Cretaceous Rails artwork
When I start designing a new game, sometimes I start with a mechanic I want to develop and sometimes I start with a theme I want to explore. Cretaceous Rails was a game that started with a theme. Those who know me know that dinosaurs are my favorite theme - I have over two dozen dinosaur games in my collection! I love them so much that sometimes I get sad they aren’t around any more. But I didn’t want to design another dinosaur park game based on Jurassic Park, though - there were already plenty of those. So instead I took my initial inspiration from a much older Science Fiction story - Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”, a story with a background setting of a time travel tourism industry that takes time tourists back to the age of dinosaurs. There’s a lot more to the story than that, but that general concept was appealing to me. Perhaps the PBS children’s cartoon “Dinosaur Train” played an inspirational role as well as, subtly at least, as it was often on in the background while my kids watched it as I made the first prototype.
But what mechanics to pair with the theme? Well, it just so happened that a few years before I started working on Cretaceous Rails, I had designed a print-and-play game called Students of Kung Fu that revolved around an innovative worker placement mechanism in which a single worker was placed between two action spaces to take both actions on a player’s turn. Furthermore, the six actions in the game were randomized each round for new combo possibilities throughout the game. I decided to expand on this idea for the central action selection mechanism of Cretaceous Rails and created six actions in various quantities in a grid of 16 actions total. Players had four workers in this iteration of the system, which I called Intersectional Worker Placement! Mix in some route-building, stocks, order fulfillment, and a tech tree, and I was off to the races!
Only the worker placement and route-building would make it into the final version of the game though. Cretaceous Rails suffered an identity crisis early in playtesting. The stock mechanism just wasn’t working! But at the same time, I started to explore my gender identity and came to the realization that I didn’t want to live as someone I really wasn’t anymore. So I also considered that my game didn’t need to be something it really wasn’t and dropped the stock element entirely, replacing it with personal valuation tracks for each player. Things started to fall into place after this and Cretaceous Rails started to find its own identity.
Cretaceous Rails. One of the most replayable tabletop experiences around.
But I couldn’t improve Cretaceous Rails alone! Game design is a process of drafting, prototyping, and revision, over and over again, and getting feedback is an indispensable part of improving a game from one iteration to the next. I was very fortunate to be able to playtest Cretaceous Rails with the Spielmasons, Omaha’s game design collective that I am the Chairwoman of. I got so much valuable and insightful feedback from my friends in the Spielmasons! And it was there that Alex Wolf of Spielcraft Games first played Cretaceous Rails. Alex shared my vision of a beautiful Euro game, signed the game, and developed the game, perfecting it to the point of publication. The addition of modular boards, volcanos, and replacing the order cards and a tiered scoring system with a multi-tiered tableau of special abilities and endgame scoring were just some of the impactful results of Alex’s development.
A demo of Cretaceous Rails being played at Spielbound
In 2023, Cretaceous Rails launched on Kickstarter. Thanks to a publicity tour of local cons, Protospiels, Origins, and targeted media influences, Cretaceous Rails attracted a strong enough following to be funded in about 20 minutes and would go on to earn over 1000 backers! Cretaceous Rails had some niche and complex components that required extra time at the factory and some issues at the factory contributed to a later manufacturing completion than initially estimated. Cretaceous Rails was additionally challenged by the sudden onslaught of Trump tariffs and Spielcraft has since joined a lawsuit challenging the legality and injustice of those. But the delays and challenges were worth it. The final shipped game is a stunning production and captures all the joy that went into designing it!
Ann Journey, Cretaceous Rails creator, poses with the game at Spielbound.
Seeing critics and influencers talking about the game and positively reviewing it has been gratifying. Earning the Dice Tower Seal of Excellence was humbling and surreal. Walking into Spielbound and seeing Cretaceous Rails on the New Arrivals shelf was living out a dream. But the best part of the fulfillment of Cretaceous Rails has been seeing it in backers’ hands and on players’ tables and seeing the smiles on people’s faces as they play. Game design is an art and seeing people enjoy art that I helped create is an amazing feeling! And I’m not done creating more art! Spielcraft recently announced a new expansion for Cretaceous Rails: Cretaceous Seas. The new expansion will launch on Gamefound together with a reprint of the base game (https://gamefound.com/en/projects/spielcraft-games/cretaceous-rails-reprint-and-cretaceous-seas-expansion). I am looking forward to sharing this new adventure with gamers all over the world!
Cretaceous Rails expansion box art: Cretaceous Seas