2021-07-22T18:43:46Z
All 28!? But thats impossible!
4 Likes
I’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 
2 Likes
Okay, he genuinely did all 28 and that was impressive.
2 Likes
So he liked like 3 of the 28? 
2 Likes
I put a screencap over in Railroad Ink game modes/modifications – both Challenge Greens come out very well, then the “S grade” are the Renovation, Special and Construction (but not Separation) dice out of Engineer, and the Investigation die out of Eldritch.
4 Likes
Very disappointed at him referring to “a meatier game” and not correlating it to the “Meteor Game™”. Such a missed opportunity; is this what the Pear’s lineage has descended to?
Weak.
.
And I’m the only one who thinks the City Buildings™ look like baby bottles? Yeah? No? Oh, okay, I’ll leave now…
4 Likes
Well now I have to play all 28 again to see how much of the assessment I agree/disagree with…
5 Likes
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, you’re now laying down a hot wheels road for a kid to play with. Railroad Ink junior or something like that
4 Likes
Do it!! And report back 
2 Likes
That reminded me of a particularly satisfying exchange about another game:
“Is The Search For Planet X not Mystery of the Abbey on asteroids?”
“Are you saying that the gameplay is abbot meteor?”
2 Likes
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 won’t have it back until next month…
3 Likes
I was inspired to start the “campaign” using the starting layout cards. So far I’ve learned that walls are really annoying
1 Like
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.
1 Like
The green one is the best 
2 Likes
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 didn‘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 
I really liked Tom‘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 it‘s just like a regular curve)
3 Likes
This made me get the blue out again and try the Lake expansion, and I like it a lot.
1 Like
I think lakes is my joint favourite with trails.
1 Like
That was my reason as well. The description of random meteors destroying things that you’d carefully built exactly reminded me of the single feature I disliked in Mind Control Software’s incredible PC game “Oasis”1, so the red edition consequently had no chance with me!
I don’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 I’m more or less in agreement with Tom’s preferences here.
1 Oasis is a kind of “casual civilisation in 20 minutes or less” that is substantially more brilliant than it appears, and features probably the most sublime learning curve through its difficulty levels that I’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 wasn’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 wasn’t present elsewhere in the game. You couldn’t plan for it, and you often couldn’t recover from it, and I found it actually infuriating – the game wasn’t testing your strategy; it was just arbitrarily handing you a defeat.
(You can cheat if the game does anything truly unfair, though, so I’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. I’ve realised that it actually has a few other superficial similarities to Railroad Ink as well – 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 ‘lake’ (oasis) in every level (and a river in some); and of course lots of randomness to cope with. It’s far more different than it is similar, but it was funny to realise how many things these two games had in common.
2 Likes
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.
It’s true they introduce a (potentially/inevitably) destructive element to the field, particularly with the “must” 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 “may” rule in Blue.
4 Likes