Let’s brush up on our SAT analogies, shall we? Pigeons are to major cities as what are to board gamers? Are you thinking it through? It’s train games. Ubiquitous train games, beloved by a few, reviled by some, and acting as a kind of unofficial mascot for the vast majority who fall into the midground that bemusedly tolerates them. You don’t have to look hard to find them pretty much everywhere. There’s a vague comfort in knowing that when you walk into a board gamer’s house or a city’s park, there’s probably at least a few tucked away somewhere, just out of sight.
Railroad Ink is a roll and write train game for 1-4 players where gamers roll dice with different features on them, and plot those features onto their own whiteboard grid to make the most efficient rail network. In the Challenge expansion sets, Railroad Ink has done their best to broaden the genre by adding dice that endanger gamer’s beloved trains with aliens that abduct sheep from tracks, godly thunderstorms that threaten to destroy your city, and Lovecraftian aboleths that get all tentacle-y, alongside more mundane civil engineering challenges like unfortunately placed cactuses. So with all of these opportunities for networking peril, which of the many Challenge expansion sets should you add to your own train game horde?
I’ve ranked each Railroad Ink Challenge set below. Expansions that are packaged together are ranked together, so base sets like Lush Green that have multiple bonus dice in them are rated collectively based on their overall worthiness for your hard-earned train game cash. The two original base sets of the game, Blazing Red and Deep Blue, aren’t ranked, assuming that if you’re interested in expansions you’re already familiar with the originals.
10. Sky Expansion Pack
Containing the Weather and Airline expansions, the Sky pack is a slightly confusing addition to your Railroad Ink collection. Weather takes you from being an infrastructure specialist to being like a pagan god controlling the skies over your railways. You place clouds, trying to keep different types of storms away from one another. Airline feels a bit more on the transportation magnet theme, as you create airports and airways that can automatically connect to any other type of route. Why does your little Railroad Ink city need multiple airports? Who could say? The two expansions are both middling, and neither brings anything particularly exciting or fresh to the game when compared to the other small box expansions.
9. Shining Yellow Edition
The two Challenge Edition base games, Yellow and Green, improve upon the original edition by including optional in-game goals that allow a more competitive game style. They both include the base game, plus two sets of extra dice. Shining Yellow introduces two expansion dice sets. Desert challenges the players to grow as many cacti as possible along their network, but cactuses must be placed near oases if they’re going to survive the hot desert climate. This is a balancing act, but not particularly difficult, and doesn’t add very much complexity to the game. The second expansion set, Canyons, is more challenging. Players need to create the longest canyon feature possible while planning bridges so that their network can cross this canyon. This requires a more careful strategy to do well but can add up to a lot of extra endpoints if executed correctly. Overall, these expansions aren’t super exciting or unique, but they’re playable. If you already own a base set, Shining Yellow might not be worth it. If you’re looking to buy your first base set and Yellow is the only option available, it’s better than nothing.
8. Arcade Expansion Pack
If you love Railroad Ink but would rather be playing literally any other game but this, Arcade is for you. It includes four separate expansion dice, Pluck-man, Tetromino, Galactic Invaders, and Rainbow. In the first, you’re trying to link ghost, fruit, and Pluck-man exits to one another. In the second, you’re reserving spaces in the shape of Tetris pieces, hoping that you’ll be able to complete the shape before the end of the game. Galactic Invaders has aliens slowly invading your board, to be taken off only if you roll a die with a Nuke face to blow them up. In the final expansion rainbows, rain clouds, and clovers cover your board. Rainbows act as wild cards, but interrupt your longest routes, clovers earn points for connecting to rainbows, and rain clouds plant themselves on an opponent’s board. The Arcade Expansion pack is a fever dream. It’s an interesting novelty, but the kind you play once.
7. Futuristic Expansion Pack
The Futuristic Pack has three different expansion modules in it: Super Connection, City Builder, and Alien Farmer. Do these make sense to be packaged together? Maybe, if you squint. But they are okay individually.
Alien Farmer is the most fun of the three to execute, garnering the player points for every sheep placed in the same row or column as a UFO, as the UFOs will be using their abduction rays to steal the sheep’s wool. Super Connection is the least exciting for me, and it lets you create new paths that can function as roads and railways at the same time, connecting up to superstations that you place. City Builder has you purchase skyscrapers to build based on the roll of the income die. The skyscraper towers earn you end-of-game points, but also function as new end stops for your routes, helping save you from error points in final scoring.
All three of these modules are playable, but they’re all about the same level of moderate difficulty. I don’t think any of these are real standouts, so all three together earn 7th place.
6. Underground Expansion Pack
The pack that makes the most dramatic change to the original format, Underground can be played as an expansion to the dice in the original game or as a standalone. Players use 2 boards from a base set at once, one representing their initial surface network and another for their underground network, where they will place pipes and subway stations. Play is alternated between surface rounds and underground rounds, doubling the length of the game. In the standalone mode, you just play the underground rounds.
This expansion is perfect for solo players who really want to dig in. If you like Railroad Ink but want it to be longer and twice as much work, this is the expansion for you. If you, like me, consider brevity to be a virtue of the game, give this one a pass.
5. Archipelago Boards
Providing a different play grid for you to interact with, the Archipelago boards are divided into four islands. You can only place routes on one island at a time. They are connected to one another by bridges, either rail or road. This expansion also introduces a new building, the Warehouse, where you can ‘store’ a route to use later down the line when it fits into your plan better. It is not easy to get a good network going on the Archipelago boards, but when you do you’re entitled to feel sufficiently smug and superior. One of the downsides to this set is that there is no good way to store them. They won’t fit in a base set, and they don’t have their own box like the small dice expansions. Because they’re whiteboards, you still want to keep them clean and dust-free. If you can get past that, this expansion is a great way to add some flavor and challenge to your game.
4. Electricity Expansion Pack
A truly electrifying duo of expansions, Street Lamp and Power Grid both add something unique and exciting to the game while staying on theme. The first lets you create extra long roadways that are accompanied by street lamps, but they’ll only earn you points if you connect this lamp system to a generator. After many Railroad Ink plays, the way that Street Lamp rebalances the game in favor of road building makes it all feel new again.
Power Grid is dastardly. You have to create a power grid on top of your normal network, connect it to an accumulator, charge that accumulator, make sure the electricity is flowing in the right direction, and see that the accumulator is networked to as many complete exits as possible. It is a difficult, complex expansion and I love it.
The duo works well together, giving you multiple levels of difficulty, unique additional mechanisms, and innovation. Power grid may be more tricky than some players want to deal with, though. If you’re looking for one pack to spruce up your Railroad Ink collection, Electricity is a great option.
3. Eldritch Expansion Pack
The Eldritch Expansion Pack is the spiritual sister to Arcade, both of which being four expansion novelty sets, but I think Eldritch executes this idea more effectively. Ritual is a hard-level expansion where you are creating a network of cultists, spreading trails of madness by opening portals on your map, and connecting those portals to ritual spots. The next expansion, the Portal die, takes this idea further by giving you three different types of portals that your city’s denizens can travel through if their train is taking too long.
Tentacles asks you to help an Eldritch monster take over your rail network, spreading as many tentacle shapes across your city as possible. The Investigation die gives you a little person who moves across your board based on how many footprint icons you place, looking to collect spyglass icons representing clues.
Each of these expansions has a different level of difficulty, and each has well-thought-out mechanical additions to the game. If you’re not burnt out on Lovecraft-themed games, this is my favorite novelty expansion.
2. Lush Green Edition
Lush green is the least revolutionary but best-balanced expansion. If you don’t have any other Railroad Ink products, this is the ideal introduction to the game, and it is the best of the four available base sets. This is good o’fashioned train gaming, in a verdant setting. The Forest expansion lets you plop happy little trees onto your board, eventually connecting them together into adjacent forests. At the end of round scoring, you choose your two largest connected forest sections and score them. The Trail expansion has you building stations, then connecting them together with trail segments. Trails travel across the corners of your spaces, snaking around your regular train network. They’re fiddly to connect up and even fiddlier to score, which makes them a real challenge compared to the fairly passive tree placement in the Forest expansion. The two expansions work well together, both fitting the theme of the set well and providing you with two very different ways to enjoy the game in the same box. Lush Green is everything we like about Railroad Ink, packaged together and travel-ready.
1. Engineer Expansion Pack
The most essential of the four expansion sets, Engineer does the best job of staying on the train game theme. It really just supplements the original game, giving you some new options without reinventing the wheel. Each dice is unique and thinky, forcing you to reconsider how you want to play.
Renovation lets you add features like extra connections to your already placed routes. Maybe it’ll make your network more efficient, or maybe you’ll make things worse for yourself, it’s up to you and your ability to plan ahead. The Special die has extra options for your standard network, making for more interesting connections. The Construction die lets you destroy or move one of your already placed routes, or place a new one in a location that wouldn’t normally be legal. The Separation die gives you unusually twisting and turning route options.
There aren’t aliens or thunderbolts in this set, but it is good solid train gaming. If you’ve played plenty of Railroad Ink and you’re looking to spend a little bit to make the game feel fresh again without changing the core of what you enjoy about it, this expansion is the ticket.
