For the 31st Scavenger Hunt, I decided to create all my images within an overarching theme of “Board games” – and maybe take the opportunity to talk about said games during this post.

“Ink” would have been a slam dunk word a couple of Hunts ago – I do have a (now somewhat on the side) calligraphy hobby, and I would have gone that way and taken the opportunity to get my nibs wet, or something like that 😉 If not for the desire to go for an overarching theme, I would probably have done that, or experimented with ink-in-water shots. Instead, I do own a game called Railroad Ink, for which, at least, I have the expectation of having the only picture with that interpretation in the album.

Railroad Ink is essentially a “multiplayer solo game”, in that there is absolutely no interaction between the players during the game. It’s a “roll & write”: a set of dice is rolled every round, and players write stuff on their sheet, and repeat until the game is over (in this case for a set number of rounds.) In this instance of roll & write, the dice represent roads and rails (and lakes and volcanoes with the expansions), and the players compete in making whatever the dice throws at them build the best road & rail network.

For this picture, I played the whole game and counted my score. I had initially managed to mess up the sum and given myself 10 extra points, oops… had to retake the shot after that ;). Then I setup things to show the box, to make the relation to the theme crystal clear, and another player mat to fill in the picture and have a bit more interesting stuff than my table.

The major difficulty was to get proper angles and setup so that the image would look good (and avoid unfortunate @#! reflections); but with this initial picture, the edits were completely straightforward.

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	smc PENTAX-D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro
Focal length	50 mm
F-Number	F/11
Exposure time	1/40s
ISO	400

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Ink album.