4th July 2021

It's a Sunday evening and I'm logged into Board Game Arena. the next game of the night is Railroad Ink. Do you spend a lot of time coming and going? Because that's what you'll be doing in Railroad Ink.

Caveat: we've only ever played Railroad Ink digitally online. Additionally, we've only played the basic version of Railroad Ink Blue without the rives and lakes dice.

What's in a game?

• Game board: Railroad Ink has a game board for each player.
  Most of the game board is taken up with a 7x7 square grid, along each of the 4 outside edges of the grid are 3 exits, 12 in total and they alternate between railway lines and roads.
  Above that is some space for calculating and tracking scores.
  Up further are illustrations of all the possible results on the standard route dice.
  Finally, at the top are depictions of the game's 6 special routes. These are not actually dice that are rolled in game, but represent different types of routes and stations that a player can make use of.
• Route dice: These six-siders don't have numbers, instead each face shows one of various different types of rail and road routes. Railroad Ink has 2 different types of route dice, 3 of one kind and 1 of the other, which makes 4 route dice in total.
  Type 1: These dice depict the following different routes that players can use on their board:
  A straight.
  A 90' turn
  A T-junction.
  They are depicted once each for both railways and roads, thus six times in total.
  Type 2: This die only has 3 symbols, each of which is printed on 2 of the die's faces. The routes depicted here are a little more specialised.
  Overpass: This allows a railway and a road to cross over each other (They do not connect.).
  Straight station: A station allows a route to change from a railway to a road or vice-versa.
  Curved station: A 90' turn that's also a station which allows transfers between railways and roads across the turn.
• Rivers and lakes dice: These special dice can be introduced into games to add some extra complexity. We never made use of them.

That's pretty much it for the components.
Since we only played railroad Ink digitally, there's not much that can be said about the quality of the components.
Neither does the game have any significant artwork to speak of, the boards look bright and cheery, but that's about it.

How's it play?
​Setup

• Each player is given a player board and well.... that's it!

On to play
​Railroad Ink is played simultaneously by all players over 7 rounds.

• Roll: All 4 route dice all rolled and thus 4 routes will be shown.
• And Write: All players must draw all 4 routes on their game board according to the results of the dice roll. There are specific rules when doing this as explained below:
  Connection: At least 1 part of a route must connect to either; an exit at the edge of the grid, or a pre-existing route, this connection must be of the correct kind, i.e., rail-to-rail or road-to-road.
  When drawing the route, the dice result may be rotated into any orientation, or flipped/mirrored.
  ​Special routes: Each special route is a 4-way connection and can only be used once per game, furthermore, a player may only use 1 special route per round and total of 3 special routes in a game.

That's it for rules, pretty straightforward.

Endgame
Once all 7 rounds have been completed, the game goes to scoring.
Railway: Each player scores their single longest unbroken railway line, gaining 1 point per connected square.
Road: Each player scores their single longest unbroken road, also at 1 point per connected square.
Centre: Each of the 9 central squares on the grid scores the player an additional point for a railway or road that runs through it.
Exits: Each player scores their single biggest network of connected exits, it scores differently to railways and roads and there's a chart to calculate this. Generally each exit in the network scores 4 points, except if you manage to connect the 12th and final exit, which scores 5 instead!
Dead end: Each player loses a point for each route that is a dead-end, i.e. does not connect to anything or does not connect to the edge of the grid (does not necessarily need to be one of the 12 exits though.).
Final amounts are tallied, highest score wins!

Overall
Railroad Ink is a game that hits that sweet-spot between rules-simplicity and depth-of-choice that has good potential crossover appeal to non-gamers.
From the relatively short length of this blog, you can see that it's an easy game to learn, consisting mostly of; well, drawing what you see!

However, it also gives players lots of choices, all of which will have impact right from the start of the game. The game's grid has 49 spaces and the maximum that can be filled in (In a basic game!) is 31, enough room to manoeuvre and also enough room to commit error.
Players must try to maximise networks and connections and also minimise their potential losses. This involves equally trying to anticipate what they need and also adapting to rolls that don't give them that.
It's a game of shifting optimisation.

Railroad Ink has a lot of randomness and for gamers who like strategizing, this can be an anathema, but in Railroad Ink, the randomness is partially mitigated because it more or less affects everyone equally, i.e., everyone uses the same dice results.
Obviously one player may be luckier than another if the rolls go their way, but it never feels like the dice are treating you worse for you than any other player. Ultimately, despite the dice rolls, it feels like player decisions are still of paramount, finding a way to use a route die that initially seemed bad can be satisfying and it's this blend of randomness and decision-making is what I like about Railroad Ink.

17th March 2020

Tuesday has rolled around again and we're at 'The Sovereigns' with the Woking Gaming Club.

​The club members agreed that due to the threat of the Covid-19 virus, this would be the last get-together for the club until we were no longer required to socially-distance ourselves.

The first game of the evening was 'Cartographers'.
Do you fancy getting out and about, doing a bit of exploring? Perhaps finding a forest or two, or even a river? Then this game may be for you.
That's right, in these days of self isolation and being stuck at home; we played a game about going outside!

Cartographers is a style of game I've yet to play called 'roll and write'.

What's in a game?

• Pad of blank maps: There are 100 of these blank double sided maps. One side features the wilderness and the other the wasteland, the wasteland is the harder map play with. Both sides contain a 11x11 grid with 'mountains' and 'ruins', as well as space for scoring and personalisation. The wasteland side also features an area of wasteland.

• Season cards: There are 4 season cards for 4 seasons! Each season card determines which 2 scoring cards apply that season. A Season card also has a numerical 'time value' that determines the length of that season. 
• Scoring cards: 4 of these are randomly drawn from a deck of 16. Each one is used to determine how scoring occurs at the end of 2 of the 4 'seasons' (Or rounds.). Thus there will be 4 ways to score during the game.
• Edict cards: Labelled A to D, used in conjunction with scoring cards.
• Exploration cards: Generally, each landscape card depicts 1 of the game's 4 main types of terrain. The card will also show 2 shapes a bit like Tetris shapes, sometimes one of these shapes will also a coin next to it. Some exploration cards feature a 'ruin' instead. Exploration cards also have a numerical value that is used to determine the length of a season.
• Ambush cards: Ambush cards contain the game's 5th terrain type - monsters! Each card also contains a shape. There are 4 of ambush cards. These cards allow other players to mess with your exploration.
• Pencils: The game comes with 4 pencils.

All of the components are of an acceptable quality. The cards are mostly covered in information, but what little art there is, is of a reasonable quality.
The only bugbear with the game is the pad of blank maps, which you tear out and give to each player. Even though 100 sheets enough for a lot of games, the idea of it makes me wince!
If you do run out of sheets however, you can download and print extras from the website.
​
Special note!
Dave, the game's owner had the wisdom and foresight to also purchase a couple of sets of coloured fine line markers to use with the game (More about that below.).

How's it play?
First there's setup.

• Put out the season cards in a face-up stack in seasonal order, starting with spring.
• Put out the edict cards in a row, sequentially from 'A' to 'D'.
• Shuffle the scoring cards and draw 4, place one under each of the edict cards. 
• Shuffle the ambush cards, draw 1 ambush card face-down and add it to the exploration deck. Now shuffle the exploration deck and place it in a face-down stack next to the stack of season cards.

We're now ready to go.
Play begins by turning over an exploration card.

• If it's a normal exploration card, it will have a terrain type (Farm, forest, village or water.) and 2 different shapes. Each player must choose one of the shapes and draw it as the depicted terrain type on their map sheet. The drawings need to clearly show the type of terrain it is. The chosen shape can be rotated or flipped in any way the player wishes and marked as the terrain type used. Some shapes allow the player to earn a coin.
• If it's a 'ruins' card, then flip over another card. The shape used from the second card must include a ruins space from the map sheet.
• If it's an ambush card, then each player must pass their map sheet to a neighbouring player, that player then draws the shape on the ambush card on the map sheet. Obviously they should place it in the most inconvenient manner possible! After a ambush card has been resolved, it is removed from play.
• Rift card: If a rift card is drawn, each player gets to draw a single 1x1 box of any terrain type, anywhere normally allowed.

So that's the main rules. There are some clarifications below.

• When drawing a shape, it cannot overlap over a previously drawn shape, a mountain, wasteland or the edge of the  map. It can though, overlap a ruins space and depending on cards drawn may require a ruins space.
• If a player cannot draw a shape for whatever reason, they draw a 1x1 box with any terrain on any legal space instead.
• If a player surrounds a mountain (Orthogonally - diagonals count for nothing in this game!), then they earn a coin.
• When all players have drawn their shape, the next exploration card is drawn. Each exploration card has a 'time value' which is a numerical value. When the combined value of all exploration cards drawn equals or exceeds the time value on the season card, then the season is over. Different seasons have different time values, winter has the least 'time' as winter has less daylight.

Scoring & end of season
Scoring occurs at the end of every season and is broken down as follows (As well as end of round actions.):

• Scoring cards: The 2 scoring cards for that season are scored.
• Coins: Each coin a player has acquired earns a victory point. They are scored over every round a player has them. Thus a coin earned in the first round, will be also scored in all subsequent rounds.
• Monsters: Monsters don't score points, but they do deduct them! Every empty space that is adjacent to a monster space, loses that player a victory point.
• Points from all sources are tallied for the round.
• A new ambush card is added to the exploration deck and all played exploration cards are shuffled back into a new stack. If the ambush card from the round just completed wasn't encountered, then there will be 2 ambush cards in the stack!
• The season card from the completed round is removed from play and the next season is revealed (With new scoring and time value.).

Endgame
Once the score for the winter season has been calculated, the score for all 4 seasons is tallied. Highest score wins. ​

Overall
​Cartographers is a fun and interesting game.

Interesting because of how the scoring works, it gives players short term and long term goals. Not only are there 4 scoring objectives, each objective is scored twice and they are scored asymmetrically.

Objective 'A' is scored in rounds 1 & 4. So working towards it in rounds 1 & 4 will earn a player points. Objective 'A' scores no points in rounds 2 & 3, however working towards objective 'A' in rounds 2 & 3 can pay dividends when it's scored again in round 4. This may mean neglecting other scoring opportunities though.

​Objective 'B' on the other hand, scores in rounds 1 & 2, after that it's worthless. So to make the most of this scoring opportunity, players will have to concentrate on it for the first half of the game.

All of this makes players think about short, long and mid term goals and how to maximise scoring opportunities.
Additionally, players cannot predict what terrain/shapes will appear if at all or the order they appear. Nor can they predict when ambush cards will appear. Players also need to be flexible and be able to change their plans.

This culminates in giving players lots of factors to consider and decisions to make - which is good.

Another interesting thing about Cartographer is the number of players it supports. It's essentially only limited by the drawing implements/time required. You could use the entire pad and play with 100 people at once if you had the time/space/pencils!

There is theoretically no downtime as everyone draws their shapes at the same time. I say theoretically, because they'll always be that player that takes too and wants to draw in too much detail! 'Do you really need to draw the chimneys on the houses in your village. What! Now you're doing the smoke too!'. You know what I mean.

The addition of the coloured markers - whilst an extra expense added quite a lot to the experience. I imagine using the pencils a little duller. It's a shame they couldn't include coloured pencils or something along those lines. Obviously costs need to be kept down though.

Even so, I found it a good game and would play it again.