While attending the World Boardgaming Championships this year in July, we had the chance to interview many designers about their current and upcoming projects. On our final day there, we met up with a new designer Wes Crawford who has just signed a contract with Compass Games for his new project called Engine Thieves: The Andrews Railroad Raid of 1862.

This game is a solo game that recreates the situational challenges of charismatic Union spy James Andrews, and his band of Union raiders just as they have arrived incognito in Marietta, Georgia from Tennessee and are making final preparations to steal “The General,” a Confederate engine with a tinder and 3 boxcars. Their plan is to travel north to meet up with Union General Mitchel’s force heading to attack Chattanooga. Their assignment is to burn bridges, tear up track, and sever telegraph wire along the way so that reinforcements and supplies cannot be brought up from Atlanta. This is not an easy task since there is only a single line of track and extra trains are unexpectedly heading south to Atlanta carrying people and supplies! Meanwhile, Confederate railroad-men Fuller, Murphy, and Cain did not take the train theft very well and began chasing the “engine thieves” (as Southern newspapers referred to them) – first on foot, then by pole car, and finally on several trains.

-Grant