A printable Railroad Ink log lives or dies on the one record nobody keeps: which exits belong to which network, because the game is played over seven rounds of drawing routes, and the points for exits are not per exit but per network, on a table that jumps in fours. Two connected exits are worth four points, three are worth eight, four are worth twelve, five sixteen, six twenty, seven twenty-four, eight twenty-eight, nine thirty-two, ten thirty-six, eleven forty, and twelve forty-five, and every exit in a network must be joined by road, by rail, or by a station that links the two. Add to that one point per space of your longest highway, one point per space of your longest railway, one point per drawn central space out of the nine in the middle of the board, and minus one point per error, and a board that looks settled can flip on a single network split or a single unconnected route end. Nobody at the table argues about the dice they rolled; they argue about which exits were really in the same network, which route was really the longest, and which ends were really errors.
Networks are the first trap the sheet is built to catch, because exits score together or not at all, and two small networks are worth less than one big one holding the same exits. A network of five exits scores sixteen and a separate network of three scores eight, twenty-four between them, while all eight exits in a single network score twenty-eight, four points more for the same eight exits, and that gap is the whole game in miniature. Stations are the only thing that joins a highway to a railway, so a road that dead-ends into a rail line without a station is two networks, not one, and overpasses are the opposite trap: they let a highway cross a railway without connecting anything, so two routes that cross on the board can still be two networks. The log records each network as its own line with its own exit count, because a player who adds up total exits and looks up one table value has invented points out of a split board.
Longest routes and central spaces are the quiet traps, because both are counted per space and both are easy to inflate by one or two. Your longest highway is the longest unbroken streak of adjacent connected highway spaces, stations do not interrupt it, and a single space may be counted twice only when different routes use it, while railway spaces do not count toward it at all, and the same rule mirrored gives your longest railway. The nine central spaces in the middle of the board are worth one point each, but only the ones you actually drew on, and an error is each end of a route that connects to neither another route nor the outer edge of the board, exits included, at minus one point each. The log tracks longest highway, longest railway, drawn central spaces, and errors as four separate columns, because a player who folds them into one running total can no longer show where any single point came from.
Here is the worked final tally the sheet is built to settle. Player A has one network of seven exits, worth twenty-four, a longest highway of nine spaces, a longest railway of six spaces, seven drawn central spaces, and two errors, giving forty-four in total, from twenty-four plus nine plus six plus seven minus two. Player B has two networks, five exits worth sixteen and three exits worth eight, twenty-four between them, a longest highway of eleven spaces, a longest railway of four spaces, eight drawn central spaces, and five errors, giving forty-two in total, from twenty-four plus eleven plus four plus eight minus five, and A wins by two even though B's longest highway is longer, because B's split networks and five errors cost more than the extra highway spaces gained.
Count B's two networks as one network of eight exits and B falsely gains four points to forty-six, flipping the winner, which is exactly what happens when an overpass crossing is mistaken for a connection. Miss B's five errors entirely and B falsely gains five points to forty-seven, flipping the winner again, which is why the log marks every route end before any total is added. Count A's six railway spaces inside A's longest highway, on the theory that stations join everything, and A falsely gains six points to fifty, stretching a two-point win into a six-point rout on spaces the rules never count as highway. Every one of those lines has decided a real game, and every one of them is on the sheet.
That is why the sheet sells as a download rather than as a blank score pad. A blank pad records a final total nobody can audit; a worked network-score log records the decisions the table actually argued about, with each network's exit count, each longest route, the drawn central spaces, and the errors on the same sheet, so the winner falls out of the log instead of out of a twenty-minute recount. Print it, update one line per network as routes grow, stations land, and overpasses cross, and the next time someone says their Railroad Ink total adds up, the answer is on the paper, not in anyone's memory.
This is an unofficial fan-made log sheet, not affiliated with or endorsed by Horrible Guild. Railroad Ink is a board game designed by Hjalmar Hach and Lorenzo Silva.
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