What Else Is on the Shelf: Traluno Next to the Games It Resembles

People describe Traluno by naming something else. "It's Minecraft with trains." "It's a small Cities: Skylines." "It's Railroad Tycoon without the tycoon." All three are close enough to be useful and wrong enough to be worth correcting, so here is the comparison written out properly, including the parts where the other game wins.

Minecraft, and voxel building generally

The resemblance is the material. Both worlds are made of visible cubes, both let you place and remove them, and both get their sense of scale from counting blocks.

What Minecraft does better: everything about freedom. You can dig, you can build upward without limit, you can make a shape nobody anticipated. Traluno will not let you do any of that. You place items from a catalogue onto a grid, and the grid sits on a table that has edges.

That is a real loss and it is deliberate. A model railway is not a world you can carve; it is a surface you dress. The moment you can tunnel arbitrarily, the thing you are modelling stops being a layout on a table and becomes terrain, and the whole conceit — that you are a person standing in a room looking at a hobby project — falls apart.

What Traluno does that Minecraft does not: the trains actually work as a system. Minecraft's rails are a transport mechanism. Traluno's are a network with routing, reversing, switches, signals and a loading gauge, and two trains on one loop is a problem you have to solve rather than a thing that just happens.

Also, and this matters more than it sounds: Traluno's buildings are not built by you block by block. They are placed whole. That is a much lower ceiling on expression and a much lower floor on effort, and for a game about arranging a layout rather than constructing objects, the trade is correct.

Cities: Skylines

The resemblance is the top-down arrangement of roads, buildings and traffic, and the pleasure of watching little vehicles obey rules you laid down.

What Cities: Skylines does better: simulation depth, by an enormous margin. It models demand, zoning, power, water, sewage, education, land value and traffic pathing at a scale Traluno does not attempt. Its citizens have destinations. Its economy pushes back.

Traluno's people walk the streets because streets with nobody on them look dead. They are not commuting. Nobody in Traluno wants anything.

Where Traluno differs on purpose: Cities: Skylines is a management game with a building interface. Traluno is a building game with no management at all. There is no budget, no failure state, no demand curve telling you what to place next. You are not running a city; you are arranging a model.

That removes most of the reasons to keep playing that a management game relies on, and replaces them with a single one: does the thing you have made look right from where you are standing. Whether that is enough is a fair question, and the honest answer is that it is enough for some people and not others.

Railroad Tycoon, Transport Fever, OpenTTD

The resemblance is trains, freight, networks and the pleasure of a well-planned junction.

What they do better: consequence. In Transport Fever a badly designed junction costs you money. In OpenTTD a line that cannot handle its traffic backs up and you watch your profit fall. The network has a purpose, so a good network is measurably better than a bad one.

Traluno has no freight economy, no revenue and no cargo that wants to be somewhere. A beautifully designed yard and a nonsensical one both work exactly as well, which removes the sharpest source of feedback those games have.

Where Traluno differs: those are games about a transport network seen from above at map scale. Traluno is about a model of one, seen from eye height, at HO scale, in a room. The difference is not cosmetic. In OpenTTD you never look at a single wagon; in Traluno you can sit in one and ride.

Train simulators

The resemblance is the cab view and the attention to how a train actually behaves.

What they do better: absolutely everything about driving. A real train sim models brake pipe pressure, adhesion, gradient, signalling rules and the specific quirks of a specific locomotive class. Traluno's ride-along camera is a camera. There is a throttle lever on the desk, and that is the extent of the driving model.

Where Traluno differs: a train sim puts you inside the train. Traluno puts you in the room, and the cab view is one of the things you can do from there, alongside laying track, painting terrain and flipping the switches on the desk. It is a layout you operate, not a train you drive.

The one thing none of them do

Every game above models either the world or the vehicle. None of them models the hobby.

Traluno's subject is not railways. It is model railways: the table, the room, the wooden edge you lean on, the control panel screwed to the front, the fact that the mountain is plaster and the river is resin and the whole thing has a size you could actually fit in a spare bedroom.

That framing is the entire design, and it explains most of the limitations listed above. The table has edges because tables do. The buildings are placed rather than built because you buy model buildings rather than laying their bricks. There is no economy because a model railway does not have one — nobody's layout goes bankrupt.

It is a much smaller idea than any game on this page. It is also the only one of them that is about the thing itself rather than about a simulation of what the thing depicts, and if that distinction appeals to you, nothing else on the shelf is really trying to do it.

Where to start if you are coming from one of them

• From Minecraft: start in Build mode and ignore the trains for an hour. Get used to placing whole objects rather than blocks. The catalogue is the vocabulary.
• From Cities: Skylines: resist planning the whole layout first. There is no demand to satisfy, so the road network only has to look right and carry traffic pleasantly.
• From OpenTTD or Transport Fever: lay a plain oval first before you build a junction. Without a freight economy, a complicated network has nothing to prove, and a simple one you can watch is more rewarding.
• From a train sim: press Cab immediately, then go and lay track at rail height. Seeing the layout from where the driver sits changes what you build.