Normally, I’m not usually a huge fan of games that have a “beat your own score” solo mode. However, in the case of Railroad Ink, the practically unlimited scoring potential has had me hooked on finding ways to increase the scoring capacity of every single dice. Whether you’re playing against friends or against the board itself, I hope this guide helps you navigate every junction on your route to success!
Apologies in advance for all of the puns… but as a silver lining, if you can find at least 25 Railroad Ink puns, I promise I’ll give you an invisible gold star!
Part One: Laying the Tracks
First stop, probability platform! Understanding the odds attached to each dice roll is the cornerstone of every dice-based game. To master Railroad Ink, you’ll need to know exactly which routes could come up on each roll – and once you do, you should be able to quickly calculate how likely it is that you’ll receive the routes you need for your plans, or whether you need to keep your strategy open to a potential backup plan.
Of course, knowing the chances a roll will come up is useless if you don’t know how to deal with the times the odds aren’t in your favour. You need to always be ready to adapt and change your plans to the unexpected – try not to waste a dice roll just because you didn’t expect it. Be the Chaos Conductor, and don’t let those pesky dice ink-terfere with your plans.
In a game with 6-7 rounds of chaotic dice-rolling, planning ahead becomes crucial. Every single one of your track placements should prepare for multiple scenarios, ensuring that no matter what happens, you can avoid having any redundant routes. Of course, planning ahead is also essential for ensuring you’re efficiently earning points from various scoring metrics, too. I call this advice “Track To The Future”.
I feel like you have probably worked this one out already, but another top tip is to avoid errors as much as possible. Realistically, if you’re going to place a route that will take -1 for an error, you want to ensure that it’s contributing at least +2 from other scoring sources, to make it worth it. For reference, my average number of errors is 5.3 – so I aim to have fewer than that whenever possible. Tight ship, tight tracks, as the saying goes.
When it comes to scoring points in Railroad Ink, you should focus on connecting as many exits in a single network as possible. The main reason for this is that the scores for the number of exits connected in a single network increase quadratically. Effectively, each additional exit multiplies your reward instead of adding to it, so if you want your exits to be worth their weight in gold, you’ll want to link them through one large network instead of multiple smaller ones. Be the exit strategist you were born to be.
This next tip will be perfect for those working in middle management: you need to prioritise the central spaces of the board! By filling those spaces, you could gain 9 points in total. To win, you’ll need to fill at least 4 of them, though it would be better to fill at least 6.
When thinking about your play strategy in Railroad Ink, you should also note that though special routes have maximum potential for connectivity, they also have maximum potential for errors. Save your special routes for the last 3 rounds of the game to ensure that you can use them as strategically as possible, avoiding scenarios where an adjusted strategy means earlier placed special routes become redundant, whilst ensuring that all of your plans are able to come together at once with your very own Deus Ex Trackina.
If you’re playing a game with multiple players, it’s definitely also advisable to keep an eye on your opponents (one might refer to this as Keeping Up with the Car-dashians). In the standard version of the game, this will help you learn from your opponents, pick up on efficient track placements, and also track how much of a gap there is between player scores. Meanwhile in the drafting variant of the game, you’ll be able to act more aggressively and block their potential road to victory.
Part Two: Mastering Rivers
The first rule of Railroad Ink club is to complete your rivers. Laying a section of river should plausibly yield at least 1 point, and completing the entire river will provide a bonus 3 points. Effectively, there is a point in the game where a single dice could increase your total score by 4 points, which is nothing to scoff at. So, take this maths lesson to heart and continue full stream ahead to the board’s edge!
Of course, in order to complete your rivers, you’ll need to become a bit of an Edge-ineer by starting each of your rivers close to the edge of the board. This will increase your chances of completing your river, no matter which rolls come up.
Though focusing on getting points from your river will be incredibly useful, it’s even more important to make sure you don’t dam it all for your road and rail network. That is to say, make sure to avoid expanding your river so far that it isolates parts of the board, cutting off easy-to-reach exits or separating your routes into two individual networks.
One method of ensuring a long, winding river doesn’t cut off your opportunities elsewhere on the board is to utilise river bridges strategically. It might seem obvious that you should find ways for your network to pass over your river, but when probability dictates that you are likely to receive only 3-4 opportunities to use a bridge per game, you must ensure you don’t waste the gifts you’ve been given. Ultimately, if you react to the dice correctly, any river-related threats to your network will simply become water under the bridge.
Another river-related tip is to curve and zigzag your river as much as possible. Forget straight lines – try hydraulic boomerangs! If you create U-shapes and C-shapes that loop back on each other, you can ensure your river doesn’t cut off the rest of the board, ensure it stays close to the board’s edges, or even ensure that it fills all the central squares (if that’s your strategy).
Part Three: Leveraging Your Lakes
I love the Lakes expansion specifically, because I was using it the first time I got a score above 60 (a very memorable moment that arrived after a frustrating streak of repeatedly scoring 58-59). If used well, they’re so useful for both filling the central spaces and ensuring the interconnectivity of the network.
You might be able to infer this from the rulebook, but it’s the piers on the lake dice that will help you the most. By creating a large central lake, you can connect routes without needing to rely on certain route rolls or even on special route intersections. Dock ‘n’ roll, people.
Some naysayers think that building multiple small lakes can be great for your connectivity, but at the point where the lake expansion shortens the game by an entire round, I’m fully of the opinion that you need to maximise the points that you can get from the lakes expansion through a single massive lake covering at least 9 squares – a number taken from my personal play stats tracking. As I like to say: “You need one lake to rule them all, one lake to find points. One lake to bring them all, and in the network bind them”.
To ensure your lakes do reach a reasonable size, you’d be best advised to make floods, not waves. If you can arrange for a domino-effect where multiple lake tiles spill over into tiles that cause more lake tiles to spill over – then you can cover twice the space with half the work! Beware, this will likely require more forward thinking than any other dice roll in the game.
Part Four: Advanced Strategies
For this final section of advice, I’ve put together some slightly more nuanced tips and tricks that you can experiment with as you please. They might work for you, or they might not – you’ll only find out if you try them!
First off, to play Railroad Ink as efficiently as possible, you’ll need to break your psychological instincts that push you to prioritise symmetry over the best possible route. The human brain find symmetry pretty and it finds it rational. But it won’t necessarily get you points. Unpack your instincts and be prepared to do a Picasso Pivot at any moment.
Now, everybody, it’s time to clap your hands and do the exit slide! Connecting the North-Western road exit to the South-Eastern road exit requires 11 track pieces, while linking the Western road exit to the Eastern road exit only needs 7 track pieces. Ensuring that your initial plans prioritise orthogonal routes is another tactic that will aid you in your goal of a large interconnected network.
To ensure you link all of your routes, no matter which direction of the board they stem from, it might also be worth making a grand central gambit. To elaborate, you could plan a “midline fork” along the centre of the board that includes at least 3-4 different network lines intersecting at staggered points, ensuring that roads, rails and rivers are able to forge paths far beyond their start points.
Ironically, my favourite strategy is actually the one I struggle with the most. Designating a deadzone on the board to act as a corner of shame is a brilliant way of guaranteeing to connect the rest of your network together and avoid all possible errors and wasted routes. It stops you from stretching yourself too thin, whilst also making it easier to visualise your plans across the rest of the board. Of course, the reason I struggle to implement this strategy is that I have to fight every one of my instincts to fill as much of the board as possible!
To accompany your corner of shame, you might also wish to create a gridlock galaxy by designating one section of the board to be filled with complex junctions. This could potentially allow you to put more focus into your planned routes without being forced into detrimental directions by an unexpected T-junction.
Speaking of chaotic junctions, an oddly specific piece of advice would be that, whenever you place an overpass, you should always attempt to loop the non-connected section back around to immediately connect with the rest of your network – this way you can ensure that you can score more from a single higher-scoring network than multiple lower-scoring ones.
Last but not least, here’s my “Procrastiplan”! The strategy here is to delay connecting multiple exits until late game, to ensure you’re neither cutting sections of the board off from your larger network nor are you prematurely overextending your network before you know what pieces you’ll have to work with. There’s nothing worse than being defeated by your own eager ambitions…
Conclusion
Hopefully these tips will prepare you to deal with all of the dicey decisions that could arise in Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition – and perhaps even prepare you for victory in each of the Red, Green or Yellow editions, too. Now go forth and draw like your score depends on it – because it does!
