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Strategy/management games are not very popular with retro players. On the one hand, we live in an era dominated by instant gratification, where the average attention span is short and people are not very willing to "work hard" to get something. On the other hand, most of the "retro" world is made up of individuals who have to divide themselves between work, family, etc. so they don't have much time to dedicate to video games, especially those requiring commitment, perseverance, planning, decision making. Therefore, the vast majority of the new titles are fast and immediate arcade games (often even quick to complete), and for those who want more, there isn't much to choose from. Thankfully, Russian Railway Magnate makes it possible to effectively fill this gap.

The player impersonates a railroad tycoon competing with other two, played by the computer. You can choose between nine figures of Russian railway transport history from different times, ranging from the first half of the 19th century to the present day. The goal is to connect as many cities of the Russian Empire as possible to your railway network and prevent others from doing so, eventually becoming a monopolist.

Game action is performed on a large scrolling map of Russia, where cities, railway lines, forests and rivers are schematically depicted, and is turn-based. Each turn, you place a part of a railway track, always starting from an already existing one or from a city connected to your network.

In fact, building and maintaining a network costs a lot, and to earn money, you need cities. Each city gives you an income depending on the amount of cargo in it, as well as the tariff for transportation, which it's your task to set. When a city is connected to rail lines belonging to more than one tycoon, the income it generates gets assigned to the tycoon who sets the lowest tariff. If tariffs are the same, the income is divided equally between the three tycoons.

Playing as Kaganovich (mainly because he and Witte were the only characters in the game I ever heard of), I won not only by blocking the opponents' expansion in my network, but also by keeping an eye on their tariffs, so that by lowering mine of one each turn, the income from contested cities went always into my pockets. I also noticed that the computer seems to go as low as possible, then raises the tariff back to 30 each time. A sort of attrition war, but it helped me in the long run.

In the end, the game shows itself to be actually simpler than it sounds: basically, you need to connect cities in the most efficient way to avoid wild expenses, and try not to be cornered by your adversaries. Meanwhile, you should remember that since you cannot cross your opponents' lines, you should be careful not to be cut off, but you could also do the same to them, forcing them to build more convoluted paths, so that their maintenance expenses become higher.

A feature I miss is the possibility of assigning the other tycoons to human players as a hot-seat multiplayer mode. Russian Railway Magnate is nonetheless absorbing and challenging: we definitely need more titles like this one.