The Railroader

In the Polish RPG community of the late 1990s, Ignacy Trzewiczek was notorious. He was a railroader — a game master who believed in absolute narrative control. When he founded Portal Publishing in 1999, he carried that instinct into board game design, and it became his greatest strength.

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island, published in 2012, crystallized his philosophy. It is a cooperative survival game built on Euro-style resource management — worker placement, action efficiency, risk optimization — but every mechanical system serves a narrative function. When you rush a build, the carpenter hurts his thumb. When you explore carelessly, the adventure card shuffles into the event deck and returns later as a monsoon, a snake bite, or a structural collapse. The game masters itself. The fiction and the mechanics are the same thing.

The Mutation Engine

Three distinct systems mark his innovation:

The consequence memory system (Robinson Crusoe): Adventure cards shuffle into the event deck to return later as delayed consequences. The three-way card interaction (51st State): Build/Deal/Raze trichotomy proved durable across six editions over thirteen years. The Antares investigation system (Detective): Players access an online database as a first-class game component — FBI files, fingerprint records, DNA matching tools. No prior game combined persistent online database with real-internet research as core mechanics.

The Hidden Pattern

The railroader never stopped railroading. He just automated it. Every Trzewiczek game contains the same structural conviction: that player agency is most meaningful when it operates within a system designed to produce narrative consequences. In Robinson Crusoe, you choose how much risk to accept, but the consequence engine ensures your choices echo forward. In Detective, you choose which leads to pursue, but the time-pressure system ensures you can never follow them all.

Trzewiczek’s entire career is an attempt to replace the game master with mechanical systems that generate narrative pressure without a human narrator. The adventure deck in Robinson Crusoe is a GM. The Antares database in Detective is a GM. Trzewiczek built machines that tell stories.

What Remains

Robinson Crusoe. Fourteen years in the BGG Top 100. A scenario system that proved cooperative games could generate narrative continuity. The delayed-consequence system that turned player risk into story.

The Detective Investigation System. A Kennerspiel nominee. Licensed to DC and Legendary. A franchise platform that attracted external designers.

The 51st State engine. Six editions over thirteen years. A multi-use card system durable enough to absorb redesigns without breaking.

And the voice. Three books on game design. Four hundred podcast episodes. A blog that published failures alongside successes. In an industry where most designers protect their process, Trzewiczek opened his — teaching the next generation by showing them everything, including the mistakes.

Total: 28 points. Year: 2012.