Railroad Ink: Blazing Red Edition

You draw roads and railways on a dry-erase board and try to link as many of its twelve exits as you can into one network. Four dice are rolled in the middle each round and everyone uses the same results, sketching the routes shown onto their own grid. After seven rounds you score for every group of connected exits, lose points for routes that dead-end, and pick up a little more for your longest road and rail line. The red box adds lava that spreads from a volcano unless you wall it in, and meteors that punch craters you can mine. Everyone plays at once, so six finish as quickly as two, and it teaches in a couple of minutes. We hand it to families and to groups waiting for a heavier game to set up, and it is one of the better solo puzzles on our shelves.