Welcome:

Welcome, visitor. Over the past couple of months I have been designing a simple tabletop game – largely for my own amusement – based on the vaguely popular ‘push-your-luck’ dice rolling concept, set collection, and resource trading. I don’t posses any over-reaching ambition for this game, and am certainly suffering no delusions of it miraculously becoming professionally published over and above the million billion other in-progress tabletop games out there. However, I’ve discovered that thinking about it has become my principal free-time occupation of recent weeks and now I just want to write about it too; Somebody out there may be interested enough to read about it.

The Concept:

In ‘Railway Dice’ (a very unimaginative title, I know, but the perfect name ‘Rolling Stock’ was already taken. By a card game. By a card game that has nothing to do with railways.)

In ‘Railway Dice’, players compete to become the most successful railway haulage company in industrial, 19th Century Europe. Players take turns to roll up a train, collecting sets of matching rolling stock to transport different types of resources: Bricks, Coal, Steel and Passengers. However, the player must roll a Brake Van before running out of dice or the train will not be fit to travel (that’s the push-your-luck bit right there).

Players, however, are not simply collecting resources blindly or merely competing for the largest sets. Each turn, the players are racing to fulfil contracts in various industrial cities of central Europe. Many contracts are easy to fulfil but, to get the big points or the most ‘Engineer’ upgrade cards, players need to think tactically, and roll luckily.

Even more perilously, steam locomotives have their tractive limits and an engine that is laden down with many resources travels more slowly than one carrying only a few carriages – So the player hauling the fewest resources reaches their destination first! Wiley industrialists will try to make sure they can satisfy more than one contract before their engine leaves the station.

Dice not playing your way? Luckily, players to not have to rely solely on the fall of the die. ‘Engineer’ cards can be collected to provide a number of benefits like improving your score, broadening your trading horizons, or surprising your opponent.

Players who reach the point target first WIN!

Plea:

So that is the concept for now. There are many things that I have been working to improve, tweak, develop or remove, but as it stands I am immensely proud that I have created a game that works. It may not be very good, but I have designed the game that I would like to play. It’s lightweight like Martian Dice (one of my favourite games), but plays far more tactically and offers a little more depth. I would like to prepare a print-and-play version of this in due course – certainly at the very least publish the full rules – but, in the meantime, I would be really interested to hear readers’ initial reactions to the concept and whether they think the idea may have legs.

In the future, I have every intention to write about various aspects of the game in more detail, which will inevitably include a broader discussion of my rank-amateur take on game design and tabletop game mechanics in general (because there aren’t enough people writing about this already.)

Thanks for reading.

Simon