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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Now, On Tour is a game that I’ve only played in app form but one that I’m interested in getting a physical copy of. It’s a roll and write game where you are trying to plan out the best tour for your band across the United States. You can stop once in each state and to do so, you are putting a number of the states and you are trying to create a string of states where the numbers are increasing. That doesn’t sound too bad, but you have limiting factors as to where you can place those numbers, because you have cards that will determine what region that you can place the numbers, north, south, east or west. Along with that, the numbers can be pretty random. They are off of two ten sided dice, so each round those dice are rolled and you’re placing, if it was a 5 and 8 a 58 and 85 on the board. You can get bonus points if you place one of those numbers in on the city from the card that determines the region and it’s part of your route.

So the app itself, how is it. The App is pretty slick, it allows you to zoom on on the game board, so it works on a phone, it does all the end game scoring for you, though I have noticed that be wrong once, though, only once in 50+ games that I’ve played of it. And it gives you the ability to mark your route between places so that you can keep track of where you want to go and what numbers you need there. So I’ve only played this in the stand alone form because that’s what it was when the app launched. I know that there is some online play, but I haven’t dug into that yet. I like it because it’s so fast to play solo.

I don’t have any major negatives for the game. For me the whole game works slick as an app, and possibly better as an app. Now, obviously I said I haven’t played this in person. But with the scoring of the game, figuring out your longest and best route is not going to be easy. Just because this game, you’re going to have a ton of different options, so while you might know how the end route goes or the start, there are going to be spots where you have similar numbers by each other and circled cities that will give you the bonus points, so figuring out your path through that might be tricky. Now, with that said, I do want to get a physical copy of the game because I like the game a lot so I want to play it with more people.

Overall, if you’re looking for a good time filling app, this one fits the bill. On Tour is an enjoyable game that plays fast on the app. I will say, though, if you don’t like luck based games, this might not be the game for you. The dice rolls, while they are the same for everyone, and the card flips, give this game a high amount or randomness, because you might get the perfect roll but not be able to place the number or numbers where you need based off of the region. Since this isn’t a free app, it’s probably worth noting that before you pick it up. Personally, I like it quite well and it’s one that while I won’t play it all the time, I do always come back to it.

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Ascension is one that I started playing a while ago, but just recently came back to it. Ascension is a pretty straight forward deck building game where you are trying to get the best engine going of buying power and fighting power to get the most honor points. You get honor points by killing monsters during the game, but also then from the cards that you purchase. The game is straight forward and has a nice rotating market that can be frustrating if you don’t get what you want or the market just becomes monsters and you’re just about buying things. On your turn you play out five cards and basically do what they tell you, that is generally adding up attack and purchase power and then using them, but some cards will have special abilities like additional card draw, or they’ll be constructs, cards that go into play permanently and give you some bonus that way. You can find my whole review here.

So let’s talk about the app and how well it works on a phone. Now I’m just doing phone only as I don’t have a tablet that I use for these. The app implementation on the phone is actually really good. The game plays extremely quickly, much quicker than in person. Or at least playing solo on the app does. Pass and play with someone in person does as well, but you can also play it online against other people. The interface is very good and the tutorial gets you up and running fast in the game and the game takes care of some of the extra work for you. Of course you don’t have to shuffle, but negative monster affects, those can run automatically, and it keeps track of your purchase and attack power for you each turn so you don’t have to mentally track that and reminds you if you have any left.

Let’s talk a bit about the AI. I tend to think that it’s just okay. On hard I win most of the time, so a lot of the time when playing it I am more interested in trying out a new strategy to see how that works or to see what score level I can get to. On easy, the AI basically goes all in attack every time, which means that the game goes fast but you don’t really have anyone competing with you for the good cards or combos. I think with adding in some of the expansions, which are additional purchases it could keep the game more fresh and interesting, but I do think the game can get a bit repetitive over time playing against the computer, no matter the level of AI. Now, playing against people online, that’s going to obviously be more engaging in terms of strategy, but obviously takes a considerable amount more time.

Some of the bells and whistles in the game are nice though. You might want to know what constructs your opponents have, you can look at that. You might want to see what you have in your discard you can look at that. But the information isn’t dominating the screen, those are all things that you can look at versus stuff that clutters it up. And you can expand all the cards, so even though I’m playing on a small phone screen, if I need to read what a card says, which I don’t now but did before, I can just hold it down and it’ll pop up for me so I can see it large enough to read.

Overall, the game feels very intuitive in what you are doing. The game play is very fast as you go, so I can probably now get through a game in 10 minutes playing solo against four AI opponents. But, the game does lose some replayability over time against the AI just because their strategy isn’t always the most unique. I don’t think it’s a bad AI and I don’t win every time, more due to luck of the draw than great AI play. But it’s still a fun time to sit down and play fast, and I could easily buy some expansions to make it more diverse in my game play if I really wanted. This is a good app implementation, and if you really wanted you can play it online with friends or as a pass and play as well, which will give you a good representation of the real game. Definitely an app that I’d recommend.

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