Iron Dragon is a crayon rails

Crayon rails

Crayon rails is the generic term for a board game which recreates the building of railroads via the use of crayons on a reusable wipe clean board...

 board game by Mayfair Games

Mayfair Games

Mayfair Games is a publisher of board, card, and roleplaying games. They also license German-style board games and publish them in English throughout the world...

. Unlike the other Empire Builder

Empire Builder (board game)

Empire Builder is a railroad board game centered on the construction of railroad track, and then the delivery of goods along those railroad tracks. The original Empire Builder game is set in North America, but the line has expanded to include games set across the world, on the moon and even in a...

 games, it is set in a fantasy world with the unusual feature of dragon-based locomotives. Eden Games

Eden Games

Eden Games is a game development studio. In May 2002, the company was sold to the Infogrames Group. It is most well known for the V-Rally series of games, as well as the 2006 release Test Drive Unlimited. They have most recently developed Test Drive Unlimited 2, which was released in February 2011...

 licensed the game from Mayfair to produce a Windows version of the game, Rail Empires: Iron Dragon, but since the license has expired neither company can sell it.

Gameplay

The goal of Iron Dragon is to connect seven of the game’s eight major cities with rails and amass 250 gold pieces. Players spend money to build railways and earn money by using them to deliver goods such as dragons, wands, spells, pipeweed, gems, wine and ale. Demand cards indicate three different combinations of good requested, city to which to deliver, and payout; generally longer distances between good production regions and destinations yield higher payouts. Players can upgrade trains for speed and cargo capacity, hire foremen to reduce building costs in various terrain, and even set sail to deliver cargo. Interaction between players is limited to competition for routes, as only one player can own the connection between any two markers, and the usually negative effects of event cards, which affect all players but may harm some more than others.