It’s unclear what to make of Expect Delays, the two-player board game by Patrick Brennan. This head-to-head affair locks rival subway operators in a petty grievance to move the most locals, snap up all the express passes, and gunk up one another’s lines with tourists. They wield preternatural command over which trains break down or get repaired. I get the feeling that Brennan has never been stuck in traffic.

But at least its play-space looks great.

I’m the guy passed out in back.

I mean, just look at it! The little meeples standing on the platform. The uneven erosion of the yellow paint. The chipped tiles. You can practically smell the urine.

Your objective is to move ten points of riders along your lines. The farther they go, the more points you score when they hop off your train. This is an incremental process, with lines that must take two months to cross the city, taken a pair of actions at a time. Those actions, too, tend to be minor in their effects. One can spend a card to gather FastSwipes, the game’s boarding passes, or trade in two of the things to board a single rider. Once spent, cards are set off to the side, representing broken cars that must be painstakingly reclaimed one at a time to reconstitute your line’s colors into the deck. You could out-walk these trains.

That sluggishness extends to the game’s most exciting action, in which one spends as many cards as they like to move trains forward. Such plays are double-edged, albeit with dull blades that bruise more than slice. Some cards move both your and your rival’s passengers, forcing minor concessions. It’s possible to spend multiple cards to stack their effects, but since your hand is drawn at random each turn, there’s no such thing as banking on a big turn.

Offloading passengers is also an action. They jump off the train, you earn points according to how far they moved along the line, and then, because Expect Delays doesn’t want any detail to go unburdened, you add a tourist to the start of an opposing line. Tourists suck. They hog up spaces on a line and only get off once they reach the end, prompting players to run their trains multiple times just to clear slots.

Everyone hates tourists.

Like I said, it’s hard to know what to make of Expect Delays. At every turn, the game feels like it’s been spun around backward. Why are tourists the problem, with their expensive single-use tickets, rather than those entitled metro-pass jerks who live in the city? Why can’t we build a hand over the course of multiple rounds? Did the actions really need to be this piecemeal — worse, this bland?

I don’t want to pretend that the game doesn’t do anything right. Its most interesting note is the service advisory deck, which offers temporary actions, single-time occurrences, and even special bonuses for offloading riders at the right stops. The problem is that they hardly ever stick around long enough to leave their mark. In some cases, especially once enough cards have been rendered broken, a single service advisory might only be present for one player’s turn before being replaced. In such a pokey game, the best detail feels like it has rocket boosters strapped to its bottom.

Perhaps the game’s biggest inversion is that it never escapes the niggling doubt that it could have made for a crafty cooperative experience. Like Sky Team, in a sense, with both players working together to move passengers as efficiently as possible despite technical breakdowns, emergencies, or the local sporting event depositing fifteen thousand passengers at your gates all at once. I know, it’s never good practice to wish a game had been something other than what it was, but all the little details in Expect Delays feel like a game about managing chaos, not creating it for the other dimwit. There are glimmers of such moments, minor plays that feel clever in spite of the game’s limitation, but they never clarify into anything more.

Gentrify me, daddy.

In the end, Expect Delays is a missed opportunity. It looks great but doesn’t speak to any deeper sense of meaning or gameplay. I believe I’ll walk.

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A complimentary copy was provided.