Depart & Derail: A Cooperative/Competitive Railroad Building Game

Depart & Derail is a 2-4 player cooperative/competitive railroad building game. The players are engineers building a circular high-speed public transit line. For the sake of efficiency, this transit line operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with no breaks for railroad maintenance. Therefore, players must constantly be working together to lay down new tracks and demolish old ones. Every player should be careful to avoid derailing the train, because of course we want to avoid that at all costs. But, maybe we actually do want derailment to happen?

Unlike most rail lines, each player represents different corporate interests in this public transit contract. Unofficially, the government contract was subcontracted to four rival companies. In a corporate directive to increase profits and slowly take over rival companies, each player must work to have the most passengers stop at their own train stations. In order to do so, the players can demolish their rivals’ train tracks or sabotage their plans by placing tracks in the way.

Created for Ludum Dare 47 (Stuck in a loop).

The Tabletop Simulator workshop module for the game is available here.

As usual, the rulebook and print and play kit are available via Google Doc. The entire assets folder is also available if you want to play this via something like Roll20.