Instead of looking at web comics like I was going to, I spent a fair bit of time last night going through the Source Forge listings. And I found some great stuff!

I found a windows version of a solitaire game called Shisen-Sho, where you remove pairs Mahjong tiles until you clear the board. Sounds exactly like any of the hundred versions of solitaire Mahjong, doesn't it, but there's just one difference - all the tiles are flat in a rectangle, and you can only remove pairs that that can have an unblocked route of no more than three lines to each other (see pic at right). The only thing missing from the download was the rules - but I found these elsewhere!

This game is extremely absorbing for me, just like Links was - I love elegant puzzle games. Apparently it's a port of a version of the game that ran under KDE (a Linux GUI) and can use the tile sets for KMahjongg. I went out and found the download page and converted them (as simple as changing the extension from .tileset to .bmp). There are heaps of other versions out there too (and Ishido looks just as interesting). Cool!

The other big find at Source Forge was the number of train and railway games and simulations. I've always been interested in trains and railways since I was a child. My father was a guard on freight and passenger trains for over 30 years, and even took me with him on a couple of runs up to the Avon Valley marshalling yards.

In Simultrains you "build the transport networks, with platforms, quays, level crossings, signals and much more. Transport passengers between nearby cities with a commuter train or use a high speed train to earn big money by connecting cities further apart". I haven't tried it yet but it looks a lot like A-Train and Sim City (though there's also FreeTrain).

 Rails is a java implementation of the 18xx series of board games. What's 18xx? I have an original copy (with Northern expansion) of 1829 by Hartland Trefoil. This was an elegant board game based on the first railways in Britain in the 19th century. Each player bought shares in one or more companies and built track (by placing tiles), bought engines and ran trains for profit or loss. It was deceptively simple, requiring a mixture of strategy and shrewd management. Like Diplomacy, the game seems to have created an entire following and variants.

And then there's the Crayon Rails game (not open-source, I found it while looking for Cyber Rails, which doesn't seem to have anything to download yet) which is clearly inspired by Empire Builder. Years ago when I was in Fandom, they used to have Rail Baron tournaments at Swancon. I used to own a set of that but I really found it difficult to play the game because the board would freak out my vision and (like Monopoly) I'd always end a game with a migraine headache! An alternative to RB was Empire Builder. I own two sets - America (the original) and Britain. The thing about these games was that you built rail networks by drawing in crayon on a laminated map. Much more interesting than Monopoly styled RB.

Actually, there seems to be a whole site devoted to these old board games, called Rail Game Fans. I must investigate this more thoroughly, as I should at Rail Serve as well.

But, without a doubt, the big "gob smacker" of a discovery in my browsing would have to be Rail World and Yard Duty. Both are railway simulations that use satellite photos of real railway complexes to simulate railway management. There's no "winning" as such, but by golly, the most realism I've seen yet! I must see about adding the Kewdale Freight Terminal and other locations sometime.

Yes, I know this all sounds obsessive, but trains (and train games) have been a passion for a long while.