Today we come to an end of the “Tunnel Trilogy” of scenarios. The first scenario we explored of this trilogy was the Wye Valley Tourer. It felt like an advanced version of the base game, fleshing out most elements of the game without any one particular element stealing the limelight. The next we looked at was the Bluebell Line, which did the opposite, investing most of its changes into the single cricket match minigame. Our final scenario in this trilogy is the Malta Railway. Malta sits perhaps somewhere between the two, having a lot of the versatility of the former but a very strong identity like the latter.

New Actions and Resources

This scenario uses the Daffodils previously seen in the Daffodil Line, the water from Trans-Australian Railway and the dynamite from Jungfraubahn … However in almost all cases, their function has been altered.

All three resources are now used as additional building resources and for scoring contracts:

• Water is obtained via the excavation action (you get 1 water per excavate from any available in completed tunnels). 

• Daffodils are generally obtained by “building” them at stations using water. They contribute to high scoring spaces on the final station. They are the rarest of the resources.

• Dynamite is obtained at the C action, you can take 1 of them as one of your 3 mini-actions just like Jungfraubahn. It can be used to boost your excavation by 5 (returning the extra rubble to the box like Jungfraubahn). It can also be used to build early stations in order to open up other spaces there.

It’s fun to have so many extra resources to play with in the scenario. They can be very effective too, but significantly less versatile than the other resources. I’ll highlight exactly where each one shines in the appropriate section. Be careful to monitor how many actions you’re spending obtaining them too. They add extra steps to the process of scoring points and this can obfuscate how much value you are actually getting with them. As later sections are about to illustrate, this scenario moves fast; it’s important to keep an eye on pace to not get caught out holding valuable resources you never leveraged.

Track

Tunnels return, and all the advice given in Wye Valley Tourer applies here too. Except this time, the placement has a huge impact. All of them are right at the start of the track. This means they cannot really be prepared for and are highly liable to all be excavated by the first event cube drawn.

The beginning of the game will almost certainly be a mad dash for everyone to get stone and excavate to get as many player markers onto the tunnels as they can before they’re gone. It is highly probable there won’t be any tunnel left by the end of round 2 or 3. Speed is the name of the game in Malta and after this explosive start, it only gets faster.

Buses

This scenario adds 3 bus cards to the contract deck. Akin to the way epidemic cards are set up in a game of Pandemic, each of them is shuffled into a smaller pile of contracts then placed in order. 1901 will always be found first, then 1921, then 1931.

They cannot be taken as contracts, but have special effects when revealed:

• 1901 triggers an immediate excavation event

• 1921 permanently blocks the first two work rate spaces This means the excavation rate can’t drop below 2.

• 1931 Permanently blocks the next two work rate spaces. This means the excavation rate can’t drop below 3 and the lay track rate can’t drop below 2.

The buses all push the game into an accelerative arc. The first event on the event track is already excavation, so the first bus doubling down on that makes those early tunnels even shorter-lived. Then the rising floors on the work rates ensure the late game can’t get overly bogged down by bad weather. Knowing the game will be a fast one, you should be prepared to make plans that budget for the significantly lower number of actions you’ll take.

Weather Changes

The weather in this scenario undergoes the following changes:

• Sun now only gives +1 excavation rate rather than 2. If the work rates can’t increase because they are at the end of the track, the game discards the top 2 cards of the contract deck. If a bus was discarded this way, its effect is resolved immediately.

• Rain no longer affects work rates, instead it adds a water token to each of the completed tunnels. 

• Fog has taken on the role rain used to serve, decreasing work rates by 1 each.

The acceleration is pushed even faster by the weather here. Though decreasing the excavation boost from sun, there are significantly fewer fog cards in the weather deck than rain, which means the work rates will rarely decrease. Even if they do, the buses minimise how low they can drop.

Fog’s game slowing effect is also gone, meaning excavation and track actions are maximally available at all times.

Rain then adds even further speed with water tokens, offering greater incentive to excavate. Water will usually be readily available too. In practice, rain will almost always add 3 water to the board since, as discussed above, all 3 tunnels are right at the start. Rain being the most common weather type furthers this availability.

Stations

At first glance, the stations subtly push up the speedometer of this scenario too. All the excavation spaces are juicier than average, incentivising use of dynamite to hit high excavation numbers to reach them.

Overall though, the stations may actually incentivise players to slow down just a little bit. This is because almost every space is offering pretty appealing trades. It’s rare to see double digits on a station space in Snowdonia, let alone this many of them. 

Floriana and Valletta (the card misspells the capital’s name) offer insane deals. 2 stone for 8 points is unheard of! But, cleverly, these stations have linear build orders not dissimilar to East Grinstead in the Bluebell Line. The spaces built with dynamite must come first and do not offer amazing rewards. This unusually means that it is sometimes beneficial to go later in the round with your build actions. You don’t want to be taking the poor dynamite spaces only to give the juicy spaces to your opponents! Set yourself up to benefit by securing the first player marker and dynamiting at the end of a round so you can guarantee scoring the good points at the start of next round.

The Museum part of Notabile Museum is where your daffodils will pay off, offering juicy points for a trio of special resources. That said, there’s only three of these. Turn order will be essential in 3+ player games where there aren’t enough of these to go around. Aside from three contracts, this is the only pay-off for daffodils too, so think twice before collecting lots of them!

Contracts

There’s a few interesting candidates here. 

The 4 daffodils for 37 points looks very appealing, but I think it will more likely lead you astray. There are only 6-7 daffodils total in this scenario. 1 is locked behind a single contract in the deck you may not see, another behind 6 to 7 actions worth of surveyor movement (massively tanking the contract’s actions to VP ratio) and the remaining 4 to 5 are on stations, each costing a water. It is *so* easy for your opponents to dirupt this. When they do, you’ll have likely overcommitted and have more daffodils than you can score. The bottom action is nothing to write home about either.

On the opposite end, 4 water for 21 is brilliant. With the work rate so high, your 4 actions collecting water, likely come with 8 to 12 rubble which can be used on a rubble contract for another 10 to 15 points.

The action on contract 3 to gain a daffodil for free is also excellent and well worth grabbing even if you’re not going to score it.

Also notable is the cards that have been replaced: As you can see lots of excavation boosts and pay-offs have gone. This makes a lot of sense to balance out the escalated work rates. It does mean though, that rubble contacts are rarer, if you see one, go for it! Malta’s card number 8 also has different weather on the back, changing from fog to even more game sun!

Trains

Trains in this scenario may be harder to justify than some other scenarios again owing to how fast the scenario moves. That said, extra workers will add a lot of pressure to other players so do consider them, especially if you got a lot of markers on the tunnels and need fewer steel for track.

Rocket: It costs 1 steel, has no ability and comes with 3 coal. This is a strictly superior version of the Mt Snowdon’s Moel Siabod, which was the same but only provided 2 coal. That was a viable buy, so this is a great buy. Especially so because of how much value it delivers up-front, freeing you up to capitalise quickly rather than spend the extra worker’s time collecting further coal.

The Royal Train: Powerful but narrow. Gaining a stone every time you build for only one steel investment is generous, especially in Malta where stone can get you a lot of points. But the higher the player count, the harder this will be to profit from as the number of stone-based station spaces you’ll get for yourself dwindle.

Male Voice Choir: When you pay a coal, ALL players get their 3rd worker rather than just you. In exchange for this, you get 2 points per other player’s worker gained this way. This train is … weird. Firstly, you need to be at a higher player count to score meaningful points off of this. 6 or 8 VP is good, 2 … less so. You’re also paying your resources to give everyone else a benefit. The only way to mitigate the granted workers is to be early in turn order, since the flood of workers will force later ones to take inefficient actions. 

In relative terms, it’s expensive too. You’ll save everyone else the need to buy trains and need to foot train maintenance (which nobody else will be paying) to hold on to it. The train doesn’t come with any coal to help get you started … heck, it doesn’t even come with a built-in way to track the points it’s scoring. I can see a world in a high player count game where it scores an awful lot, but I’ve yet to see it happen myself.

The three trains here don’t seem to have any obvious mechanical or thematic links to this scenario. I don’t believe the royal train or Stephenson’s Rocket ever visited Malta and my research suggests there is only a single All-male voice choir there. Please enlighten me in the comments if I’ve missed something though! 

Surveyor

Oof. Surveyor is fighting here for potentially the worst outcomes they’ve ever offered. 6 - 7 actions for 7 points and a water token is *barely* better than missing your turn entirely. If you go all the way to the end, you will lose your 7 points for a daffodil, which demands yet another action to leverage (alongside collected dynamite and water). Scoring 17 points in a final station build is a lot less appealing when you spent 8-9 actions getting there.

Avoid using your surveyor at all costs. 

Jaya’s Design Thoughts

The explosive start and continuously accelerating pace makes this scenario really stand out in a way I like. It’s a distinct and specific experience but not one that feels overly focused on a specific gimmick. It challenges players to play a particular type of game and that’s great fun.

Potentially controversially though, I’m lukewarm on all the extra resources. It’s cool that dynamite brings a timing puzzle into building, but apart from that they mostly feel like noise to me. None of the 3 resources quite have the same level of identity they did in their debut scenarios. 

For me personally this doesn’t topple Wye Valley Tourer as my favourite, but I like it a lot more than Bluebell Line. I would enjoy this as an alternative pick sometimes.

To look at the “tunnel trilogy” as a whole, I’m not sure there's too much beyond the titular tunnels that ties them together. I don’t know for example if they have an intended play order. But I do like how by simply placing the tunnels in different parts of the railway route, they demand meaningfully different approaches from players.

What’s your favourite of the tunnel trilogy? How do you feel about tunnels in general? Is there a particular scenario you’d like to see covered next? Let me know!

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Jaya Baldwin