Lucky Train::Social Games::Facebooks Lucky Train Game

Do you play any of the games on Facebook? I mean games like Farmville, Frontierville, City of Wonder and the like? I seem to have a number of friends who do this as I am always getting requests to join them in their adventures. I am only active in the granddaddy of them all Farmville, but have found a new game that has captured my interest, which is called Lucky Train. It combines the same concepts of all the games, which is social connection to build up your presence with a love of mine from childhood, trains, to deliver an interesting little game. there are a number of train games on the internet, builbing on the success of PC Games such as Train Tycoon.

Like all other games on Facebook that I have tried Lucky Train is dependent on you enticing your friends to join you in your effort to build up your county in this example. The main goal is to extend your train line to others thereby adding stops and the potential to generate cash which allows you to buy more structures and faster trains. It is a numerically based equation very similar to Farmville, Frontierville and every other Facebook game.

There are twelve different kinds of trains available on the Lucky Train game as I write this hub. They range from a basic steam engine that travels 25 mph and pulls 3 cars to the most expensive, a bullet type train names the Shuriken which travels 200 mph pulling eight cars. In between are variations of the other twelve which travel at speed between the steam and bullet train and pull between 3 and eight cars.

Again, the way to progress in the game is to haul passengers around “the world” as the game puts it by adding people that are your Facebook friends and thus adding stops to your train. If you have a friend that is in another country then your train will travel a farther distance and a faster train is in your best interest.  The more stops on your route, the more the potential for cash and experience points to accumulate.

In order to have riders for your trains you have to add buildings. The buildings range from a cottage up to the types of structures built to gather tourists, such as memorials and stadiums and the like. Each building type generates a particular type of passenger who pays a fare and delivers an amount of experience. The least expensive buildings produce the lowest paying passengers and ones with lower experience value. As the buildings get more elaborate, so does the fare of the passenger and the experience they add to your total.

You can purchase the building in two ways, by accumulating coins through gaem play or buy purchasing Lucky Bucks using your own money. Personally I am too cheap to spend my own money on the game, so I just let the coins accumulate and expand in that way.

Each building will generate a passenger in a prescribed time. For instance the cottage will provide a passenger every 30 seconds on the basic level. You can progress to the next level by producing 10 passengers, meaning you click on the building when you see a passenger is ready. When the first ten passengers from that building have been loaded onto a train the building can be upgraded. The next level of passenger pays more for their fare and will give a few more experience points.

When you get to apartment buildings, condominiums and such there is more people generated, over longer periods of time, thus giving you the method to keep up with your growing amount of trains. Think about this, if you have 15 trains with 5 cars that means 75 passengers you have to be able to supply, so you can see the need to have multiple buildings.

Okay, no one likes to live in a barren area that has no greenery, so the designers of Lucky train did you the favor of including some decorations in the form of flowers and trees to add to your design. These items do nothing to enhance your train development, but do make your county look like a place people would want to live and work. Do not neglect these additional items as they help to round out the picture.

Again you can buy these with either coins or bucks, whicever method suits you best.

When you first start playing you have no train routes. So your first task is to make some train routes that will ultimately begin adding money so you can build more buildings and more trains. You get free trains to get you started, so do not obsess about being unable to begin the game. As you create trains you will see that there is a time meter that tells you when your trains are set to arrive to be loaded with passengers. You can use this to gauge how many passengers you need to be producing to meet your train’s schedule. This allows you to estimate the need and build the necessary buildings.

Above the buildings you will see a little meter that tells you the quantity of passengers the building will produce. If it shows 0/1 then the timer is still ticking until the passenger is ready; once they are you will see the indicator change to 1/1. You can click on this to send your passenger to the train platform and restart the timer. The maximum number of passengers on the platform at one time is sixteen. This is not really a concern, but just for information in that after you have added sixteen you can not do anything more until a train commes and takes some of the passengers aboard.

When this becomes important is when you have trains with many stops coming and you want to use your highest fare passengers to wring the most coins out of the train route. You want to plan so that your local routes get your lowest fares and the higher ones get the best paying passengers.

In the right hand corner is one of those train crossing signs with the flashing lights that will alert you when a train is ready for loading. You can click on this to bring the train into your county and up to the station. If you have enough passengers waiting, the train loads automatically. If not you will be asked if you want to send the train partially loaded. You make the choice, but fully loaded trains pay the best.

When the train is loaded you will get a box over top of it saying how many passengers are aboard, how much money and how many experience points were earned. The box with all this will be green, meaning you are ready to send the train away. There will also be a box to the left telling you how long until this train will return to your station.

Basically there are two types of train route: local and cross country. You get three local trains that you can build with three “players’ built into the game. At the most there routes will have four stops. You won’t generate many coins or experience, but the trains will come sooner, so you can harvest passengers rapidly to upgrade your buildings to the higher paying fares.

The cross country routes are the ones that will generate the most money for you. As you get into the game you will find other players will “extend” routes to you, meaning they want to add you to their train circuit. This is a good thing as the more stops on a train the more coins and experience you accumulate.

 Facebook knows how to put together forms of entertainment to augment their platform that will draw in gamers. I can remember when games like this cost several dollars. The graphics are very good, the game play is smooth and it can become an obsession if you allow it.

Overall Lucky train is one of the more enjoyable games i have tried on Facebook. It is much easier to get involved with others as everyone is dependednt on another to extend their routes, so you get to build new connections.

I think the game will do very well in this already crowded gaming sector.