Reply from Rostherne Games

I came across a twenty-two year-old letter when tidying the study.  It's the response from David Watts, creator of Railway Rivals, after I phoned him to tell him of our (in retrospect) slightly insane obsession with the game, playing it every Wednesday, and creating our own maps.

Even though we very rarely play it now, it will stay in our affections as the game that the gang formed around and was named after!

Railway Rivals - 17 June 2009

A (mostly) welcome return to the game that started it all. Amazing to think we spent a good couple of years playing Railway Rivals every Wednesday night in the early nineties. This was the first play of the Games Workshop boxed version that James bought at Newbury a couple of years ago (as opposed to the home-produced roll version originally purchased by James at Duncan's recommendation from Gameskeeper in Oxford's Cowley Road in June 1993).

The GW version has been simplified in a couple of places for families with the most significant (and worrying) change being the replacement of the 2,3,3,4,4,5 average die with a standard D6. We decided we could live with most of the rule changes but not that - so the average die was retrieved from the other set.

We played the original London-Liverpool map and the final scores were Orhan 181, Adrian 173, James 171, Kieron 133 and David 131.

Like other things that one spent a lot of time on and enjoyed in the past (Risk, The Clangers), it's never quite the same on return, and difficult to understand what the original enthusiasm was all about. But it was the game that started Games Night and brought the Rivals together, so will always be held in affection (even if we don't want to play it again for another five years!).