Review
A lot of Railroad Tiles will be familiar to players of Railroad Ink - it’s a thinky but cosy game where you’re trying to build out a well-connected network with nice long routes and as few unconnected ends as possible. Instead of dice and markers, though, you’re using a bag of chunky cardboard tiles (very tactile) and some teeny weeny meeples (very cute). Honestly it’s like if Railroad Ink merged with Carcassonne, and considering they’re two of my favourite games, it shouldn’t be a surprise how much I love Railroad Tiles.
What are the basics?
I feel like the rules to Railroad Tiles make it sound more complicated than it is. There’s quite a lot of components and a fair bit going on, but it’s easy to pick up, I promise. The setup has you lay out a very thematic train station, with wooden player tokens waiting on the platform in the multiplayer game. You draw tiles from the bag and lay them out in columns of two, three, or four under the station. Each round, you pick a column of tiles and add them to your personal tableau of tracks and roads, building up your network.
Each round you can also place meeples into your network, as indicated by the circular tokens on the train station. You get points based on how many other meeples of the same type there are on that stretch of road/track, but you can only place them on the pinpoint logos and you can only place the type(s) shown on the train station tokens. Unless ☝️ you use a star token to swap out a meeple type for any other one you like, though there still needs to be an open pinpoint.
The other set of components are the points tiles, which are pretty self-explanatory and help you keep track of points during the game. Honestly I think these are a little clunky, and they don’t help with the overwhelm when you’re trying to teach the game. I prefer Carcassonne’s separate point tracker board, but admittedly it’s better than writing down scores as you go.
Like I said, it sounds like a lot when you hear all the rules at once (or see it all laid out on a table), but you pick it up quickly once you’re playing. In fact, you’ll very quickly get caught up by the puzzle of trying to place your tiles, decide where to put your meeples, and plan ahead for your network. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll be enamoured by the lovely artwork
Is the solo version different from multiplayer?
Not really! The only change in the setup for different player counts is using different numbers of tile columns during drafting. In the multiplayer, there’s a neat balancing mechanic where the player who draws the fewest tiles gets first pick next round, and vice versa. When playing solo, you instead get different perks for choosing columns with fewer tiles - for choosing two tiles you get a star token, and for choosing three you get a free point. As you’d expect, the main differences are not having to fight with other players for the tiles, and taking as long as you want to place them.
The goal of Railroad Tiles is still to get as many points as possible, ideally focussing on just a few areas to maximise point-scoring. There are three ways to score - placing meeples, making cities (three connected town tiles), and having a large area of filled-in tiles. You’ll also want to minimise loose ends, since every one after five loses you a point. Rather than just trying to beat your high score, though, there are a series of 15 solo challenges, which give you a specific mission and an easy, medium, and hard score to aim for. These include things like ‘make a city with at least ten town tiles’, and ‘connect at least ten stations in your network’, or restrictions like ‘cannot have more than one meeple of the same type in each row’. You can think of these as in-game achievements - once you beat the target score for a particular mission, you can tick it off and consider it complete.
How’s the replayability?
The replayability is great, especially for solo. The hard levels of each of the challenges are genuinely challenging, and if you’re playing to the letter of the rules, you have to choose which challenge you’re aiming for before you start playing, so you can’t pivot based on the tiles you draw. Speaking of, there are so many tiles, you’re almost guaranteed to have different drafts each time.
There are also optional objective tiles, which aren’t compatible with the solo challenges but can be added if you’re just playing beat-your-own-score. There are seven different objective tiles, each with their own unique scoring condition, and you draw or choose three to use in a game. Thematically, they each represent a large building or structure you might have in a town or city, like an airport, city hall, or stadium; they remind me of the unique buildings in city-builder games like SimCity or Cities: Skylines. I actually prefer playing like this than completing the solo challenges, so for me I love the replayability of the various objective tiles and the random combination of them.
There’s also a healthy handful of expansions for Railroad Tiles, although sadly they appear to be mostly out of stock at the moment. I’ve got the World Expansion, which focuses on adding more of what’s in the base game rather than introducing anything new. It has ten more objective tiles, including a swamp, an observatory, and a cemetery, and adds 19 special car, train, and people pawns with their own unique scoring conditions. I can’t speak to any of the other expansions, but I'm particularly intrigued by the Monuments Expansion, which includes an archeologist who travels through your network uncovering ancient monuments.
How does it compare to Railroad Ink?
I think they both have a very similar vibe - cosy with that one-more-go feel, and as chill or as brain-burny as you want it to be. They feel quite different in important ways though - Railroad Tiles is more focused and streamlined than Railroad Ink, as there are fewer scoring options and so less to keep track of during a game. The scoring in Tiles also hits the balance of familiar but different, by giving you new goals that nonetheless lead to you playing in a very similar way to Railroad Ink. For example, you might not get points for your longest route any more, but having long routes maximises your chances of getting points from placing meeples.
I also prefer the implementation of the objective tiles in Tiles, versus the challenge cards in the Railroad Ink Challenge games. I found the challenge cards too much to keep track of, especially in solo games where they don’t add the competition element they do in multiplayer. It helps that the objective tiles fit in really well thematically, with their unique buildings.
All that said, as a lover of both roll-and-writes and tile-layers, I'll definitely be keeping both games in my collection. The simplicity of Railroad Ink is hard to beat - all you need is a board, a marker, and a few dice, and even the expansions just add a couple more dice. But when you have the time and table space, Railroad Tiles has that same thinky challenge with the added tactility of tiles and meeples. Plus, even though this is a solo review, I have to say I prefer Tiles over Ink as a multiplayer game. It has that more direct interaction of drafting tiles and potentially stealing the ones your friend wanted, and even indirectly it’s nice to see other players’ networks coming together and spreading across the table.
What’s the tl;dr?
Overall, Railroad Tiles is an excellent evolution of the already fantastic Railroad Ink formula. It has that thinky but cosy feel, with the added tactility of tile laying and cute meeples. It makes for a great solo game, where you can take your time over each tile placement; and the replayability is great, even before you get to the small mountain of expansions. For me, it’s a new favourite in my collection.
