There’s ice on the tracks, Tourists keep getting tangled up with regular Commuters, and two trains are Out of Service. That other subway line is going to have a much better reputation at this rate. Well, you can try some overnight repairs, see if you can funnel some riders into a tourist trap, and hope against hope the other line catches fire or something, but no matter what you can probably Expect Delays.

Designed by Patrick Brennan and published by offcut games, who we’ve previously seen around here figuring out board game rules and trying to figure out relationships and furniture, Expect Delays is a competitive two-player game of hand management. Both players are Transit Operators, each managing a pair of train lines, and the goal of the game is to get as many passengers to their destinations as possible – while causing trouble for your rival along the way if you can.

Setup is simple, in part because the game’s box is also the game’s board. When you open the box and put it between the players one player will be on the side labeled Uptown and the other will be on Downtown, which will determine which Subway Lines each player owns. You shuffle the Train and Service Advisory cards into their respective decks, and claim the Commuter meeples and scoring tokens that match your Subway Lines. Fare Swipes and Tourist meeples get placed on the Platform. Each player starts the game with no meeples on the board and three Train cards. The Uptown player takes the first turn, while the Downtown player starts with two Fare Swipes.

Each turn is divided into two phases, Action and Upkeep. During their Action phase a player can perform two Actions (you can take the same action twice if you want to).

You can Board by paying 2 Fare Swipes, putting one of your Commuter meeples onto the 0 point Stop on one of your Subway Lines.

You can choose one of your Subway Lines and Run The Line, discarding  any number of Train cards and moving them a number of Stops for each symbol that was on a discard card; notable, some cards have more than one symbol, usually a symbol for one of your opponent’s lines, meaning that multiple lines will see their Commuters moving.

You can take 1 Train card in your hand Out of Service to gain a number of Fare Swipes displayed on the card and putting it into the Out of Service pile; this means that the Train card won’t shuffled back into the deck, so that it won’t be available for future draws.

You can Repair, taking a Train card and putting it back into the discard pile so that it will end up back in circulation.

You can Disembark a single one of your  Commuters, gaining a number of Destination Points equal to the value of the stop they disembarked from. When you do this, you also Board a Tourist meeple onto an open 0 point Station on one of your opponent’s Subway Lines. These Tourists take up space you’d rather have used by paying Commuters, and the only way to get rid of them is to Run the Line until they reach the end of it.

Finally, you can Use a Service Advisory. The first Service Advisory comes into play when the Train deck is empty and has to be refilled with the shuffled discard pile for the first time. Every time after the first that the Train deck has to be refilled, a new System Advisory takes the first one’s place.

There are three types of Service Advisory, and the first two types can’t actually be used with the Use A Service Advisory action. The first type is labeled Event and is a static effect that is always on, such as “Fare Hike” increasing the cost of the Board action to 3 Fare Swipes. The second type are labeled Transfer, and activate when you Disembark a Commuter from specific stops marked with a T; these add an additional effect to the Disembark action on top of gaining Destination Points and boarding a Tourist, like “Ride to the Airport” removing your Commuter from the game permanently but gibing you an additional 3 Destination Points.

Others do introduce entirely New Actions for you to choose from on your turn, like “Take A Cab Instead” letting you spend 3 Fare Swipes to gain 1 Destination point. Another example is “Scheduled Maintenance”, which puts all of the Train cards in your hand Out of Service, a neat trick if the only cards you have bear the Subway Lines of your opponent.

Once a player has performed two actions, they hit the Upkeep phase: discard any remaining Train cards you have in your hand and draw three more, shuffling the discard pile and putting a new System Advisory on the board as needed.

There, off you go, start riding the rails! The game immediately ends when a player scores their 10th Destination Point. For an additional win condition, if a player goes to draw their 3 cards during the Upkeep phase but can’t because too many Train Cards are in the Out of Service pile the game ends. The player with the most Destination Points then wins, with tiebreakers based on how many riders are on a player’s Lines and how many unspent Fare Swipes they possess.

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The one quibble I have about Expect Delays has to do with the Service Advisories. The fact of the matter is that the Train deck is is so small (only 16 cards deep, and remember that 6 of them will already be in your hands at the start of play) that several of the Service Advisory cards are likely to be activated, never used, and then replaced before they can get their time to shine. This is only made more acute by the Out of Service mechanic, which can speed up how fast the Train deck has to be refilled. There are two takes on this; for one, such advisories becoming outdated as soon as they are announced certainly matches the reality. On the other, some of the advisories can come across as lost opportunities – if you run out of Service Advisories you reshuffle them and potentially get another go at each of them, but sometimes you’ll see an Advisory that would’ve been perfect just pass you by.

Aside from that, though, I find it be a fun, chaotic-and fast paced game. There are enough interesting choices (which actions to take and when, which resources to gather or send Out of Service) to make you feel like your decisions are having an impact, and enough chaos (Tourists gumming up the works, Service Advisories [potentially] making big changes to the game at large and your options in particular) to keep you on your toes and make it feel like you’re both trapped on the MTA yourselves. It’s also a neat blend of form and function that make it very portable, perfect for playing on a Park St. Station bench while you wait for the latest mess to straighten itself out or on a dining car table to make the cross-country trip go by faster.

You can get into the station and Expect Delays yourself on offcut’s own site for $35!