by Ann Journey

In spring 2019, the Missouri River flooded dramatically as heavy northern winter snows melted and swelled the river well beyond its banks. Farmlands and portions of river towns found themselves under water, and vast stretches of highway became impassable and demolished.

I remember watching massive chunks of ice float down the raging and uncontained river from a fifth floor hotel room at Tri-Con in Sioux City. The convention center was on the other side of the hotel parking lot, and we had to keep a close eye on the ever-rising water line. The hotel was on a hill, but the parking lot and convention center were at a lower elevation. I wound up moving my car the second day to a spot further away from the hotel and closer to the convention center.

About half the parking lot was under water by the end of the con, and it was easy to imagine how this portion of the country used to look when it was an inland sea in the final millennia of the Mesozoic Era. I was at the con with my first prototype of Cretaceous Rails. Despite a general air of nervousness that pervaded the con about the river less than a hundred yards away, my scheduled demos went really well, and Cretaceous Rails garnered a lot of excited early interest from these blind playtesters.

A flooded parking lot
In its earliest inception, Cretaceous Rails was the product of the combination of two early designs. In 2016, I designed a print-and-play game eventually called Master of Kung Fu that featured an innovative worker-placement system in which the worker-placement actions were printed on individual modular tiles. The tiles were randomized into a circle between each round. In this game, players placed a single worker between two of the paired tiles, then took both of those actions in the order of their choice.

I was really excited by that mechanism, thought it was the best part of that early design, and knew I wanted to revisit it on a larger scale for a future design when I had the right theme to pair it with.

Central board of my print-and-play kung fu game
That same year, I designed another game called "Dinoland", an economic game about building a dinosaur theme park. A couple of things deterred me from developing that design further. The first was a convoluted scoring system that made the game more tedious than fun, which is never a desirable balance. The second deterrent was the sudden avalanche of similarly-themed dinosaur park games on the market. What was an original theme when I started designing the game was anything but just a couple of years later!

But dinosaurs are my favorite theme, and I vowed to return to it again with something I hoped would remain unique this time.

A sheet of cards from "Dinoland"
In any event, thanks to these early designs, a core design philosophy solidified in my mind: Give players interesting decisions to make for interesting reasons.

This philosophy epitomizes the idyllic harmony between mechanisms and theme that exists in my favorite games. While a game can be fun because of its mechanisms or because of its theme, when both are working together in a unified purpose, a truly special experience is created. That experience is what I wanted to strive for in all stages of my game design process.

I have a background in creative and technical writing and adapted the traditional writing process to my game design process. A piece of writing starts with a brainstorm where the most important elements are identified and planned. In my game design process, this entails settling on a theme, identifying the broad mechanisms I want to use to bring this theme to life in a game setting, imagining what a player turn will look like, and figuring out what the game end trigger and victory conditions are. I spend a lot of time on this initial step because it helps ensure I have an interesting enough idea to pursue further and kickstarts my planning for the next step of the process.

In the case of Cretaceous Rails, I'd had it in mind for a while that I wanted to design a route-building game since it's one of my favorite mechanisms. I run a monthly Steam/Age of Steam/Railways of the World game at Spielbound, Omaha's board game café, and I just love how the unique map selection creates a unique play experience for these games from one month to the next — so when thinking about my own route-building/train game in 2018, I knew I wanted a unique setting right away because that would help the mechanical elements fall into place and help the game stand out to players.

Naturally, dinosaurs being my favorite theme, a train game set in the Mesozoic Era was my first thought for a unique setting, and I decided to run with it.

The cover for the first prototype, pasted on the box of Railways of Nippon, which housed the prototype
But why would there be trains in the Mesozoic? I thought of all the dinosaur theme park games now on the market, which took their thematic cues from Jurassic Park and established their settings in the modern world with dinosaurs that were a product of genetic engineering. Well, as we all know from fictional canon, that never ends well!

But there was another, much older, science fiction story that has always stuck with me: Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder". With that story as a loose thematic starting place, I started to wonder what a dinosaur time-travel tourism game might look like with rail-building as a central component.


"Trains in the Mesozoic" was a grand enough theme that I immediately thought of my old "larger-scale intersectional worker-placement system" from Master of Kung Fu as a mechanism that might be a good fit for it.

Master of Kung Fu had six actions arranged in a circle, and I thought six unique actions was a good number to develop around for my new design: one action to lay rails, one action to send time tourists on time safaris, one action to harvest wood from the jungle, one action to pick up and deliver dinos, one action to draw cards, and one action to play cards. For the larger-scale system, I would have multiple copies of each action: three each of lay rails, safari, pick up dinos, and harvest jungle, and two each of draw and play cards.

Instead of the circular worker-placement tile arrangement of Master of Kung Fu, my new game would arrange the sixteen total action tiles in a grid. This would create multiple pairs of combo action possibilities each round that players could take advantage of with four total workers instead of the single worker of Master of Kung Fu. This initial math behind the central mechanism of grid-based intersectional worker placement is something that would not change in any future iteration of the game. It was exciting and worked for playtesters from the very beginning.

The details of many of the actions present in the grid, however, would evolve a great deal.

The executive stamps in the published version; in the initial prototype, I borrowed the cylinders from Dominant Species
Cretaceous Rails as a title for the game was also something that would stick throughout every iteration of the game.

Many existing dinosaur games have "Jurassic" in the title, despite some of those not actually having a focus on the Jurassic era or its specific dinosaurs. I wanted my title to stand out — there were no games in the BGG database with the word "Cretaceous" in them at the time — and be historically accurate with the content of the game. Many of the most iconic dinosaurs are Cretaceous Era ones. Plus, I had a whole bucket full of plastic dino minis from my "Dinoland" design I could use in a prototype, and most of them were Cretaceous dinos! Now, I had all my essential elements of a game design brainstorm in place.

The next essential step of the writing process is outlining. In my board game design process, that translates to writing a full draft of the rules at this early stage. I find this helps me flesh out how the game works, figure out which components I will need to gather and create to make a prototype, and allow for a smooth teach of the game to early playtesters.

Several central elements of that first ruleset have survived to the current published version of the game. Each hex of the board is seeded with a dinosaur (though they were randomly distributed in the first version), rails are built on the edges of hexes, time tourists occupy a space on a player's train and enjoy their favorite color-coded dinos in the prehistoric jungle, forest pieces start play in every space and can be harvested from the map (which also takes up space on the train), and the dinos themselves can be picked up and occupy space on the train.

Plastic toy dinos on a paper train
The first set of rules and the first prototype that went along with it had a central stock element that played a key role in the action of the game. The value of each of the four types of dinosaurs was tracked on a central stock board. Every matching dino that a time tourist could see with the safari action increased the stock track one notch for that dino. If a tourist couldn't see any of their favorite dinos with the action, then they could reduce the value of a different dino that they could see because they were disappointed they couldn't see their favorite kind of dino.

The stock values ramped up every so often, and at game's end, all players scored points based on the number of all dinos they collected times that dino's communal "stock" value.

The communal stock board from the first prototype
The first set of rules also featured a heavy set-collection element that revolved around "order" cards players could acquire and fill. Those cards all required various combinations of tourists and dinos be brought into play, and players scored some 7 Wonders-esque set-collection formula points at game's end for diverse sets of these collected resources.

The game originally featured a tech tree as well. When taking the infrastructure action, instead of playing cards, players could spend their collected resources on various tech tree steps that included enhancements to actions, additional train cars to hold resources, and extra endgame points.

The prototype player board with tech tree
The next essential step of the writing process is drafting. My board game design equivalent for this is prototyping and early playtesting. I'm the Chairwoman of the Spielmasons, a collective of local Omaha-area game designers. We meet once a week and playtest each other's designs, suggest feedback, and help each other with prototyping and publication and contest leads. I am fortunate to have this organization available for playtesting purposes because I feel like we've all grown adept at the skill of providing feedback. In early 2019, I assembled the first prototype of Cretaceous Rails and brought it to Spielmasons. (This is also when the nearly-flooded Tri-Con occurred.) The positive reception at these early events and the early feedback got me thinking about my second prototype right away.

The most important step of the writing process is revision. The board game design equivalent is a continual pattern of additional playtesting and rule and prototype changes. Besides the feedback from playtesters, I found inspiration for a critical revision in an unexpected and surprising source. As 2019 progressed, I started to explore my gender identity. I had recently left a high-demand religion I had belonged to since birth. Now, for the first time in my life, I found myself with both the desire and freedom to explore this aspect of myself without the burdens of religious shame and guilt that had previously kept it deeply hidden. I was done pretending to be someone I wasn't, and the shaking off of culturally-enforced roles and expectations found a way into my game design as well.

The truth of the matter was that I didn't like most games with a stock mechanism, so I wondered why I was trying so hard to make Cretaceous Rails be one. One of my original goals with Cretaceous Rails was to design a stock game that I actually enjoyed playing...but the more I playtested that first prototype, the more this central mechanism of the experience felt forced, a facade that was hiding the soul of what the game really wanted to be. It felt like I was trying to make the game be something it wasn't.

Working on a prototype in 2019 and in 2023
So the stock system was the first thing I decided to get rid of in my revision process. I replaced it with individual popularity tracks for each dino on each player board. While the stocks tended to make decisions obvious and the winner predictable partway through the game, the popularity tracks gave players more agency in their own success. As a result, the safari action was a lot more appealing, and it felt like all the major actions of the game now worked more harmoniously. In the first version of the game, time tourists could negatively affect a stock value by seeing dinos of a type that wasn't their favorite. This element, which wasn't often used anyway and which created a negative play experience when it was, wasn't needed anymore in any case, and the positivity of the play experience increased as a result.

I played around with the tech tree at this stage as well. Players tended to gravitate toward the same path, and reworking the paths wasn't having the desired result of creating interesting decisions for the players. I tried literally cutting up the tech tree into modular parts that could be arranged randomly at the beginning of the game, but this just resulted in the players all focusing on the same path within a single game rather than across multiple games. Ultimately, I dropped the tech tree altogether and translated the new train cars and special abilities players once earned from the tech tree into new decks of cards. Now I had three different decks of cards: special ability cards, order cards, and train cards — all of which I referred to as "infrastructure cards".

I created the first iteration of a tiered tableau. Now players had to place all of their cards in a single action on a single infrastructure level, and they earned bonus points at game's end for each card on the various levels, with the top level being the most valuable. Since I was redoing the scoring system anyway with personal popularity tracks rather than stocks, I took the opportunity to drop the set-collection scoring in favor of the new infrastructure level scoring.

I also had a Ticket to Ride-inspired bonus for the largest network at the end of the game, and I played around with this being either a continuous or contiguous scoring bonus.

The revised prototype player board with personalized popularity tracks, no tech tree, and a crude multi-tiered tableau
I felt the game was coming together in a positive direction, so I assembled a new revised prototype, brought it to BGG.CON in 2019, and got it played in the Unpub Room several times. It was a successful con in other ways for me, too. Not only was I learning something of my game, but I was learning more about myself, too. I met many lovely people from the Rainbow BGGers community and was exposed to many different facets of gender identity that I was not previously aware of. I presented femme for the first time at that con and felt comfortable in my own body like I'd never felt before.

Early in 2020, Covid fell upon the world, which presented challenges for further revising Cretaceous Rails. Thus, not much progressed in 2020 for the game, though it was a convenient opportunity to start work on a solo mode. I generally prefer solo modes that present some kind of challenge for the player to achieve rather than solo modes that try to replicate another player. It's a personal preference, but I often find replicatory solo modes cumbersome in the amount of upkeep the solo player has to perform, the autonomous decision-making flowcharts they have to reference, and the volume of time I have to spend pretending someone else is playing rather than playing myself.

But a game that came out late in 2020 really impressed me with its solo mode: Stefan Feld's Bonfire. What a brilliant and elegant solo mode that is. Each of the virtual player's cards in the small deck have short, easy-to-follow iconographic instructions on them that dictate how the virtual player takes their turn. The turns are quick and painless with minimal upkeep or maintenance to perform and no flowcharts to consult!

The virtual player doesn't play the game the same way as a human player, but they replicate the most important parts of a human player: the depletion of and accumulation of resources and the advancing of the game end trigger. They score points a little differently than a human player, but in a way that makes sense both thematically and for how they have been performing actions — and their final score creates a legitimate and engaging challenge for the solo player to try to beat. That kind of solo mode focus and the smooth experience it creates is what I wanted to try to replicate in the solo mode for Cretaceous Rails.

A very rough first solo mode attempt
In 2021, the Spielmasons resumed face-to-face playtest meetings. My friend Alex Wolf, who is also a member of the collective, was very impressed at where Cretaceous Rails was at when meetings resumed, and he extended an invitation to sign it with his publication company, Spielcraft Games.

I was, in turn, impressed with how Alex was guiding his start-up game company. Not only had he managed to Kickstart, print, and ship his own design, For Glory, in the middle of the pandemic – but it was one of the few campaigns that managed to get the game into backers' hands on time.

Alex has a real talent for game development. For Glory was the result of years of dedicated playtesting and fine-tuning, and it turned out to be a standout unique entry in the deck-building genre because of that attention to detail. I, like Alex, felt that Cretaceous Rails was already a good game, but I also felt confident that he could help elevate it to another level as a developer.

One of the first and most significant changes Alex made was scrapping the order cards and changing the focus of the tiered tableau. The order cards were proving to be overlooked and not pursued in playtesting, with players gravitating almost exclusively toward the special ability cards until late in the game.

Alex hit upon the idea of combining the order cards and the ability cards into one so that the orders were essentially the cost of each card's ability. Each card would now also include an individual endgame bonus scoring condition, and the tiered tableau itself was transformed from simply awarding level-dependent points to awarding more powerful level-dependent effects. This dramatically ramped up the engine- and tableau-building aspects of the game because now players were building a tableau of both abilities and endgame scoring, creating a more customizable experience rather than a scripted one.

More than any other element, the cards have changed the most from game inception to final vision. While the cards and tableau have always been an integral part of the game, where once they felt like a complement to what was going on, now they feel like one of the game's main standout and central features.

Final version resort cards
In 2022, Spielcraft Games successfully funded the For Glory expansion, and while production got underway, the company turned its attention to how a Cretaceous Rails campaign might look.

One of the reasons why I felt comfortable signing the game with Alex is because he shared my vision of making Cretaceous Rails look as amazing as it played. We both wanted to make a game that people would be excited to put on the table, a game that would be a joyous experience to play. We both felt like Cretaceous Rails hit a sweet spot of accessibility, with just the right amount of engaging and rewarding complexity in its decision space.

With that in mind, we were both initially hesitant to add anything else to the base game — but during development and further playtesting, the phrase "this would be cool as an expansion" was sometimes uttered. When enough of those set-aside ideas had that phrase attached, the idea of a modular expansion started to make sense, but neither of us wanted to make a haphazard expansion that wouldn't ever be used by anyone. Each module needed to be easy and intuitive to incorporate with the base game, while simultaneously adding an engaging layer of additional decision space that would appeal to gamers and add extended variability and replayability in the system.

I'd already started the solo mode, so that was the first thing to focus on. The Bonfire solo mode was still on my mind as an inspiration, so I designed the first build of the solo mode around a deck of directional grid cards to dictate where the virtual player placed their executive pawn each turn. Easy-to-follow instructions for each action dictated where the virtual player laid their rails, what they picked up and delivered, and the cards they collected for endgame scoring.

As with the Bonfire AI, the Cretaceous Rails virtual player didn't always behave like a real player, but it was intuitive to execute and the brisk actions it performed tightened the map, accumulated resources, and scored points in such a way that it felt challenging without being burdensome.

My initial solo dashboard was pretty busy, and the bot did clunky things with some of the actions. Alex's development skills cleaned up the dashboard and refined and simplified both it and the actions, including getting rid of the "build card" action entirely. My first draft of a solo mode had a system of turn-dependent priorities for which action was performed first and whether one of the actions was performed twice or not. Alex incorporated all of this information in a more elegant and straightforward way onto the solo deck cards themselves and the cherry on top was him affectionately calling the solo mode the Cybersaur. The Cybersaur ultimately felt such a natural part of the game that it was moved into the base game package instead of the modular expansion.

Final version solo mode: The Cybersaur
As a result, the chief centerpiece of the modular expansion became a fifth dinosaur, the Pteranodon. Wanting to do something completely different with these guys, I brought back the tech tree from the early inception of the game and turned it into a sort of tech web. Starting at a central square, each Pteranodon picked up and delivered to the grid unlocks an extra special ability. These abilities differ from the infrastructure abilities (which all modify actions in some way) in that they are triggered benefits that happen when the player meets certain conditions in the game. Other tech web spaces unlock permanent, useful passive abilities and new lucrative endgame scoring conditions for the player to pursue.

Recognizing that the tech web risked the same danger of a traditional tech tree, that is, encouraging a particular path of abilities to take, Alex changed the triggered effects into more powerful triggered actions and made the tech web modular to promote even more variability and replayability than the game already had! While the tech tree felt like a disconnected part of the game, the Pteranodons and their tech web feel like an integrated part. Alex called the entirety of the modular expansion Cretaceous Skies.

The final pteranodon tech web
Some ideas that were toyed with and abandoned during development included a convoluted turn-order system and a sixth dinosaur represented by plesiosaurs. The plesiosaur system used a sort of leap-frog track to advance on and awarded an immediate bonus at the end of each round to the track leader. It was okay, but didn't have the interesting and dramatic impact the Pteranodons had.

While all of this development was underway, Alex hired an artist and graphic designer at the beginning of 2022 and got started on building the files and creating a factory prototype for the game. Our artist, Graham Burkum, is a local Omaha-area artist, and I'm really happy that Cretaceous Rails turned out to be a showcase of local talent. I think Omaha has one of the strongest and most vibrant board game scenes, and the entirety of the Cretaceous Rails package reflects that.


Alex planned a late 2023 Kickstarter-launch date, and we spent the year leading up to it demoing the game, showing it off, and generating interest for it at Origins, Omaha Pride, and Nuke-Con. When I entered the long hallway outside the exhibit hall at Origins to pick up my badge at will call, I saw the large banner on a central pillar advertising Cretaceous Rails and felt a thrill of excitement!

We talked to hundreds of people non-stop over the course of these events about Cretaceous Rails, ran demos, and gave away promo cards featuring time resort company employees with their pet dinos. These cards were variable player powers that Alex came up with, were super cute, and made a lot of people smile. We collected hundreds of e-mails at these events to notify people when the Kickstarter page launched.

The banner at Origins
When the Kickstarter went live, it reached its funding goal within twenty minutes, which was a big relief to me because I really didn't know whether people would be excited enough to play my design as to actually pledge money to do so.

But that's exactly what happened, and the Kickstarter would go on to attract over 1,100 backers pledging over $110,000. I was both humbled and excited at the support. With enough funds to make the game, Cretaceous Rails had taken an important step from a dream to becoming a reality.

At the same time, so too was my transition. In October 2023, on the final day of the Kickstarter campaign, I attended the court hearing for my legal name change. Alex was one of the first people I shared my true name with because I wanted to make sure it wasn't too late to change the box and rulebook credits appropriately!


2024 was characterized by waiting. I took an interest in the games that launched at the same time as Cretaceous Rails did and enjoyed following the successful fulfillment of Defenders of the Wild and Roberta Taylor's Hello Kitty game.

I got to meet Roberta in person when we both attended Camp Meeple, the first Women's Game Design Retreat at Gamer's Ranch in the lovely Missouri countryside. Roberta mentored me on a new design I'm still working on, and the entire retreat was an amazing and inspiring experience. I brought a factory prototype of Cretaceous Rails with me and had tons of fun playing it with many of the other women there.

The attendees of Camp Meeple!
Cretaceous Rails took awhile longer to fulfill than some of those other games that launched around the same time. Following along with the updates and being privy to Alex's behind-the-scene insights was quite the educational experience in learning the surprising ways that making a game can be unpredictable. One surprise was learning that the factory originally printed the miniatures in the wrong color and that printing in more than one color like Cretaceous Rails needed drew out the process considerably.

But the biggest unpredictable surprise came in April 2025 when, just as the factory was printing the last of the components, boxing the packages up, and preparing them for their long ocean voyage on shipping containers destined for all parts of the world, Trump announced the first of many staggering rounds of roller-coaster tariffs, and I seriously wondered — after all of this time and work and effort by everyone involved — whether Cretaceous Rails was going to be able to make it over the final hurdle and cross the finish line or whether it was going to be thwarted at the last instant.

I'd been close before to publication only to see my creative endeavors remain in the closet. I had another design signed in 2018 by a major publisher for which the contract expired due to Covid, and I wondered whether Cretaeous Rails would now come up short as well, leaving me to endure another agonizing disappointment.

Those containers did make it to shore, though, and the fulfillment did happen — though at personal cost to Alex and Spielcraft Games. They have since joined Stonemaier Games' lawsuit against Trump's tariffs, and I am super proud of him for doing so and taking a principled stand against the capricious whims of authoritarianism.


The struggles and efforts have all been worth it, though. The positive reviews that Cretaceous Rails has been earning, including a Seal of Excellence from The Dice Tower, have been rewarding and validating. The initial print run went into distribution and quickly sold out.

Now Spielcraft has announced an upcoming second printing and new expansion crowdfunding on Gamefound. Those months of waiting for the factory corrections and the long ocean voyage of the containers were not spent idly. Since we already had a Cretaceous Skies expansion, I knew I wanted to bring back the plesiosaurs that were discarded before, rework them entirely, and create a Cretaceous Seas expansion. Nebraska was underwater during the Cretaceous period and part of the Western Interior Seaway, so I feel like I have a geographic connection to this particular dinosaur. The end result of the new expansion is an exciting new addition to the game that feels completely different than any of the existing content. The plesiosaurs surface and sink beneath the seas and connecting their network to the surfaced ones enables a player to take advantage of dramatic enhanced actions that create a series of combos players get to do on their turn.

Also present is a blueprints module that rewards players with bonuses when they cover up spots in their resort tableau for even more combo possibilities!


Every day since that court hearing in October 2023, I've woken up with a smile on my face and a feeling of contentment and accomplishment at the knowledge that I'm really living my life as I had once only dreamed possible.

I got to live out another dream recently, too. When I started designing my first game over a decade ago, I fantasized about walking into a game store and seeing something with my name on it for others to enjoy, so it was a surreal experience when I walked into my FLGS, Spielbound Board Game Cafe, and saw Cretaceous Rails on its new arrivals shelf, with my true name printed on the cover.

But it's been even more fulfilling seeing so many people posting pics of themselves receiving their copies, opening their packages with excitement and relish, and expressing how much fun they are having in their initial plays. It's a wonderful feeling getting to have shared in some small way with the creation of a joyous experience. I wish many more such experiences for those who play Cretaceous Rails! Roar!

Ann Journey