Railroad Tiles Expansions Review: Countryside
Railroad Tiles is Horrible Guild’s follow-up to the very popular Railroad Ink, and while you won’t be rolling dice and drawing routes onto a dry erase board, you will be connecting roads, rails and more as you try to create the best network.
Railroad Tiles is an arguably much better game than Railroad Ink, and that experience is only made better by a litany of expansions that are sure to excite hardcore players. I originally backed the Kickstarter campaign for this game, but didn’t dive in with any expansions. Now that they are available in Canada for 19.99 CAD, I jumped on a few! Let’s look at the first expansion I played, Countryside!
In the Countryside expansion, players will be placing barns pieces, building pastures, and placing animals to score points. There are also a number of unique objectives as well, like having a specific sized field with no animals, or having animals adjacent to a tile. The objective tiles are not ground breaking, but they do add a bit more options to the game when playing with this expansion.
Countryside is considered a HARD expansion according to Horrible Guild, and I can see why. We did have a few questions around what was and what wasn’t a pasture, and we don’t feel the rules explained this very well. There were references to colours on tiles, and it all just didn’t make a lot of sense while we were learning the rules. As we played, though, those issues melted away.
Unlike the other expansion we are going to talk about today, each round of drafting will have players not only taking tiles, but drafting an animeeple as well. Generally you want the same types of animals in the same pastures, as you will score for the animal you place, and other animals of the same type present up to a maximum amount. Animals need to be placed on barn spots, so making sure you get some of those in your draft is important as well.
The table presence here is really awesome, and I quite enjoyed the look of my city when the game was all over. I went hard after the sheep in my first play of this expansion, and it paid off well. While diversifying your animals makes your end product look cool, it doesn’t score you many points! Either way, I quite enjoyed this expansion and look forward to playing it more!
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Article By Adam
