Sid Meier's Railroads!

You won't need a ticket for this ride

-  Ian Evenden

> £11.99 > FROM feralinteractive.com > NEEDS iPadOS 15.5 or later

Constant increases in your wealth thanks to trains shuttling back and forth

From 2006 comes an iOS port of yet Fanother classic PC game, this time a railway tycoon sim in which you plot steam-based financial dominance with not a care for the huge amounts of industrial pollution you're inflicting on the world.

And while it's possible to play your way through various careers and scenarios, a better fit for mobile is the Train Table mode, in which you're set loose on the landscape with no goals, infinite cash, and may find yourself reaching for an engine driver's cap.

The actual game, in which you play against up to 20 would-be railroad barons, isn't exactly stressful, however. The process of linking resources such as farms with cities and trying to do so as efficiently as possible is an optimisation problem which, mixed with lovely countryside and the gentle chuff of the locomotive, can actually be quite relaxing.

You'll still swear - often at yourself for failing to foresee right back at the start of the game the precise situation you find yourself in now, trying to splice new tracks onto an existing network that doesn't go in quite the right direction - but the constant increases in your wealth thanks to trains shuttling back and forth between locations makes up for it.

When the line comes to life