This may be my first review on BGG, and it appears I may be the first person to post a review for this game, so . . . no pressure. But hopefully you find this useful in deciding whether to buy this game.
Background
I have been gaming for over 30 years and at this stage of life, I game almost exclusively with my wife. So board games compatible with playing with two players is my sweet spot. We enjoy Pandemic (including Pandemic Legacy Seasons 1 and 2, Season Zero, not so much), Race for the Galaxy and lately Terraforming Mars. We have also played Dominion and Spirit Island, though we stopped because one or the other did not enjoy it so much.
After playing the heck out of TM, including buying and playing most of the expansions, I was looking for a new puzzle to solve and did a LOT of research. Things that I like in a game are, in this order: theme, smooth mechanics, multiple ways to win and replayability. Many games have good mechanics, but I just can't get into the theme (many traditional Euros fall into this category for me). Raising sheep to ship to market, blah, blah, blah. BOOORIIIIING. But anything too "take that" and the wife will not be amused. She really hated the first few times I bombed her plants with asteroids in TM until she learned to do it effectively herself . . . anyway, that's a story for another post.
So after much research I finally landed on Maglev Metro. It had a lot of things going for it, which, now that I think about it, let's get started with the review, shall we?
Overview
I will start with the obvious stuff. MM is a pick up and deliver system where the goal of the game is to accumulate the most victory points by: (a) laying track, (b) delivering commuters to their stations and earning points (and there are different ways to do that), and (c) scoring end-of-game points based on four special VP cards you draw at the beginning of the game. 366
When you "deliver" a commuter to a station, you place it on your board. Where you place it determines how it will be scored at game end.
Some ways of scoring points are constant. For example, you always score 1 VP for each link (station-to-station connection) in your track network. However, there are bonuses available too. For example, if you deliver one of each type of commuter and put them in the right slots on your board, you get a bonus VP for each track link. The VP cards also give you bonuses, some of which gives points per, say, each curved track on water in your network, while others give bonuses for track tiles you DIDN'T lay. So depending on what you draw, different strategies suggest themselves.
Mechanics
So how does it work? You start with a train at a station (duh) and begin by laying track and then building stations. The locations where stations may be placed are fixed on the board (they are the inset hexes on the double-thickness board), but how you connect to those stations and what stations go where is determined by play and varies each game. (Some VP cards provide bonuses for directly connecting certain kinds of stations, which can affect your decisions on what stations to put where.) You get a free passenger when you build a station. Early on, the free passenger is a free robot, which you can use to build your engine. Later when you unlock the commuter stations and place one of those stations, you get a bonus commuter. That commuter can also be used to build your engine (in a limited way) or to start scoring VPs. So tension is created between engine-building and VP scoring, which is how it should be.
So what are robots you ask? They are passengers you use to build out your engine. Want to be able to lay more track per turn? Drop a silver robot in your "lay track" slot. Want to move faster? Drop a gold robot in your "move" slot. There are also slots for train capacity (the total passengers your train can hold), pickup capacity (the number of passengers you can pick up with one move), drop-off capacity (the same as pickup capacity, but in reverse), refill station, adjust, build station and reverse train.
You can also fill out rows with robots or commuters to gain a third or even fourth move per turn. But be careful! Commuters used to grant additional moves do not count toward VP scoring. So again, tension. Is the extra move worth it to be more efficient? It will obviously depend on whether your opponents are Hoovering-up commuters or whether you feel you have time to collect them later.
A word about player interaction. There isn't a lot of it, but you have to take into account what your opponent is doing when deciding your moves. 349