The concept behind Stephen Kerr’s Metrorunner seems like a misbegotten effort to put a finger on a pulse of what’s hot in board games. What are folks into these days? Trains. Netrunner. Oh my gosh. What if we made a game about trains and netrunning.

But it isn’t like some of my favorite board games aren’t about wackadoo topics. For all I know, some combination of turnstile-jumping and encryption-cracking is poised to become my favorite mashup of all time.

Still could be. Won’t be Metrorunner, though.

Round and round the rondel. I mean metro.

It isn’t a train reference when something “stumbles right out of the gate,” but Metrorunner makes it feel like one. This is a rondel game with perhaps the dullest rondel I’ve ever rounded, a hacking game that transforms blackhatting into a duller pipe-routing minigame than the one in BioShock, and a resource-gathering and recipe-fulfilling game that leaches the enjoyment from both activities. On the whole, it’s a shocking stumble from a studio that has given us Cartographers, Dawn of Ulos, and Dual Powers: Revolution 1917. Even middling efforts like Stonespine Architects come out shiny by comparison.

Let’s start with the rondel. Like most rondels, this one sees players circling the board to pick up various benefits. There’s the obligatory blocking, plus a two-layered set of actions to be claimed that allows for some flexibility when your desired space isn’t available. Only there’s a problem. Your desired space will be available. That’s because the board is divided into five zones, each with identical spaces. And that isn’t the worst of it. The rondel is so immense that you can ride this train for a whole game without colliding with anybody.

Maybe I sound nutty when I declare that it’s bad that you’ll always be able to reach a worthwhile space. But the thing about board games is that they’re as much about restriction as they are about permissibility. The entire purpose of a rondel is not merely to be moved around. It’s to be negotiated. Navigated. Picked through. The joy of a rondel lies in figuring out a way to maximize your movements despite meddling opponents getting in your way and despite spaces not always aligning quite the way you’d prefer. In Metrorunner, it’s a rare move that pinches your options. When those occasions do roll around, it’s trivial to bypass them by hiring a rideshare to zip you to the other end of the city.

The result is an entire portion of the game that’s barely there. You’re hackers who ride the metro. But apart from the odd restriction, there isn’t enough going on to justify the rondel’s inclusion. I guess it’s dystopian that the metro only goes clockwise.

It’s telling that the solitaire mode gets it. When running the metro solo, the A.I. deck slaps obstructions onto the spaces in front of your pawn. You’re more likely to have your plans foiled while playing against a robot than against fellow humans. Like I said. Dystopian. While I don’t recommend the solitaire game, at least it tosses some hurdles in your path.

Some of these jobs don’t seem so punk to me…

I wish I could say the other parts worked better, but even the portions that are workmanlike have a certain shoddiness to them.

Much of your attention is focused on finishing jobs. There’s a card market for grabbing new gigs. Each offering is tied to a specific zone and requires an assortment of cubes to complete. But there’s no character to any of these activities. Gathering cubes is easy, almost flippant. You can pick up certain colors in corresponding zones, but each zone also has a space for grabbing whatever the heck you need right now. As the session progresses, your ability to pick up these cubes becomes even easier. It’s uncommon to be more than one or two moves out from gathering what you require to wrap a gig. The whole thing is airy and unfulfilling.

And when you do finish a job, you get more or less the same stuff. There are two tracks to move up, but neither one is especially exciting. Gathering cubes makes leaping into another gig effortless, while earning credits unlocks purchasable effects that mostly bypass the rest of the game. Want to skip the rondel altogether? Spend a credit. Want to take two actions instead of one? That’ll be a pair of creds, choom. Even the little abilities you earn from completed gigs exist solely to increase your cube efficiency. Remember, cubes come fast and easy as it is. Oh, now you get an extra orange cube. Oh, now you can spend black cubes as wilds. Oh, now gigs don’t require a blue cube. Please, let me get off this roller coaster.

I haven’t even mentioned the hacking yet.

Oof. The hacking.

Hacking the planet. I mean the metro.

Every so often, you’ll want to hack the planet. No? How about a nine-tile grid? Metrorunner has one of those.

Landing on a hacking space interrupts the usual gameplay to play a plumbing minigame. Your objective is to connect two pins, displayed at random via the hacking deck. As you level up your reputation — one of those two tracks — you can also plug pipes into additional spaces for bonus stuff. Initiating a hack gets you two free moves, either to rotate a tile, swap two adjacent tiles, or slide an entire row or column. If you need more, you can spend cubes.

As little minigames go, it’s fine. Really. There’s a reassuring familiarity to the whole thing, probably because even people who haven’t played a board game have at least repaired a leaking sink or rerouted a sprinkler line. Figuring out how to configure a limited set of connections in order to bridge A to B while also plugging into X is something we’re hard-wired to appreciate.

What stinks about this process is that it intrudes into the game like a couch stuck in a hallway. Most turns take only a few seconds. Hacking consumes multiple minutes. There’s no such thing as planning; everybody works from the same grid, so any forethought will be wasted when anybody else conducts a hack. It gets so bad that landing on a hacking space prompts a round of groans. And it only gets worse. As you level up your character’s influence, you’re given additional pins to connect. Why shouldn’t you? This is an optimization game. Now everybody gets to wait around while you struggle to line up four pins without spending too many cubes.

I don’t know how others will approach the hacking, but in our group’s case it was so unbearable that we resorted to crowdsourcing solutions. As soon as somebody initiated a hack, Metrorunner’s competitive game took a beat. Now it became a cooperative endeavor, everybody laboring to find the most efficient connecting passage for those wires. At least we were doing something. Enough of this game is already spent sitting around for others to complete actions that won’t affect you.

I’m a true solo now.

Look, I can appreciate a middling board game. It’s a hard market. There are a hundred very good games coming out every year. Every so often, it’s nice to sit down with a game that’s trying to be the best thing you’ll play tonight rather than the best thing you’ll play this decade.

But Metrorunner is not middling. It’s bad. It’s a one-way el-train that misses too many stops. It’s uninteresting, devoid of the essential friction that makes a game worth playing. It’s frivolous, going through the motions but producing none of the joy behind those motions. It insults the table by deciding to let one person play a different game while everybody else stares at them. The purpose of dystopian media is to draw our attention to society’s shortcomings, not to deepen that dystopia. Metrorunner doesn’t understand the difference.

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A complimentary copy was provided.