Published Horrible Guild has over the past years been rather successful with the Railroad Ink series of roll & write games. So in September of last year they launched a Kickstarter for Railroad Tiles. It has the same idea of trying to build a network of rails and roads, but as the name says uses tiles instead of rolling dice and having to draw the network yourself. The Kickstarter delivered on time this year, and extra copies were available at Essen, where I picked up a "Kickstarter version" of the game.

In Railroad Tiles, 5 sets of between 2 and 4 tiles are set up. The first player takes a set, then the second player, and so on. The set not taken receives a star token as additional bonus, the sets are filled back up, and a new player order is determined. Basically, if you chose the 4 tiles set, you will play last, and the fewer tiles you took, the earlier you can choose next round. After 8 rounds, your network is scored, and the game ends, which takes about an hour with 4 players.

Placing you tiles in your network is a puzzle, as there are different things that score points. You will want to take tiles with placement spots for pedestrians, cars, and trains, and connect those. Each round you can place between 1 and 3 of those, and you score points in function of how many of them you connected, up to a maximum of 5 per placement. In my first game I totally underestimated how quickly that adds up and concentrated on other scoring objectives, ending up last in points. Other scoring objectives are the number of tiles in the biggest rectangle, rewarding you for building compact; number of clusters of 3+ cities; and avoiding loose ends of roads or rails leading nowhere.

I like Railroad Tiles better than Railroad Ink. The tiles are prettier and less messy than hand drawn networks, while the puzzle remains more or less the same. But still, this is a lighter and faster game than the average games I play, and so I consider it more as a filler, or for board game nights where we prefer to play a series of shorter games rather than one taking all evening. There are already a bunch of expansions out for Railroad Tiles, but I don't think I'll play this often enough to necessitate expansions.