Dale Yu: Review of Pencil Express: Yugoslavia

Pencil Express: Yugoslavia

Designer: Damjan Miladinović

Publisher: Hectic Games

Players: 2-4

Age: 10+

Time: 45 minutes

Played with review copy provided by publisher

Pencil Express is a route-building and drawing game set in 1960s Yugoslavia, during a time of ambitious railway modernization and expansion. Taking up the roles of engineers, the Players compete to design the most efficient and well-connected railway network across the country. Each turn, players choose whether to play route cards to pursue long-distance connections, or to place track cards that shape the central rail layout and determine which rail patterns must be drawn. As the network grows, players draw rail shapes on their personal maps, striving to connect towns, cities, capitals, and border crossings. Strategic planning, spatial optimization, and careful use of limited bonus actions are key to building the most successful network.

To set up, prepare the deck of cards for the player count. Then, each player gets a player sheet as well as a hand of 3 cards; one of which is placed on the table as a Route card, the other two remaining in hand. On the table, one card is placed Track side up to be the starting Track card – align it so that each player is looking at a different side of the starting card. A market is made – 3 cards Track side up, 2 cards Route side up and the deck (which always has Route side up).

On a turn, the active player will draw a card from the Market (and refilling as needed) and then play a card from their hand.

Cards can be played as routes; being placed on the table next to their sheet. You will score the points shown on the card if you can connect the two destinations together with track, while you will suffer a penalty if you cannot do this before the end of the game.

Cards can be played as Track, being placed on the table adjacent to a previously played Track card. There is a marker to show the current card, and ALL players must draw ALL the full track hexes formed from the card play – there could be as many as four track pieces generated. The track must be drawn as the player sees it from their point of view. You can only make a Junction in a city – it is possible to overlap previously drawn rails in that city hex, but you must always draw at least one new line. Towns (triangles) can have up to 3 branches, cities (squares) can have up to 4, and confusingly the Capital (circle, not hex) can have up to 6.

There is a special shape, the half rail. When this is made on the table (it looks like a U), the player draws this particular half rail onto one of the three special hexes in the upper right of their sheet. Whenever two halves are drawn in a hex, that shape is complete and must be drawn into the player’s map. Alternatively, the half rail shape can also be added to the player board without being completed.

Players also have four possible bonus actions – seen in the top right of the sheet. A maximum of one bonus action can be used per a turn, and only on turns when track cards are played. After you use the action, fill in the box beneath it so that you don’t use it again. Unused bonus actions are worth points at the end of the game.

The game continues until all the cards from the central deck have been drawn and all cards from player hands have been played. The game then is scored:

Score for settlements/border crossings: 1pt per town, 2pt per city, 3pt per border crossing and 4pt per capital
Score completed route cards as shown on the card, and if complete, if a bonus is shown on the card, score points for each settlement on the route
Penalty for incomplete route cards, negative the value on the card
3 points for each unused bonus action
-1 point per hex that has a rail shape not connected to your network

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most completed routes.

My thoughts on the game

I was interested in learning about Pencil Express when it came up on the 2025 Spiel Preview geeklist – I still have a soft spot for X-and-write games, and I have always been a fan of non 18xx rail games, so this one looked to hit a lot of my sweet spots. I got a nice presentation from the folks at the booth, and I was thrilled to have a copy to take home.

The game is learned easily enough, and I’d definitely make sure to show people the scoring example at the end of the rules as it really helps to visualize the amount of track that a player could expect to build over the course of a game.

The game does give players an interesting decision on how to use their cards – to add them to the table to build track pieces or to keep them as routes to try to score points from them. As with many rail games, I’m sure that the route visualization is much easier for someone who grew up with those particular cities as opposed to a first time map reader. The station locations are highlighted on the card and each location has a helpful 2 letter abbreviation, but it still took a bit of time to scan my sheet to find the appropriate places.

We all had an issue with drawing the rails at first. We eventually learned to describe the path of the track by the times on a clock face – OK, so I have a rail going from 11 o’clock to 4 o’clock… and then drawing it in. For the two people at the top/bottom of the grid, this worked out quite well. For the other two, it was a bit more challenging as the shape made on the card backs isn’t really a perfect hexagon, and it took a bit more work to figure out just exactly what sort of track was to be drawn as the wonky hex on the cards didn’t really line up with the grid unless you turned your sheet to a somewhat weird angle.

On my turns, I usually had a specific type of track that I wanted to build – and I’d spend the majority of my downtime trying to find a combination of a card in my hand and a card on the board that would create the desired track piece for me to build. This is definitely where the clock face technique comes in handy as I try to visualize the pieces I’m about to make.

Each individual turn doesn’t take too long, but it behooves you to check to make sure that all players have drawn in the requisite number of track pieces before moving on. If you get a particularly cranky piece of track, sometimes it takes awhile to figure out where you can hide it (usually, finding a capital or a city and then branching it off into the hinterlands)

That being said, the game does feel like it drags on a bit. I think a playtime of 45 minutes is being particularly generous, as I’ve yet to have a game play out in less than an hour. Sure, there is a bit of delay each time I have to cross reference the locations of cities that I’ve never heard of before – but honestly, there are just a lot of turns in the game, and the time to do all the things really just adds up.

The bonus actions can be quite powerful when used at the right time, and adding in this possibility does increase the thinking time a bit – because you have to add them in as action possibilities on each turn unless you have already used them all up.

Scoring is both straightforward but opaque. There’s really no way to know how well someone is doing until you add up the points at the end. Sure, you can generally see whether someone has completed route cards or not, but there are a lot of other ways to score points. It is a bit deceiving just how many points can be scored by simply connecting stations to your train line. I have tried to make little hashmarks in the scoring area each time I connect a city or foreign country to my track, but this still is imperfect and I end up having to count and re-count everything at the end.

Pencil Express: Yugosla

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Ben B: I started by liking the game enough. There’s a fun solo puzzle in the game. But I wasn’t paying attention to anyone else at the table. Like many other roll and writes, if someone wanted to leave the game early, they could without impacting play too much. That also demonstrates perhaps how unimportant the other players are. The fun was picking a tile others wanted the orientation of. It was basically the spawn of TTR and roll and write. Cute and interesting. I would play again perhaps but my enjoyment of the solo genre is fleeting.