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.

27th October 2020

Tuesday evening is here and I'm at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club.

Time for the first game of the evening; Karuba.

​Have you fancied yourself as an explorer just landed on some unmapped jungle island? Well in Karuba you control not just 1 explorer, but 4! All in a rush from beach to jungle in order to find temples, treasure and ultimately glory first before everybody.

What's in a game?

• Player boards: All player boards have 30 spaces in a 6x5 grid. Half of the grid's perimeter is bordered by the beach and the half by the jungle. Each half of these perimeter's is numbered (In increments of 10.) from 10 to 110, these numbers represent compass degrees. There is little artwork here, but what there is, is nice enough
• Path tiles: Each player has 36 identical numbered tiles. Each tile shows a path or a junction. Some tiles will also display a gold or diamond symbol.
• Meeples: Each player has identical tokens, 4 sets of an explorer and a temple, in 4 colours. These are nice wooden tokens.
• Gold and diamonds: Shiny and translucent little plastic tokens are used to represent gold nuggets and diamonds.
• Scoring tokens: There are 4 sets of 4 scoring tokens in the same 4 colours as the meeples. Iin each set of tokens they are worth from 2 to 5 points.

There's not much to be said about the components. The meeples are good classic wooden tokens and the gold and diamonds are a nice touch too. The rest of the components are well made and sturdy.

How's it play?
Set up
The set up for Karuba very straightforward, if a tiny bit time consuming.

• First choose 1 player as a 'caller'.
• Starting with the caller and clockwise order, each player will put a single explorer down in a beach space numbered from 10 to 110 on their player board, at the edge of the grid. All other players must also put down an explorer of the same colour on the same space on their own player boards. Then the player puts down a temple in the same colour as the explorer, but in one of the jungle spaces numbered from 10 to 110 instead; the only restriction is that it cannot be less than 3 spaces away from the same coloured explorer. Again all other players follow suit. Continue until all explorers and temples have been placed. All players should now have all their meeples in identical spaces.
• The caller is given their set of 36 tiles, these should be shuffled and placed into a face-down stack.
• All remaining players should place their tiles face-up in numerical order around their board so that they can be easily found.
• Gold, diamonds should be placed in an easily accessible spot for all players.
• The amount and value of scoring tokens used will be dependant on the number of player. 1 face-up stack in each colour should be created, with highest value token on top and lowest at the bottom. All 4 stacks should placed in a spot easily reached by all players.

Now were're ready to go.

Gameplay for is very straightforward. Players are trying to move their explorers to the temple of the same colour. Unsurprisingly, this is done by laying tiles and moving the explores along the paths that are created.
Karuba has no turns, everyone makes their choices at the same time.

• The caller will have a stack of face-down tiles. They turn over the top tile and announce the tile's number to all other players. The other players should then find and pick up their matching tile. Now all players have to make 1 of 2 decisions: Lay tile or discard tile to move explorer.
• Lay tile: If a player chooses this option, they must put the tile on to a grid. There is only one rule; tiles cannot be rotated, the number in the corner of tile must always be upwards. Other than this, any placement is ok, you do not have to connect it to another tile or path, you can create dead-ends or block other routes off or send a route off the grid, remember the only player you can screw over... is yourself. Finally if the tile has a gold or diamond symbol on it, then place a corresponding token on to it.
• Discard tile to move: If a player discards a tile, then they can move an explorer along a number of tiles equal to the number of exits on the discarded tile. Thus a straight or bend confers 2 movement points, a T-junction confers 3 and crossroad -4. There are some rules here: Only 1 explorer can be moved, the movement points cannot be split between explorers, an explorer cannot pass through a tile that is already occupied by another explorer nor can they end the round there. If an explorer moves on to a tile with a gold or diamond token on it, the player can choose to pick it up, picking the treasure up ends the explorer's movement irrespective of any remaining movement points.
• Once all players have finished playing a tile or moving explorers. A new round begins and the caller draws another tile.
• When an explorer reaches their temple (By moving off the grid and onto the temple's space.) they collect the topmost scoring token in the same colour as their explorer/temple. If two or more players reach the same coloured temple in the same turn, they all score according to the topmost token, players who take the lower value tokens also take diamonds to make up the difference.

Endgame
Play continues until one player has moved all 4 of their explorers to the relevant temples, or as is more likely until the caller has depleted their entire stack.

Players add the points of all the scoring tokens they've collected and the gold and diamond tokens, gold is worth 2 points and diamonds 1 point.
​Highest score wins.

Overall

Despite the simplicity of the rules, Karuba gives players lots of decisions to make nearly all the time.
​
The most common of these is whether to play a tile or discard it for movement.

This is a very elegant mechanic, the best tile to build paths with is the crossroads, because it gives you the most options. But the crossroad is also the best tile to discard for movement, as it give you most movement. 

Early in the game, you'll obviously be wanting to play the tiles more often to build up your paths, but you can't afford to play them willy-nilly. A meandering path is something players will want to avoid.
You may end up putting tiles in seemingly unconnected, random places, hoping to get the right tiles later on!
Players have limited rounds in Karuba and will want to build their paths as efficiently as possible. The game has an absolute maximum of 36 rounds.

If you look the photo of my gameboard from the end of the game. All 36 tiles were drawn. This means  I played 19 tiles, which means I moved 17 times, whilst I managed to get 3 explorers to their destination, the blue explorer barely managed to leave their starting spot.

Movement may also provide difficult decisions.
For example; you may have an explorer who is just 1 step away from a treasure or a temple but have just drawn a crossroads tile which grants you 4 movement, using it on 1 movement can be a waster. Do you use it to move another explorer to maximise it's value, or do you use 1 movement to complete an objective and waste the rest of the movement?
Also, when moving explorers, players will need think ahead a little, a badly placed explorer can block their colleagues, meaning it might require an entire round to clear the path.

Only towards the end of the game, when I had connected everything up and reached 2 temples, did the decisions become no-brainers. But because the game is played simultaneously and other players were more or less in the same situation: There was little downtime between rounds, which passed very quickly.

Karuba is a quick game to play anyway, if a player spends 1 minute deciding their move, the game has a play time of 36 minutes.

The only small criticism I could level at Karuba is that there is no interaction with other players. Not a problem for me personally, but it can be for others.

Otherwise I thought it was a good game.
Quickly and easy to learn, quick and fun to play.

​Anybody can learn and play Karuba. It's such a visually driven game that players should quickly comprehend what they need to do.

It's a game that's definitely going on my list.

20th October 2020

Tuesday evening in Woking at 'The Sovereigns'.

Time for a boardgame with the Woking Gaming Club.

Tonight's game was 'Ride the Rails'.
Now Ride the Rails looks like a traditional railroad building game set in North America, but it has a few wrinkles that make it play a bit differently.

What's in a game?
Some of the components will seem familiar to any that's played a railroad building game

• Game board: Like all self respecting railroad building games, the board depicts continental North America with a hex map! The map also shows about 50 cities, most are coloured black, but some have other colours related to the rail companies. A scoring track runs around the edge of the board and there's also a section for tracking share price and travel.
• Train meeples: There 27 train meeples in each of 6 colours.
• Passenger meeples: There are about 50 of these. Look closely and you'll that these little meeples are waving their hands!
• Player boards: These player boards track the railroad shares that have been purchased by players.
• Disc components: Used to track turn order, player scores and changing share prices.

There are lots of little components here, all of them are of a good quality, the train and waving passengers meeples are particularly nice.
You may have noticed that I mentioned shares, but there are no components for shares and no money either. Well, more on that below...

How's it play?
Set up

• ​Put all of the share price tracking discs on to their starting spots.
• Put a passenger meeple on each city space in the map.
• Sort the train meeples by colour.
• Give each player a player board.
• Determine starting order.

That's it, pretty simple.

Ride the Rails is played over 6 rounds.

It's important to know that there are only 2 train companies (Red & blue.) available from round 1. The orange becomes available from round 2, yellow from round 3, purple from round 4 and black from round 5. No new companies appear in the 6th and final round.
Additionally, each company has it's own rules for the placement of train meeples.

A round consists of 3 actions, which all players will carry out.

• Acquire a share: Each player (In reverse turn order.) can take one share from any available company, thus in round 1 there is choice of 2 companies. When a player takes a share, they take a train meeple of the relevant colour from its supply. These are the same meeples used to build railroads, the more shares that are taken, the less meeples are available to expand the company. It's also worth noting that because there are only 6 rounds, players will only ever acquire 6 shares.
• Build railroads: Going in turn order, each player can build railroads. A player can only build railroads for any companies in which they own shares, but the player can mix the companies they build for. This is done by taking meeples from the supply and either starting at a city or continuing on a railroad. There are rules for which cities a rail company can start from. There are also limits on how many different companies can occupy the same city or hex. Lastly, building through mountains will slow expansion down a little.
• Ride the Rails. Once all players have build railroads, then in turn order, each player can select any meeple in a connected city and move it to any other connected city going thorough as many connections (Cities.) as they want, there is a limitation though. A single journey cannot use the same hex more than once. Then the meeple is immediately scored and removed from the game. Scoring is a little involved. The share value of company is increased for everyone of it's connections used. So if a journey used 3 blue and 1 red connection, the share value for blue would be 3 and for red 1. Every blue share would pay 3 and every red 1, this is for all players for shares that they own. Finally, only the active player earns 1 for each city that was in the journey, this is equal to the total connections plus 1, in the example above, the active player would earn 3+1+1 for a bonus of 5. The share value and journey tracker are then reset to 0 for the next player's journey. The more connections a journey has, the more points are scored.
• New turn order: Once all players have ridden the rails a new turn order is determined based on the players with the lower scores going higher in the turn order.

Players can earn bonus points by being the first to reach certain cities, or being the first to connect the east coast to the west coast.

Endgame
Play continues until the 6th round has been completed. Final scores are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
As you can see, Ride the Rails is pretty straightforward and simple to understand, it also plays quite quickly.
Don't let the simplicity fool you though, there is a fair a amount of depth here.

Firstly; Ride the Rails has the classic dichotomy in which competing players may need to cooperate. If more than one player has spent a turn investing in a certain company, it's to both their benefits to expand that company efficiently.

Being able to gauge which shares will generate the most points is vital to winning, if a player manages to get 2 or 3 shares (Out of their 6) in a rail line that will see a lot of use, they can potentially rake in a lot of points. If a player however invests too quickly in a single company, it can scare off players who might perceive they are helping another player too much. Remember, 2 players can build up a network much quicker than a single player.

Secondly, building rail networks. In the first round, red and blue train meeples can only start in east coast cities and must more or less head west.
Should a player create a meandering network that maximises connections?
Or should they race towards the west coast? No single rail company can cross the entire map, it will probably take the efforts of 3 companies to do that and this will involve crossing the mountains.
This means it's unlikely that more than 2 companies will connect the east and the west. Making this connection first can be very lucrative, it forces other players to either use the rail network you've got shares in, or waste time building a separate network and just like with shares, each player will only have 6 opportunities to build their network.

I think that Ride the Rails is a good game, that has a lot of elements that will be familiar to experienced gamers but actually plays a bit differently.
You buy shares, you just take them and you don't pay to expand a rail network, it just happens. There is no money in the game in fact, money immediately translates into points.

I definitely want to try Ride the Rails again.

5th February

Another Tuesday night at 'The Sovereigns'.
The ladies bathroom was closed and most of the pub smelt of poo! But board gamers are a tough as it gets. So we endured and played on.

The first game of the night was 'Century: Eastern Wonders'.

This is the 3rd 'Century' game I've seen the other two are:
Century: Spice Road.
Century: Golem Edition.

I've played Century: Spice Road previously and it was alright. It was sort of a deck building Resource trading/management card game. But a specifc random element in the game 'Really pisses me off to no end!' But enough talk of a game that I'm not actually blogging about.

So Century: Eastern Wonders is a sequel  of sorts to Spice Road game and contains rules for combining both games into a single game. Curious - but something for another time.

In Eastern Wonders, you control a merchant ship that travels around, trading spices for profit.

The first thing I'm going to say for this game is that even though it's more or less just a bunch of boat shaped meeples sitting on tiles - it is quite a pretty looking game. Unfortunately I didn't get a good photo of it.

On to the gameplay.

First; let me explain the different spices.
There are 4 types of spices, ranked from least to most valuable they are:
Yellow - red - green - brown.

In your turn you can move your ship 1 or more spaces, then you can perform 1 of 3 actions after moving.

• Harvest: This allows you to collect 2 yellow cubes from the bank.
• Market: If you are on a market tile (which you will be most of the time), you can trade spice cubes. Different market tiles allow you to carry out different types of trading. For example, you could trade 2 yellow cubes for a 2 red cubes (which are more valuable) on a particular tile. On another tile, you could trade 2 red cubes for 2 yellow cubes and a brown cube. Or a tile might allow you to turn a brown cube into 5 yellow cubes, etc, etc. So by travelling along particular routes you can create trading loops to increase your spices. Why are spices so important?
• Port: This is why spices are so important. The game's playing area has 4 ports, generally each port contains a 'Victory Tile'. Each victory tile has a cost (E.G. 2 red and 4 yellow). If you are on a Port tile and play the 'Port' action and have the necessary spices, then you discard those spices to acquire a Victory Tile. Each Victory Tile has victory point total (the highest I've seen is 20 Victory Points). victory points win you the game. Then a new victory tile with a different cost. There's also a mechanic where a port can become temporarily inaccessible.

There are some other mechanics, such as 'outposts'. Each player has their own board. On their board are 20 outpost markers arranged in 4 rows of five. In order to use the market action on a tile, the player must place a outpost marker on the tile.

However, there are specific rules on how out post markers are removed from a player's board and placed on a market tile. Each market tile has a spice symbol (yellow, red, green, brown) and each of the 4 rows of outposts has a corresponding symbol.
Thus: If playing an outpost marker on to a market tile with a yellow symbol, it must be the left-most outpost marker from the yellow row that is placed on to the market tile.

This is important, as how markers are removed from your board makes difference.

• The spaces further to the right side of the board have numbers, these count as victory points at the end of the game. So playing outpost markers from one type of spice will earn you points.
• Removing an entire column of spices earns you an upgrade to your board. This can be extra movement, extra cargo hold space, improved harvesting etc. So there's also a reason to place markers from the spices evenly.

And that's good. There's more than one strategy you can pursue to earning victory points. And there always seems to be a meaningful decision to make. Sometimes you just need to recognise and adapt your tactics when circumstances change.

And that's it. I enjoyed Century: Eastern Wonders enough that it goes on to the 'would like to own' list and I may revisit Century Spice Road in the future with a different mindset.

Dang! Just realised; I blogged a game tabout spices and I didn't make a single reference to 'Dune'. Well The spice mu - ah too late, screw it!​