Now you see why I married her! As far as future appearances, I don’t think that will be practical or possible for every episode — but she’ll definitely be back.

Thanks! And to your questions:

1. Depends. An inexperienced group of 4 can take up to four hours to play. An experienced group can knock a game off in an hour. I’d say that the average time is about 2 hours, assuming everyone is focused on the game and avoids analysis paralysis.

The main thing that takes all the time is planning out your deliveries — if you don’t know the map well, you spend a good deal of your downtime and your turn just trying to find the cities.

I don’t recommend playing the game with more than 4, btw. It takes way too long between your turns, the map gets too crowded, and black and yellow are wretched colors on the board (black doesn’t wipe off easily (see below), and yellow is too hard to see).

2. I haven’t played either Age of Steam or 18xx, but my understanding is that Empire Builder and its ilk are less complex. There is no stock/trading aspect to it, for example.

3. Whoops, that would have been a good thing to cover during the show… the crayons are specially treated to wipe off the board when done. However, if you don’t wipe them off right away, some residue can remain behind. Because of that, some people lay down a sheet of plastic and use transparency pens instead.

When the crayons run out, you can use china markers or grease pencils.

Thanks for those comments, Steve — those timing tips will be useful for planning out our next games. I will say that more than once I’ve been in a tournament situation where someone has pulled off a win in an hour while the rest of us were barely getting started, but that’s not very common and I bow to the man with more experience.

Speaking of experience, I’m going to assume that you are the Steve associated with this FAQ, which does a better job summarizing the different games than we did. There’s also a list of variants, which some people might find useful.

Adrian, I’m glad you liked the show! We had a lot of fun, so we’ll probably be doing it again, depending on the game. I do have at least a couple more shows planned around other people as guests, as they know those games a lot better than I do, so there will be more…

And truthfully, stacking your money only does so much. Once you start cashing in for fifties, people get a pretty good sense of how much you have, even if you have a single on top.