RailRogue

One wooden train. Eight stations. Your typing is the coal.

RAILROGUE is a roguelike deckbuilder played out on a toy train set on a bedroom floor. Type the ticket, and the words become Steam. The train spends that Steam chugging around the loop, ringing every bell it rolls past, until the boiler runs dry and it coasts to a stop.

Where it stops is the whole game. Beat the station's target or the run ends.

Value x Mult, paid out in front of you

Every bell the train rings adds Value. Your wagons and trinkets stack Mult. When the train finally halts, the payout runs: the Mult ticks down one at a time, each tick throws its weight into the score, and the total falls into the bank. Watching a x9 unwind into a number that clears the target is the best three seconds in the game.

The train is deliberately slow, and a heavier train is slower still. That is the point. A bell you have to wait for is a bell worth ringing.

Build a machine that scores itself

• 120 trinkets across seven families, Common to Legendary. The rare ones bend rules rather than just raising numbers
  
• 25 wagons whose ORDER matters: a Caboose has to sit last, a Flatbed copies the wagon ahead of it, a Sprint Car pays for every 10 WPM you can hold
  
• 19 track pieces you place on the loop yourself. Bells, gold bells, piggy banks, boosters, tunnels, signal boxes. The track never changes. Your arrangement of it is the strategy
  
• Four Pressure keywords: Snowball grows every phase, Fizzle fades, Surge climbs during the ride, Convert trades Value for Mult and back
  
• 8 engines, 6 stakes, 5 routes, and 26 feats to chase

Five kinds of ticket

You never pick a sentence. You pick a KIND of ride, and the words arrive afterwards.

• Clean is a comfortable sentence with no strings attached
  
• Risky is longer, and pays 20% more Steam for finishing it
  
• Golden hides one golden word. Type it cleanly and it pays gold
  
• Cursed takes your backspace away, or hides the words until you reach them, for 35% more
  
• Steady prints a target speed. Land close to it for up to 30% more. This one is not a race

Not a typing test. A deckbuilder that happens to use a keyboard.

Switch on Autopilot and the Conductor types every ticket for you, at his own honest pace, with his own honest mistakes. The bells, the placement puzzle, the trinket engine and the whole build are still yours, and you can upgrade the Conductor like anything else. Typing fast is simply a bigger boiler, not the price of entry.