Railroad Ink

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.

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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.

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An example of connections and scoring.

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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!

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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.