Parents' Guide to Unrailed!

If you're looking for a game that won't break the bank, is easy to learn, quick to play, and fosters friendly social interactions between players, this will probably do the trick. Unrailed! has refreshingly welcoming presentation and personality. A cleverly designed menu and lobby system sees players moving their cute, blocky characters around the screen to modify settings and make selections. Once you begin playing, you'll be dropped into a colorful, randomly generated, Minecraft-like environment that quickly and efficiently relays all the visual information players need to get started, including where the train needs to go, what can be mined and harvested, and what's going to prove problematic, getting in the way of player movement and the track's construction. It's a delightfully simple design that most players will intuitively understand in moments, but which also has nuances that can take hours to master.

The best way to play is with others -- ideally a group of friends in the same room, so you can use more than just emojis to quickly communicate what needs doing. (Playing alone with a computer-controlled bot is a good way to get the hang of things without any social pressure, but there's only so much your AI helper can do.) Tasks may be simple to understand and execute, but coordination among team members is absolutely vital. The downside of this simplicity is that parts of the game grow a little tedious after a while. Randomly generated levels go some way towards keeping things fresh, and earning new characters and train upgrades provide something to strive toward, but in the end you're always doing the same thing -- and starting over from scratch when you fail. That said, Unrailed! isn't really meant to encourage deep strategy and epic play sessions. What it wants is to be simple, accessible, cooperative, and social, and in these modest ambitions, it succeeds splendidly.