Reviewing ALL 28 Railroad Ink Expansions!

2021-07-22T18:43:46Z

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All 28!? But thats impossible!

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Iā€™ve only watched him review blue and red so far, but I am very pleased that of the limited editions I could get in retail, I chose blue :smiley:

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Okay, he genuinely did all 28 and that was impressive.

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So he liked like 3 of the 28? :joy:

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I put a screencap over in Railroad Ink game modes/modifications ā€“ both Challenge Greens come out very well, then the ā€œS gradeā€ are the Renovation, Special and Construction (but not Separation) dice out of Engineer, and the Investigation die out of Eldritch.

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Very disappointed at him referring to ā€œa meatier gameā€ and not correlating it to the ā€œMeteor Gameā„¢ā€. Such a missed opportunity; is this what the Pearā€™s lineage has descended to?

Weak.

.

And Iā€™m the only one who thinks the City Buildingsā„¢ look like baby bottles? Yeah? No? Oh, okay, Iā€™ll leave nowā€¦

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Well now I have to play all 28 again to see how much of the assessment I agree/disagree withā€¦

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you are not! I had the same weird connection, which makes for a completely different view of the game. In stead of building a city, youā€™re now laying down a hot wheels road for a kid to play with. Railroad Ink junior or something like that

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Do it!! And report back :grin: :grin:

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That reminded me of a particularly satisfying exchange about another game:

ā€œIs The Search For Planet X not Mystery of the Abbey on asteroids?ā€

ā€œAre you saying that the gameplay is abbot meteor?ā€

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I was just thinking that, but on Wednesday I lent my chest of RRI to @cornishlee so that he can have a play before the next podcast, and I wonā€™t have it back until next monthā€¦

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I was inspired to start the ā€œcampaignā€ using the starting layout cards. So far Iā€™ve learned that walls are really annoying

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Pulled the trigger on the green one finally. I played a print and play of the regular one during early COVID and decided to get a real copy. I like the additions of the green one.

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The green one is the best :+1:

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I have the original blue box and the green challenge box and I am quite pleased with both and their expansions. My favorite are the woods from the green box. I chose blue over red because I didnā€˜t want the destructive red dice and green over yellow because I like woods more than the desert?

I was looking into getting the engineering and weather expansions before the review. But first they have to become available :slight_smile:

I really liked Tomā€˜s ranking system. Why be bound by static levels when you can make up everything on the spot. Also I will never be able to unsee the dreaded baseball die. (Although having played so much of the app now, I got used to it. In a corner itā€˜s just like a regular curve)

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This made me get the blue out again and try the Lake expansion, and I like it a lot.

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I think lakes is my joint favourite with trails.

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That was my reason as well. The description of random meteors destroying things that youā€™d carefully built exactly reminded me of the single feature I disliked in Mind Control Softwareā€™s incredible PC game ā€œOasisā€1, so the red edition consequently had no chance with me!

I donā€™t love Railroad Ink, but I have found that the Rivers and Lakes expansions both made the game noticeably better, and the green edition sounds like a similar style of improvement, so I think Iā€™m more or less in agreement with Tomā€™s preferences here.


1 Oasis is a kind of ā€œcasual civilisation in 20 minutes or lessā€ that is substantially more brilliant than it appears, and features probably the most sublime learning curve through its difficulty levels that Iā€™ve ever experienced in a computer game. Any time I returned to it tended to result in it consuming the next few days of my life.

The meteors in this game only affected a few levels of one specific campaign (out of many), and they would randomly fall and destroy anything they landed on. It wasnā€™t such a major problem on the kinder difficulty levels, but at the highest difficulty levels things are so tightly balanced that one unfortunately-placed meteor might turn a successful strategy to a catastrophic failure, potentially ruining the entire campaign in the process. Strategically managing the randomness in the levels is an integral part of the game, but the meteors brought a degree of unfairness that really wasnā€™t present elsewhere in the game. You couldnā€™t plan for it, and you often couldnā€™t recover from it, and I found it actually infuriating ā€“ the game wasnā€™t testing your strategy; it was just arbitrarily handing you a defeat.

(You can cheat if the game does anything truly unfair, though, so Iā€™d never put anyone off giving Oasis a try on that account : ) I happily cheated my way past these particular levels on the Hard and Insane difficulty levels!)

I found this review of Oasis in the web archive, if anyone wants to read more about it. Iā€™ve realised that it actually has a few other superficial similarities to Railroad Ink as well ā€“ a small grid-based play area; a fixed number of actions in which to accomplish (as best you can) your goals each level; roads to build; a ā€˜lakeā€™ (oasis) in every level (and a river in some); and of course lots of randomness to cope with. Itā€™s far more different than it is similar, but it was funny to realise how many things these two games had in common.

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I actually really liked the lava and meteors expansion and in fact, ended up ditching Blue as the priority when it became clear that I only needed one copy.
Itā€™s true they introduce a (potentially/inevitably) destructive element to the field, particularly with the ā€œmustā€ wording in the rules, but they also introduced new scoring opportunities, which I found to be really fun and unpredictable as compared to the more controlled ā€œmayā€ rule in Blue.

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