The puzzle game Railz! is intended to reward skillful play. Although luck does play a role, we believe it has been kept to a minimum in the game. In this article, we reveal what goes on behind-the-scenes during a game of Railz! and leave you to decide how much luck is involved (or not) in getting high scores.

The game is played on a 7×7 grid, a total of 49 cells. When the game starts, 8 of the 49 cells will be occupied with normal Railway tiles. One of the seven rows will have two cells occupied, and the other rows will have one cell occupied. In this way, you will never have the starting positions clustered together too closely. In any case, with just less than 16% of the board occupied at the start of the game, the starting positions alone shouldn’t determine your end score.

Let’s look at the tiles used in the game - we have the normal Railway tiles, the special Bonus Railway tiles, and the special Broken Railway tiles, shown below respectively:

That is a total of 18 distinct tiles. At the start of the game, we take these 18 tiles, shuffle them and take the first 8 tiles and place them on the board on positions determined in the way explained above. If the tile is a special tile, we convert it into a normal tile. In other words, you will never start with a special tile on the board. It is also impossible to have more than three-of-the-same-kind on the board at the start of the game.

The starting positions are intended to provide “initial disorientation” when you start a new game and may help to vary how you play your first few moves, but we believe that there will not be any “bad” or “good” starting positions.

After the first tiles are determined, we take another group of the 18 distinct tiles and shuffle them. The “next tile” is taken from this shuffled “deck” in sequence. After 18 tiles are used, we go through another cycle. Therefore, the “next tile” is not completely random. For example, if the very first “next tile” you see at the start of the game is a normal horizontal Railway tile, it will be at least another 18 tiles before you get to see it as the “next tile” again. If a particular tile appears twice consecutively, it is because its position in one cycle was last, and in the next cycle first. Anyway, the important thing to note here is that every player has access to the same tiles in every game. Luck does not determine what you get, but rather when you get it.

So next time you play Railz! and you run into a situation where you desperately need a particular tile to complete a loop and you do not see it coming… you should know now that it’s not “just bad luck”. Take note of the cycles of tiles, and plan your moves carefully.