Railroad Ink – The Unboxinating!
I first ran into Horrible Guild’s Railroad Ink online over at Board Game Arena and I thought I’d try it out. I play with a group of people who like to try out the beta games and one of those people is Cheryl. So of course I signed us up for a virtual train game. It was super awesome and I played a LOT of virtual Railroad Ink
Naturally, phone Amazon looked over and said, “Heeeeeyyyyy, you spend a lot of time on that game. Oh lookie here, I just happen to have the Blue edition for a great price. What a coincidence, eh?” So yeah. I now own all 4 of Horrible Guild’s Roll and Write train games and in composing this post, I’ve discovered there are expansions to the base games. I wonder how long it’ll be before I suddenly find the expansions on super sale over at Amazon?.
Oh, Horrible Guild also makes Potion Explosion and there are 2 expansions to that (5th ingredient, Sixth player). Well then…but first, the Unboxinating!
Number One: Let’s look at the components. Blue and Red are 1-6 player games and come with 6 game boards, 4 white dice (Route dice) and 4 colored expansion dice (2 River/2 Lake for Blue, 2 Lava/2 Meteor for Red), a rule book and dry erase markers for everyone. Green and Yellow are 1-4 player “Challenge” editions and come with 4 game boards, 4 white dice (Route dice) and 4 expansion dice (2 Forest/2 Trails for Green, 2 Canyon/2 Desert for Yellow), a rule book, dry erase markers for everyone and expansion cards for each of the expansion dice sets. Overall, the game parts are solid, although one of the dry erase markers gave up the ghost the first game out so the quality there could improve a bit.
Number 2: The artwork. The design crew was in overdrive here so this is gonna get a bit wordy and there will be pictures. I bought the Blue expansion first and was super amused by the game box stats pictures. I wouldn’t bat an eye if someone told me that Horrible Guild’s headquarters were in Arkham, MA. They are not, sadly, (Horrible Guild is based out of Milano, Italy) but their North American distributor is out of Delaware. Close…ish?
I then discovered that the player boards had different pictures on the back side of the panel that flips up to keep your board secret. That was cool…but it turns out that each set of game boards creates a panorama when you line them up correctly. Sahweeeet.
Next, after realizing that the Blue version has a red insert and the Red version has a green insert, when I got the Green and Yellow versions I wondered if the colors would loop back around and they do! Green has a yellow insert and Yellow has a blue insert. That was pretty snazzy but you know what else? All the accent colors on the boxes are the same color as the insert. Daaaang art design team. Just….daaaaaaaaaang.
And then they advertise the corresponding edition color on the back of the boxes (Blue and Red advertise each other, Yellow and Green advertise each other) with the caption, “Buy the XX edition and play with up to 12/8 players!”. Well played, Horrible Guild. Now we all have to go out and get other expansions so we can play 20 people at once.
Number 3: I really like the box construction. The Games Library doesn’t have any Railroad Ink (yet) but if it did, I wouldn’t have to find a giant rubber band in my parts box to hold the game closed (standard operating procedure with the smaller games so they don’t pop open and spill everything everywhere) because the box folds over and magnets itself closed. Niiiiice, and thank you for that. The inserts hold the components well and I like how the Route dice are set off from the expansion dice. You don’t have to play with the expansion dice so they get their own cubby to keep them out of your dice pool if you aren’t using them. The two expansions that have cards put the cards in the same cubby as the markers, but there is a card divot in the bottom of the cubby so the cards don’t slide all over. My only quibble is that I have to stack the 6 player boards one inside the other in sets of 2, otherwise the lid doesn’t close as neatly as it should. It’s not that quibbly but it is extra time spent neatly tucking the boards in rather than gathering and tossing.
Number 4: The instructions are well laid out in sections starting with Components, then Game overview, Set up, Game rounds, End of game, How to score, and at the very end each expansion has its own section. It’s easy to read and easy to follow these directions, even when the dynamics get complicated. There are even examples where the designers think there will be confusion (what constitutes a legal vs. illegal move,etc.). On the back of the box are the super cliff notes of how to play so if you find this in a store you can get a really good idea of what you will be in for without having to go find reviews or a friend who has played the game before.
Number 5: This is an odd unboxinating because I played this game digitally first so I knew how the game worked coming into writing this up. The one thing I wondered about with the physical game was how easy it was going to be to draw the dice in the squares. The computer will let you virtually pick up each die and noodle around with it if you like and then put it where you want it. In reality, everyone is using the same physical dice so if you aren’t good at spatial orientation of objects, this can get tricky. There are guides at the top of your board but you still have to have the ability to visualize how those pictures will look rotated and some people just don’t have that skill. Then there is the art aspect…if you are just not good at drawing at all I’d recommend sticking with the online version. The computer does your drawing for you too.
Lastly :
