It just came to our attention that many visitors were unable to play Railz! despite having Flash Player 9 plugin installed. Many apologies! The Flash Player detection script was looking out for the version 9,0,45,0. After going through Adobe’s release notes for the sub-revisions, we have decided that it is not necessary to target that version. We have changed the script to just check for Flash Player 9,0,0,0, but it will be nice if you have at least 9,0,28,0 (which fixed several bugs in the Flash Player).

If you installed Flash Player 9 a long time ago, it is advisable to upgrade to the latest version. Thanks!

Here is a little tip. If you want to jump right into the game and don’t care about nicknames… instead of typing randomly on the keyboard or anything meaningless for your nickname (which you yourself cannot remember later on) , you can just click on the Play! button directly without entering anything in the input field and you will be assigned the nickname ‘guest’.

Still, we encourage you to use nicknames you can remember and identify with. Really, it does add to the fun. Try it!

Railz! is now in BETA version 2.

[New Feature]
We have introduced a new type of special tile in the game to make it more challenging and interesting. The “Broken Railway Tile” shows, well, a broken railway track (it has some wooden planks but unfortunately is missing the track bars).

Ok, so what does it do? You can move these type of tiles around normally, but you can never remove them from the board. The reason is very simple - since they are broken, you cannot complete a railway loop with these tiles. If you have these tiles within your “loop”, you will not score - you need to swap them out with the good railway tiles.

As play progresses, because of these pesky broken tracks, you will find your available empty space on the board reducing. Eventually, you will run out of space to move. In the previous version, we have found that the game could go on forever if you have the patience… definitely not what we had in mind! With the introduction of these new tiles, there is now an inherent ending to the game.

[High Scores]
Since the new tiles will affect game play significantly, we are having a new leaderboard for BETA 2. This time round, we will no longer record your game if your score is zero.

We still have the statistics for BETA 1 and may publish them again some time in the future. For now if anyone is interested, here were the top scholars (erm, scorers) for BETA 1:

1st heylor $24,472
2nd chris $21,372
3rd serendipit $21,194
Congrats guys, and many thanks for your patience in completing those games…

[Nickname]
Your nickname can now be 11 characters in length (10 max previously).

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So that is that.

Have fun!

Typically, it is common for games to award the same rank for ties in scores. So if the leaderboard has scores of 100, 50, 50 and 30, the score of 100 will be ranked 1st, the 50s both 2nd and the 30 4th. In Railz!, we are giving ties different ranks. If you achieve a particular score earlier, you claim a higher rank than the next person who score the same. This is fair as it rewards the person who achieved the same score earlier.

We are pleased to introduce our first casual puzzle game - Railz! Unlike most of the railway themed games out there, this is not a “connect-the-pipe” clone. In this game, you are tasked to complete loops of railway tracks, NOT to build the longest track.

When designing the game, one of the key goals is to make it “simple to pick up and play” - no complex rules, just think, point, click and click.

In Railz!, you are limited in what you can do in the game, and perhaps that in itself makes the game simple and yet challenging. In this game, you cannot rotate tiles, or place new ones directly on the board. All you can do in the game is to move tiles around on the board - click on an existing tile, point at an empty space on the board, click. That moves the selected tile to the new location. If that completes a loop of railway track, the tiles forming the loop are removed from the board and you score! After your selected tile has been moved, another tile will take its place at the old location. Once again, if this completes a loop of railway track, you score!

The score you get increases exponentially with the size of the loop, so you should try to build larger loops. You do this repeatedly until you can no longer make a move or have run out of new tiles to place on the board (you start with a deck of 60 new tiles, and one tile is placed automatically each time you move a tile on the board).

Simple enough? We think so. But the challenge comes from the fact that you only have a limited number of moves before it’s game over. There are also special tiles that improve your scores but cannot be moved once placed on the board. Remember that you cannot place a new tile directly on the board, it is placed at the old location of the tile you moved, so be careful of which tile you move if the next tile is a special non-movable tile.

Give the game a try and help us see how high the scores can get. Remember this is just a beta release - there may be bugs, or we may tweak and balance the gameplay, or (just maybe…) erase the high scores…

The game is developed with Adobe Flash 9 so you can play the game from any web browser with the Flash Player plugin installed (version 9+ required).

Have fun!