YORKTON – If you like tile laying games – they are a favourite for most in The Meeple Guild – then you will want to take a long look at Railroad Tiles.
This one is a fairly new effort from designers Hjalmar Hach, and Lorenzo Silva and publisher Horrible Guild.
Railroad Tiles, is a sequel to the roll-and-write series Railroad Ink, which the Guild has not played, but reports online were usually favourable.
The new version is a quick-play – there are only eight rounds — tile placement game in which you pick tiles and place routes to build an interconnected community.
“We wanted to take the small, monochromatic, two-dimensional world of Railroad Ink—made of roads and railways drawn with markers, which we fell in love with—and bring it into three dimensions,” offered Davide Amici Marketing Manager with Horrible Guild via email. “We aimed to make it vibrant and colourful, populate it with life, and bring it one step closer to reality.
“What convinced us to pursue the project was its simplicity. When people sit down to play, they naturally start combining tiles and populating them with meeples in a way that closely mirrors the official rules—even without knowing them. There’s something intuitive about this spatial puzzle that immediately “clicks,” and that made us believe it was worth developing into a full game.”
Players start each round by drafting tiles from the sets available in the common pool, then you place your routes in front of you, trying to make as many connections as possible.
There is nothing innovative in the mechanics here, but Railroad Tiles still works well, and the game experience while not amazing is generally satisfying in large part due to the game play’s general familiarity.
Asked what stands out Amici noted “probably its unique combination of elements: simple rules, a relaxing and almost romantic visual style, a touch of engine building (the more cars on the same road, the more points each new one earns), strong variability, and plenty of room for expansions.
“It also builds on the recipe we know works so well with Railroad Ink.
“A less common mechanical twist is that you don’t place just one tile per turn—you place several. This opens up a wide range of options and allows you to build a large, satisfying “map” over the course of just a few turns.”
Each round, players can also place cars, trains, or travellers to populate their landscape they are creating. The available actions change from round to round, so you need to prepare in advance.
The more pieces of the same kind each new placement connects to, the more points you earn. This adds some depth to play beyond just laying out tiles.
“We think the most distinctive element of Railroad Tiles is the scoring system for cars, trains, and travellers,” said Amici. “The more cars are already on a road, the more points each additional one will earn when placed. This mechanism was designed to echo the “longest road” scoring in Railroad Ink: players are incentivized not to close off their roads, so they can keep generating points—very much like how players in Railroad Ink try to keep extending their longest road or railway for maximum score.”
Players also score bonus points at game’s end for various designs within the tile layouts.
Railroad Tiles will not tax your brain, and it doesn’t feel like there is anything you have found in part at least in other games, but this one still stands out as a solid night of gaming fun. Ultimately one likely to hang just outside our top-five games played of 2025, although that isn’t so bad as the number of solid games climbs.
Check it out at horribleguild.com
