Top Ten Railroad Ink Challenge Expansions

boardgamequest.com:

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.

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