"Rolling Rails" - YANGI

What's in a name?

There's already a game called Rolling Freight, by Kevin Nunn, where you use dice to build train routes and chip cargo... which is maybe too bad, because I had an idea today for a dice game about trains!

Though to be fair, my game isn't about freight at all, just about laying track. So maybe Rolling Rails would be a better title. Surprisingly, that one doesn't seem to be taken.

Rolling Rails - a game of dice rolling and track drawing

I was watching a video about the latest game by Carcassonne designer Klaus-Jurgen Wrede: Caral, and the thought crossed my mind to make a simple dice game, maybe along the lines of Carc itself. I imagined custom dice with track on each side (Crossroads, T-intersection, Straight, Curve x2, and Turnabout). You'd start with a crossroads in the center of a grid player board, roll 4 of these dice, then use each to extend your track in one of the 4 directions. My first thought was that you'd have 8 dice, place 4 of them onto your board each turn, then pick the previous 4 dice up to roll next. That way your dice would propagate outward from the center, and the goal would be to drive them to cities at the edge of your player board. Then it occurred to me that just drawing the track on a piece of paper would make more sense.

So, we start with a player sheet grid, crossroads (or a train station?) in the center, and cities on each edge. The goal is to connect the center to a city in each direction. The cities would be worth points - fewer for the ones in the middle of the edge (they're closer, easier to get to), more points nearer the corners of the grid. For example, maybe a 9x9 grid, where the cities are worth 4/5/6/7/8 from center to corner.

Perhaps there are no turns... in real time all players roll their 4 dice, assign 1 to each track, and draw in the result. As soon as a player connects their first city, they announce "1 city!" and grab a bonus tile, scoring a few points for that accomplishment. This only happens the 1st time a player does it. At that point EACH player must discard a die and continue with only 3 dice. That part reminds me of Bananagrams, when players call "peel!" upon playing their last tile, causing all players to draw another tile.

Similarly, as soon as a player connects a 2nd city, they announce "2nd city!," grab that bonus tile, then everyone discards a 2nd die. Same for the 3rd city. After someone connects their 4th and final city, the game end is triggered... perhaps at that point remaining players get 1 or 2 final turns to connect their last city, then score their boards.

Alternate format - Bingo style

I understand a lot of players do not care for the time pressure inherent in real time play. Perhaps another format of this game could be more like Take It Easy or Karuba, where one player rolls the 4 dice, and all players mark those the way they prefer on their own player sheet. While it's possible in these types of games for everyone to do exactly the same thing, in practice players tend to differentiate pretty quickly.

This format would work with the same components, and so would be easy to try, and both formats could potentially be included in the game box. Who knows, this might work better than the real-time format, and it would require fewer dice!

Either way, this sounds to me like it could work out, and it's probably worth a try.

A shortcoming of Tabletop Simulator

I quickly mocked up a board and die for this in Tabletop Simulator to try it. With an infinite number of those dice, I was going to just leave them in play and draw 4 more dice for the next roll, however I discovered a downfall to Tabletop Simulator when it comes to using a die as a tile... pressing Q or E to rotate the die (in order to orient a 90 degree turn, for example) does not do what I wanted it to do -- instead it changes the die face! There may be a way to rotate a die without changing its face, but until or unless I figure that out, I'll have to make tiles to place on the player board or something like that.