Railroad Tiles takes the roll-and-write train game on a trip to a Carcassonne-like sequel

Lovely travel-sized train game Railroad Ink is trading away its roll-and-write mechanics for tile placement, a la Carcassonne, in upcoming sequel Railroad Tiles. A Kickstarter campaign from publisher Horrible Guild will launch in the coming weeks.

The Italian-based tabletop maker, which is also responsible for The King’s Dilemma, Sunrise Lane and Evergreen, announced the new project via its social media channels on March 25th. Hjalmar Hach and Lorenzo Silva return as designers, and it sure looks like artist Marta Tranquilli will once again ply her soothing watercolour aesthetic to the box and components.

Looking at the pair of available images - both promotional shots without much in the way of gameplay - Railroad Tiles trades the dry-erase markers and boards for tiles that display the trademark mixture of roads, rail tracks and stations. Wooden meeples for cars, trains and individual travellers sit on top, giving more credence to the Carcassonne-esque gameplay - combining certain meeples with tiles earns that player points, and much of the strategy comes down to choosing the best time and place to deploy their meeples.

It’s early days, yet, and Horrible Guild hasn’t supplied any concrete information about Railroad Tiles deeper design - will the dice, extra scoring objectives and fun environmental augmentations from the Challenge series be translated over. It’s difficult to imagine the designers wouldn’t keep the infrastructure connection puzzle that makes the tiny title such a thumper.

Railroad Tiles’s Kickstarter campaign will launch in “Spring 2024”, according to the publisher. Horrible Guild recently wrapped up crowdfunding for its first tabletop RPG, Wilderfeast, a game that takes the core conceit of the Monster Hunter video game series and mixes in some fun mutation mechanics as players literally become what they eat.