A group I play with loves Mayfair's Crayon Rail games and our current fave is India Rails. As many of you are aware, if folks aren't familiar with the geography on the board you play on, it can be a serious drag on play time as everyone waits on another to finish their turn.

We've done everything we can to speed play: faster trains, more money/build rounds on set-up, mercy, and borrowing. But we've come on another angle that we think really speeds the game along: card collection at the _end_ of the build phase. This may have been touched on by others, but I haven't seen it yet, so here goes: Normally, as you drop loads at your destination, you collect your money, discard the load card, and immediately draw the new one, read off any events, and continue your turn if possible. Instead, we alter the sequence so that you discharge your cargo, collect your money, ditch the played card and continue your turn through builds and replace your discarded load card(s) at the very end of all your actions.

The advantages of altering the order of play in this way are two-fold:

1. No one has to wait while someone else scouts the board for the destinations on their new load cards or where they can obtain a particular commodity. When players draw new cards to the limit of three, this signals the end of their turn and the next players can take their turns while the drawing player ponders their next move.

2. You aren't double-whammied as the drawer of an event card. Normally, if you are hit by a lose 1 turn/1 load disaster, you lose the remainder of your current turn and all of the next. Others that may be affected just lose their upcoming turn. This way, you can still move and make builds before any disaster strikes and you share the burden equally with everyone else that is hit.

The only disadvantage some in our group have opined which, MHO, hasn't really had that big an affect on play is that you can't drop a spec load on the turn you draw a new card. The solution to that is to end your turn in the city of your last payoff, or another close by, so that you can still drop your spec and make your money at/near the start of your next turn. Yeah, a disaster may knock it off your train in the meantime but, more often than not, you have the opportunity to draw a commodity chit to protect your spec before your turn ends and disaster rears its ugly head.

We played just our second run at India Rails under this system last night with a full table of six players and finished in just 3 hours! (That's fast for us. YMMV)