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That's the beauty of this hobby! Thanks to the vast variety of what's released from publishers large and small, from designers known and never heard from before, yes, you will be confronted with hundreds of games that you'd rather trod on than trot out to play, but at the same time you'll encounter some number of seemingly bespoke games that suit your tastes like nothing else. With that in mind, if you'd rather not hear about yet another roll-and-write game, I invite you to move along to another post instead of yucking on someone else's yum. Criticize games when they don't do well what they're trying to do, but not for their mere existence, please.
Anyway, Italian publisher Horrible Games has released a pair of games — Railroad Ink: Blazing Red and Deep Blue from the company's own Hjalmar Hach and Lorenzo Silva — that draw from the old-school version of the roll-and-write genre because they are true multi-player solitaire games a là ye olde Yahtzee.
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Each player in the game gets their own laminated player board, and over the course of six or seven rounds, they draw the highways and railways rolled on the dice on their own board. That's pretty much it. I mean, the game has rules for what's drawn where and why you'd want to draw something here rather than there, but the enjoyment of the game comes mostly from you creating something, then looking at it, and saying, "Hmm, neat."
When you add pathways to your board, you must either place them at one of the twelve exit spaces on the perimeter of your board or extend an existing path. You must match highway to highway and railway to railway, but stations allow you to change from one type of transportation to another, and you'll want to do this as your main goal is to create a network that connects as many exits as possible. That's where most of your points will come from, so you're encouraged to build that way — but often the dice won't co-operate with your internal plans, so you'll have to end up doing something else instead.
You also score points for your longest highway and your longest railway as well as for the number of center spaces that you cover, but these feel like gravy points on top of the meat-and-potatoes of your network. You lose points for roads and rails that end in the midst of the land, but all too often, you can't help but drop a few eggs while keeping your eyes on the larger goal.
Aside from the base game, which is the same in both editions, each version of the game includes two different pairs of expansion dice, with those two dice twisting the game in some manner. In the pic above, you can see that we each had an active volcano in the center of our board, one that spewed lava while we tried to build networks around it. Other expansions hurl meteors at the board to destroy what you've built and give you new mining capabilities, drop a river that can snake under and around the other modes of transportation, and install one or more lakes that let you extend networks across the water.
While you can compete against others in Railroad Ink, you don't feel like you are. You're staring at your own board, weighing the odds over what might come next before deciding what to draw where and never thinking about what others might do. The game is a challenge to do the best you can with the raw materials presented to you, preferably in a pleasing way so that you can take a nice-looking picture of your board for sharing before erasing your creation, then hitting the rails once again...
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