Railroad Ink City Expansion (Custom DIY Expansion)

The City Expansion is a custom Railroad Ink expansion for the base game compatible with either edition of the game. As with all Railroad Ink expansions, it features a set of 4 dice that add a unique twist to the gameplay, and change how the game can be played, how you can score points, or makes your life as a city planner a lot easier. (or worse!) With the city expansion, you can expand your road and rail infrastructure to include underground train tunnels, improve your traffic flow with the use of roundabouts, implement emergency services to ensure the safety and wellbeing of each network in your county, and construct supermassive malls to fuel your county's economy.

Included in the files is also a detailed rule booklet PDF for how this expansion is played, the booklet is styled to match with the rest of your railroad ink expansions and may be printed in glossy thick paper to fit nicely with the rest of the expansions you own!

Meet The Cast:

The Emergency Services Die changes up your gameplay by adding three types of emergency services, fire rescue, law enforcement, and medical services. Each unique station can be placed on the board, and rewards two points for any independent network connected to it. This has the potential for massive scoring, but be wary, as each network on your board only needs one of each, and you earn nothing for redundancy, so make sure you spread out your stations and keep your networks separate!

The Malls Die adds the ability to construct a supermassive mall in the center of your board and score points the larger you allow it to grow. However, be careful as seldom do you have control on the direction that this growth expands into!

The Roundabouts Die allows you to mend your past mistakes and create new ones by introducing unique roundabout center nodes. These nodes are exclusively road or rail but allow you to add more and more exits to them as you progress throughout the game. Roundabouts are great for when you realize you would have preferred to route in a different direction or you just need more 4-way connections. Whatever your goals may be, but keep in mind that placements are mandatory, so you best have a plan at all times for where to place additional roundabouts, or you may find you create more errors than you resolve!

The Tunnels Die allows you to construct underground subway networks that keep your board nice and clean for other connections, and also allow you to easily span gaps from one end of your board to the other. However, there are some restrictions on how these tunnels operate, such as strict rules on how they may or may not overlap.

Print Settings/Tips:

Ideally to have the best experience with these dice, you should print them on a resin printer or have them ordered from a service that can handle this for you (JLCPCB and PCBWay are good popular options)

Railroad Ink dice distinctively have their tiles on each face embedded into the actual dice and are then painted within these lines to create their distinct look which also reduces wear showing on the dice as the paint cannot be scuffed as easily. Ideally, you should also paint your dice in a similar way (don't feel the need to follow the explicit colour scheme I did!)

Since these are dice, the only real advice for printing them is to play around with infill settings to attain a fairly dense core to insure ‘fairness’ when rolling the dice (ie, no differing weights on each side causing significant preference towards rolling one specific tile). If you intend to heavily sand the dice down, consider printing them slightly scaled to give yourself a bit of extra material to work with. The dice are by default scaled to exactly match the original dice.

For painting, sanding and polishing, I recommend painting the dice first and getting at least a rough first coat filling all the holes, you don't need to be super careful as any leakage will be sanded off anyways. I then used a 600 grit sandpaper to sand down the defects and excess paint from each side of my dice, and then followed up with a bit of 1200 grit to attain a decent shine and reflectance. You may want to use even finer grits if you want to attain a mirror-like finish, but for my purposes this was enough. At this point I also painted a second coat on each face to thicken the paint and get the colour to really shine through, and then sanded each face with the 1200 grit a bit more to remove excess and complete the polishing process.

Instruction Booklet Printing Tips:

The Instruction booklets are intended to be printed as two double-sided sheets (as pictured). The ideal dimensions to match with other expansion booklets is around 5.3 inches x 8.3 inches. If possible, print on a thin glossy paper to replicate the look of the original booklets. Note that in the files there is a normal SVG and PDF file, and a ‘for print’ variation of both. The ‘for print’ variations include a 0.125" bleed which may be useful to ensure nothing important gets cut, and also means you can have them printed at a print shop and ensure they come out nice!

DISCLAIMER:
The images used for the cover art and such follow the railroad ink style of having the sides of the dice not be embedded as the real models are, be aware that these images do not represent the intended final look of the parts!