Railway Rivals is a railroad-themed board game that was originally published by Rostherne Games in 1973. A German language edition was released by Bütehorn in 1979, and a mass-market edition in the UK by Games Workshop in 1985. The game involves railway building and operations. Description Railway Rivals is a boardgame for 2–6 players, in which each is a railway owner, and is striving to build track in order to join up cities and deliver profitable loads. Gameplay The game is in two stages; in the first part players draw tracks on the card using washable finetip pens (allowing the board to be cleaned for reuse). Players have a building allowance each turn; building through difficult terrain costs more moves. Players earn money for connecting cities to their railway network, and pay other players for connecting to or building alongside their track. Once all cities are joined by railway tracks, the second part of the game starts. Players race their trains along the tracks between randomly chosen pairs of cities; just as in real life, players must pay other players to use elements of their track if they don't have a complete route of their own. The choice of routes raced is random; each city is used one or more times. Money is awarded to the trains that arrive first and second, and the player with the most money when all routes have been raced is the winner. Maps Initially, the towns on the maps were indexed by the 36 numbers 11–66, allowing a town to be randomly generated by rolling two standard dice. Some towns could have more than one index number associated with them; for example, on maps that included London, it was usual for London to have 4 or even 6 index numbers to reflect its size. As Watts' experience increased, map design got more complex. It became standard for a map to have six "special runs" to destinations at the edges of the map, or special classes of town (for example, sea ports). In redesigns of some early maps, valleys were widened, to make it easier for more than one player to have a route along them. The building cost of going into or out of a hill was also reduced, again increasing competition for previously secure groups of towns. The first digit of a town's number was considered its "sector" and in postal games GMs