For once I’m being very on top of an app review when I talk about Railroad Ink Challenge. This game just came out at the end of last week, and well, I’ve played it a number of times already. Let’s take a look at what I like about this app and what maybe hasn’t worked so well.

The Game

Railroad Ink Challenge is basically an implementation of Railroad Ink by Horrible Guild. In the app, they don’t have the expansions for it, yet, but they do give you a way to play the game, and then if you want, challenge friends to see if they can better your score with the same rolls.

Railroad Ink is a roll and write game where you are trying to connect routes across a map. At spots on all the edges are either road connections or rail connections. You try and connect as many of these together as you can by filling out the grid between with roads and rails and stations. The stations allow you to transition from one type of transit to another. At the end, you get points for how much you’ve connected, if you’ve gone through the middle and various other things, like placing stations in towns, goals you’ve completed, or losing points for rail or road that deadend into nothing.

I haven’t done a full review of Railroad Ink, the game yet. But I have played it a number of times. You can see my Beyond the Box Cover first thoughts over here.

What Doesn’t Work

I am going to give them some of a pass on things that don’t work well in the app, because, well, it’s extremely new. But I will say there was one thing that I found frustrating thus far. That was the fact that I couldn’t reset my password. I set-up on the game on my phone, but I also have it for Steam. I wanted both to be in the same login, but what I thought I’d typed as my password on my phone didn’t work on my computer. So I did the reset password, and the token was immediately invalid upon receiving it.

With that said, the rest of the app, and the game play, no major complaints. I think that the navigation could be a bit smoother or at least better worded at times, but that’s about it.

What Works

Firstly, I think this makes the game easier to play. The game does two main things that makes it easier. It shows you where your legal spots to place a die are. In the board game you have to stop and look to try and find every spot. In the app, you select a die and it shows you where you can place it. It doesn’t show you where you should place it, but it gives you the options you have available.

Then, it also shows you how many places along the edge of the map are connected. This gives you an head of how well you are doing and helps you know if something is connected or isn’t. The more you can connect together the more points you score. But also the more that are connected in one group, the more you score. SO it really makes that nice and clear as you go along.

I also really like that it has bonuses on it. When playing vanilla Railroad Ink the game is really about connecting those routes. That is fine, but Railroad Ink Challenge adds more into the game. Trying to build a station at a town to get more points works well. Getting a bonus die by hitting three certain spots, also works so nicely. It gives the game more, well, challenge. And it isn’t like Railroad Ink isn’t a fairly challenging game already, this just adds more.

Final Thoughts

I really like this app. I think it takes an already fun roll and write, and while I still prefer to play games in person, it gives me the same feel. And that is what I want in an app, it should make play easier, and give me the feel of playing the board game. There have been some apps where it almost makes it harder. Railroad Ink Challenge makes it easier and gives you a really nice package to look at as you play the game. If you like roll and writes, this is an app I highly recommend.

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