Aside from an NPC train, “The Baron”, who comes by daily to give a reward that scales up with the number of uninterrupted days you’ve played, there’s few built-in annoyances forcing you to log in at a certain time, though downline stations may wonder why you’re holding up their trains!
Scorecard
Genre: Simulation
Spam Level: Medium; friends who play will get spammed by you, but friends who don’t play need never know you do.
Friend Requirement: Medium, you will need friends who play to create new routes.
Expense: Low, you can buy buildings and trains in the cash shop, but in-game gold will be sufficient to play.
Overall Rating (1-10): 6, more fun than the average click sim, but lacking in strategy and depth.
1 thought on “Social Game Review: Lucky Train”
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A good summary, but a bit harsh I felt, as it does involve other strategies than just putting the highest payers on the longest route.
Leaving a few 1-tenant houses is good as it allows you to keep “ghosts” and “circus strongmen” etc. for the longer routes you know will be arriving soon.
Deciding whether to spend coins upgrading trains or buying new buildings is another point to consider, especially early when coins are scarce.