Great Western Trail rules refresher

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You are trying to finish with the most victory points, earned mostly by delivering valuable cattle to distant cities, putting up your own buildings, collecting hazards and teepees, and hiring workers. You do that by driving your cattleman along the trail to Kansas City again and again, improving your herd deck and your engine's position each lap.

A quick refresh on the table. The seven neutral building tiles go on the seven neutral spaces, lettered A to G for a first game or shuffled otherwise, and the five station master tiles go face up at random on their spaces. The worker, teepee and hazard tiles are sorted by the number on their backs into three shuffled piles, the Kansas City supply. From the pile marked one, reveal and place tiles until seven are on the board: teepees fill the Indian trade section starting at the lowest money value, hazards fill their own sections from number one upward, and anything with no space goes back face down into the supply. Then from the pile marked two, fill the job market, starting in the top row beneath your player count sign, left to right, ending on the space with the job market token, which starts on the top dashed circle. Fill the six foresight spaces with two tiles each from piles one, two and three, matching the space numbers. Shuffle the market cattle cards and lay out seven in a two player game, ten with three, thirteen with four, sorted by color. Reveal four objective cards as the general objective display. Each player takes ten private building tiles, all a-side, in ascending order above their board, fourteen discs covering every colored disc space with only the two gray spaces at the upper left left empty, an engine on the red starting space of the railroad track, a certificate marker at zero, and a cattleman set aside. With three or four players, cover Phase A of your board with your player count tile. Shuffle your fourteen cattle cards as your personal draw stack, draw four, and take one random starting objective card face up into your objective area. Starting capital is six dollars for the start player, then seven, eight and nine clockwise.

Turns go clockwise, and every turn has three phases in order. Phase A, move your cattleman forward along the trail. Phase B, use the location you stopped on. Phase C, draw back up to your hand limit. On your very first turn only, you place your cattleman on any neutral building tile and go straight to Phase B.

Only tiles count as locations. Empty trail spaces are not locations and cost nothing to cross. Each location you enter or pass costs one step, you must move at least one step, and you may never exceed your step limit, which starts at three or four depending on player count. Always move forward with the arrows, choose freely at forks, and you may never pass Kansas City. Other cattlemen do not block you. Whenever you move to or over a tile showing a green or black hand, you pay immediately: to the bank for hazards and teepees, to the owner for another player's building. With two players each hand costs two dollars. With three, green costs two and black costs one. With four, green costs one and black costs two. If you cannot pay a hand fee, pay what you can and keep moving, and you never pay it later. Every other cost in the game must be paid in full.

In Phase B, if you stopped on a neutral building or one of your own, you may perform each of that tile's local actions once, in any order, including any risk action attached to the space. Where two actions are split by a white slash inside one action, you pick only one. If you perform none of them, then and only then you may take a single auxiliary action instead. On another player's building, a hazard tile or a teepee tile, a single auxiliary action is your only option. Auxiliary actions start mostly locked: an action becomes available once at least one of its two disc spaces is cleared, and if both are cleared you may take it as a double auxiliary action, doubling both requirement and reward. However, the single auxiliary action you take in place of local actions can never be doubled.

The core actions you will meet again and again: Hiring a worker means taking one tile from the job market, never from the row the job market token is in, paying the cost shown at the right of its row as modified by the action icon, then placing it on the leftmost free space of its row, performing or forfeiting any immediate action uncovered there. A full row cannot take more workers. Placing a building means choosing a tile from above your board, checking you have at least as many craftsmen as the number in its corner, and paying two dollars per craftsman required. You may instead replace one of your own tiles on the trail with a higher-numbered one, needing and paying only the difference, and the old tile leaves the game. Buying cattle depends on your cowboys: with one cowboy you can buy a breeding value three card for six dollars or a West Highland for twelve, and more cowboys unlock cheaper and multiple purchases. Split your cowboys as you like, but each is used only once, and any cowboy you do not spend on a purchase may instead draw two cards from the market cattle stack into the cattle market. Purchased cattle go face up onto your discard pile. Moving your engine lets you advance up to as many spaces as you have engineers, ignoring entirely any space occupied by another engine, and turnout spaces count as an extra space. Once you stop, the rest of that movement is lost. If you stop on a turnout space, you decide right then whether to upgrade that station, paying its cost and placing a disc, but only if you have not upgraded it before. A disc from a white-cornered space can go anywhere, a disc from a dark-cornered space only onto dark-cornered spaces. If there is a station master tile beside the station, that is your only chance to take it: remove a worker from the rightmost space of its row, put that worker in the tile's place, and keep the tile. Clearing disc spaces on your board is what unlocks auxiliary actions, raises your step limit with three dollars now and three points later, raises your hand limit but costs five dollars immediately or you must clear something else, and raises your certificate limit, though clearing the six before the four leaves you at three until the four is cleared.

You can also remove a hazard tile of your choice, paying any cost shown, or trade with the Indians, taking a teepee and gaining or paying the money shown above its space. Objective cards go to your discard pile when gained. On your own turn you may play objective cards from your hand either before Phase A or before or after any single action in Phase B, never mid-action and never once Phase C has begun. Playing one puts it face up in your objective area and lets you take its immediate action.

Reaching Kansas City means carrying out five subphases in order. In each of the first three, choose one of the two foresight tiles at that spot and move it to its section. Workers fill the job market row where the token sits, left to right, and when a worker fills the token's own space the token advances along the arrow to the next row. A yellow arrow refills the cattle market up to seven, ten or thirteen cards. Teepees and hazards go to their sections as in setup, and if there is no room they leave the game. Fourth, income: reveal your whole hand and total the breeding values, counting each cattle type only once no matter how many copies you hold. Add permanent certificates from station master tiles automatically, and add as many temporary certificates as you like by moving your certificate marker back. Take that many dollars and discard your hand. Fifth, delivery: choose a city whose value is equal to or below that total, but never one where you already have a disc, except Kansas City and San Francisco, which you may deliver to repeatedly. Place a disc on its city space. Delivering to Kansas City gains six dollars now and costs six victory points at the end. Green arrow actions and green arrow points only trigger when both adjacent crests hold your discs. Then pay transport costs of one dollar per cross between your engine's nose and that city's value, if your engine is farther down the track. Finally move your cattleman to the horseman space at the start of the trail and refill the three empty foresight spaces with tiles whose back numbers match.

Then in Phase C, draw back up to your hand limit, which starts at four and can reach six. Only when you must draw from an empty stack do you shuffle your discard pile into a new draw stack.

The end is triggered when a player places a worker on the very last space of the job market during foresight subphase two or three. That player takes the job market token, finishes her remaining subphases normally except that she cannot take another worker tile, refills the foresight spaces, and that was her last turn. Every other player then takes one final turn, and if they reach Kansas City they may not choose worker tiles in subphases two and three, though they still refill the foresight spaces. Then score eleven categories: one point per five dollars, the points on your buildings standing on the board, the city crest points you have unlocked including any negatives, the points beside each train station holding your disc, the points on your hazard tiles, the points on cattle cards anywhere in your deck, your objective cards, where cards still in your deck may be added to your objective area or discarded from the game as you choose while cards already in your area must be scored, positive if fully fulfilled and negative if not, with each fulfilled task counting toward only one card, the individual tasks on your station master tiles, four points per worker on the fifth or sixth space of a row, three points if you cleared the marked step limit disc space, and two points for the job market token. Most points wins, and a tie is a shared victory.

A turn, played out

It is a three player game and you are 3 locations short of Kansas City, which is within your step limit, so you go all the way. You hold 5 dollars. Your first step passes a hazard tile showing a green hand, and with three players green costs 2, so 2 dollars go to the bank. Your second step passes the building of the player to your left, which shows a black hand, so you pay that player 1 dollar. Empty trail spaces cost you nothing. Your third step lands on Kansas City with 2 dollars left. At the first foresight spot you choose a teepee over the other tile, and it goes into the Indian trade section on the lowest money value still free. At the second you take a worker. The job market token sits in the second row, so the worker goes on the leftmost free space there. That space is the token's own, so the token moves along the arrow to the next row. At the third you choose a hazard, and it fills the lowest free number in its section. Now income. You reveal your 4 cards: two copies of the same breeding value 3 type, and two copies of another type worth 2 each. Each type counts once, so that is 3 + 2, making 5. Your station master tile adds 1 permanent certificate, making 6. Your certificate marker sits on 2, so you move it back to zero for 2 more, making 8. You take 8 dollars, now 10, and discard your hand. For delivery you may choose any city valued 8 or less where you have no disc yet. You pick the 8, your first disc there. The crest on its other side already holds your disc, so the green arrow points between them will count for you at the end. Your engine's nose sits 2 crosses short of the 8, so transport costs 2 dollars, leaving you 8. Your cattleman goes to the horseman space, and you refill the three empty foresight spaces with tiles whose backs match their numbers. In Phase C you must draw 4, but your stack holds only 2. You draw those, shuffle your discard pile into a new stack, and draw the last 2.