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Welcome to the 18XX thread, where potentially crazy grognards talk about the merit of crushing someone's soul by dumping failing companies on them after buying crap trains and stripping them of treasury money/assets.  18XX games are stock games not so cunningly disguised as railroad games. Although there are some that focus on the actual railway building aspect, most of them require you to be a complete I was hit in the head when I was young, I'm interested in trying! Good! First of all, some history. 18XX games started with the venerable 1829, which no one really plays anymore because it's grossly unbalanced and takes too long to play. Fortunately, 1829 laid the groundwork for the 18XX and now we are literally swamped with so many different titles that it's difficult to keep track of them. Generally, there are two schools of 18XX games. The 1829 school usually focuses on being a good railroad manager rather than a financier: usually the person with the best developed routes is the one that is going to win. You don't usually want to dump your companies since they can have a good potential throughout the game. Usually these kind of games use partial capitalization. The other school is the 1830 school, which instead focuses on being a financier, manipulating the stock-market and also the famous dumping of companies and bankruptcies. Usually they have full capitilization.  Full/partial capitilization?! I don't understand Without going too much into detail, they are different ways that the companies get financed. Full capitalization means that you (or other people) need to buy a pre-determined amount of shares (usually 50-60% of the shares) from the bank and then the company gets 100% worth of the shares in cash within it's treasury. It's usually very hard to give the company extra money, which means that it's easy for companies to fail if they aren't managed well. Partial capitalization means that the company itself owns the shares, so anyone buying the shares gives money directly to the company. As well as that, a company can get started (floats) as soon as the first share is sold, instead of waiting until 50-60% of the shares are sold. Any shares left in the company also allow the company to pay dividends to itself. I don't understand half the terms you mentioned above I will provide a glossary of common terms in the second post. Although it might be a bit daunting to understand before playing your first game, the terms start to make sense once you actually get down and play. Okay, so where do I get started It's easier to say what to miss out than what is the easiest to play, but I'll suggest where I started: -1846. This game is based around the great lakes/Chicago area and centers around building a successful company rather than market shenanigans, which can be difficult for a newbie. I would also suggest the smaller games like 18FL, 18GA and others like that which are relatively good to play. Even though it might be the easiest to buy and find, something like 1830 might put a new group off since you need to know how the game works if you are going to even finish the game without going bankrupt.  Where can I find more information about 18XX games? BGG is usually good for seeing pictures of the various games if necessary, but here's a few websites anyway: http://www.18xx.net/: Has some good info but is sadly outdated. http://www.deepthoughtgames.com/: Mostly interesting if you are intending to buy an 18XX, expensive but worth it. http://www.mayfairgames.com/: Recently had a reprint of 1830, you can find a few 18XX games on their site. http://rails.sourceforge.net/: Java implementation of many 18XX game, essential for PBP/PBEM games. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3495910: PBEM game on the PBP forums in case you want to see a game being played out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rulElJITIVY: Realistic rendition of what it's like to play 18XX games. Let me know any other links and I'll add them! I went to spend my time discussing the merits of keeping the B&O private company over opening it immediately at high cap Come join us in the #boardgoons where you can meet rail grognards discussing such things. What is this thread for? Discussion of everything 18XX mostly, but I'll try to write up more thorough AARs of my own games as well as reviews of various different 18XX games I tried. Please feel free to post AARs/pics of your own games!
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Aug 18, 2012 00:15
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(reserved for other stuff)
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Aug 18, 2012 00:16
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I haven't had a chance to play 1835 so I can't give you specific advice, but yeah, it sounds like a situation in which you want to train rush like mad, although different games handle the rush in different ways. What's the distribution of trains in 1835 like?
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Aug 18, 2012 01:38
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Olayed 1848 today again and I think I learnt something about it. It was a three player game and I had enough money to float a company but after the three good ones went, I decided to try something different and decided to become the silent partner in the CAR (a company that acts exactly like the B&O but is substantially better in terms of positioning/routes, both in the early and late game). I think this proved to be a mistake because although the company I started at 100 cap was alright, it never caught up. This game reinforced the fact that there are only 3 good companies (potentially 4) with all the other ones being mediocre at best. These are the Victorian, the South Australian and the Central Australia: they all control the west and since this is the only area with 2 K cities within a single region boundary, most of the action goes out there. The Western is good but can get tokened out too easily in comparison to the others and it's home token is in an awful place. I ended up last with the person that got both the COM and the VR winning the game by a wide margin. We might play it again next tuesday but I hope we do something else since I don't relish playing this 3 times in a row.
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Aug 18, 2012 21:15
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I'll plug the thread in the main one, was intending to do it but kind of forgot. Here's the situation in the end. I was the only one to lose a company since the guy in the lead bought a D and I wasn't expecting it. The three companies I was talking about earlier are the COM (Grey), VR (Yellow), CAR (Black) and SAR (Purple):
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Aug 18, 2012 22:10
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I think I said it in the board game thread but these games are so niche that only the classic ones (1830) will ever get published by semi-big publishers. As well as that, there are too many of them and they all require slightly different components and for the amount of work that they would require and the amount of demand there is (really really low), it's uneconomical for any big companies to make them. So what ends up happening is that they become print-to-order, with the 'publishers' pretty much making them by hand, for relatively high prices in order to make it worth their while, although it's pretty much a 'love-of-the-hobby' sort of thing. So you end up with deep thought games costing upwards of $50 (potentially more) and since it's literally one guy and there's a backlog, it take 7-11 months to order a game.
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Aug 18, 2012 23:51
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It's mentioned in the list of links, I'll include it in the glossary section when I can be arsed to do it. With three players you should have been able to float two companies each since the starting capital is pretty high so I'm surprised that only two started, that's pretty much what you would expect from a 5 player game. I prefer games with higher number of players, though.
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Aug 19, 2012 01:59
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There are print and play 18XX games out there, don't know if they do it though. You can also buy the stuff unlaminated/unmounted/uncut, although to me it seems like a pain in the arse to do it all by yourself.
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Aug 19, 2012 19:07
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Has anyone tried 18VA? I'm thinking of adding it to my order along with 18MEX and 18FL, so I was wondering if it was any good. I like the aspect of having coal and passenger trains to make things differently, and our group needs a small game for the weekday meetups anyway.
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Aug 19, 2012 23:12
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Played 1848 for the third time in a row and lost again. Since we are all more experienced with it, the game has become kind of formulaic and boring. It was fun when we didn't know the set strategies but now that we do I can't see us putting it out on the table again soon.
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Aug 21, 2012 23:07
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i'll fill out numbers if necessary but I'd be better to have all newbies.
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Aug 24, 2012 21:03
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I haven't played 1870 myself and although I like the sound of the price protection system, my group did bring up something that can be used to abuse the system. Let's say you own the shares of a company that the guy to your right owns. If you sell the shares one by one and he keeps share-protecting them, you can get consecutive buying rounds with the other people not being able to do anything. I think it would be much more interesting if, when you share-protected, you merely skipped your next turn (and maybe still be able to sell but not buy shares) rather than changing the turn order so dramatically. I didn't know 1856 had partial capitilisation. I haven't tried 56, but both Neb and 46 have partial capitalisation (the system you described) and they are pretty good games, although you'll have to wait a long time to get them since deepthoughtgames takes ages to process orders.
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Aug 24, 2012 22:06
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I'm going to give 18C2C a try at the end of september, which should be fun. No idea on the catch up, but considering all 18XX games, I doubt it.
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Aug 25, 2012 00:09
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Played a home-made prototype made by one of the people in the 18XX group I play: the scale of it was the smallest I ever played, centered around the Bradford region in England (the entire game could be covered by a single hex in 1825). Some of the interesting features were 'tiers' for companies: only two companies could open per tier, with the lower tiers having to float for less and having less tokens, offboards that you can only use when you buy in (you use cubes to represent this), being able to place 1-3 tiles (or even upgrade one tile multiple times) for increased cost per tile, loans, parent companies that can help you buy trains and several tiles having different upgrade paths. It was actually a lot of fun and a lot more playable than the above makes it sound.
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Aug 26, 2012 21:43
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Had an interesting game of 18MEX yesterday, 3 player this time which we hadn't tried before. It was two experienced players and one newbie, and the new guy actually managed to win, mostly because me and the other guy were mostly at each others throats since we have a long history of screwing each other over. I like 18MEX a lot, I think I would rate it as one of my favourite 18XX at the moment. In a lot of ways, it's like 1830 but more gentle, since the mail runs help you to get more money in the company as well as the fact that even the more expensive trains are relatively cheap. This does lead to people trying to skip the 5 and 6 trains outright if they can, which is what happened in our game, since they aren't nearly as good as the 4D trains that you can get later on. Overall the game doesn't have too many additional rules, only the NdeM and its merger really stand out, so I think it's a pretty good intermediate game to ease new people into more competitive games. Although I still enjoyed it, three player did have some issues: first of all, since all the companies start with high cap and since the train rush in the game is so gentle, the game isn't as competitive in 3 players as it is with 4 or 5. There was never really any pressure to get trains and the companies never really ran out of cash (added to that there were a couple of shares within the pool after our attempts to manipulate turn order, which no one scooped up because there weren't enough players to scoop them up). Also, the privates, especially the NdeM, need to be bided up much higher than their actual price. Anyway, as always, here are the pics of the end board positions. I started the SoPac first, followed by the FCP: this was possible for me since I had started the B minor, which meant that most of the tracklaying on the west coast was already in place for the FCP to come in:  
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Aug 29, 2012 11:27
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I've always found that being the silent partner comes with incredible risks, especially in a full capitalisation game, since there is a very high possibility that a person will strip and run, leaving you with a company that is completely useless. I usually end up not buying many privates since I'm always so wary of not being able to float my own company, so I usually end up buying up the lower-end ones that don't restrict me to a specific company/strategy. I do think my play is actually suffering because of this.
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Aug 31, 2012 12:00
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I don't necessarily think it is due to groupthink, since different games can make it worthwhile for you to dump companies even if the game has only had a couple of ORs. There are games in which having a company at the start and making sure that it grabs all the good routes before anyone else can will win you the game, while in others it can be beneficial to simply dump a company. It's all about relative positions on the board and how hard/easy it is to reach the more valuable parts of the board.
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Aug 31, 2012 13:28
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1844 really looks interesting to me. One of the people in my group has it, so we might give it a go. Group split into two today, since we had too many people. I lead the newbie group, playing 18MEX again: we managed to have a game in which the owner of the NdeM didn't win, but in this case it was me. I came a solid second, though, with the win going to one of the newly joined player. He had a company in the yellow that paid out loads, which I think won him the game. One of the newest members got the closest to bankruptcy without actually going bankrupt, ending up with only the president certificates for both of his companies left. Unfortunately he didn't want to stick around till the end and I can't really blame him, since he was dead last. The game is much better with 4, in my opinion: the rush is faster but not unmanageable and there is plenty of interesting token placement to consider. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures, but 18MEX really seems like a solid 4 player game with a lot of 1830 flavour but with a lot of the annoying things about 1830 fixed.
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Sep 5, 2012 00:24
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1846 is actually the first game of 18XX I ever played and although I have some misgivings about it (the privates auction can screw you over quite substantially, and one of the privates, the MS, is overwhelmingly the best one), I do like it a lot. It really is a 1829-style game, in that you have to be a better engineer than a financier and usually having only one company, but a strong one, is a viable tactic. I even managed to make the C&O work, with tunnel-blasting and the C&WI, and I had an extremely strong early-game route, but unfortunately late game what I had wasn't great.
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Sep 9, 2012 18:09
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I agree about the C&O: the problem with it is the late game routes, since otherwise it can run a double route from the red offboard near Cinci to Cinci with 2x2-trains that was raking in $200 per OR relatively early on, but the fact that both the IC and the B&O can do the same and they should have better end game routes (unless the IC gets shut out though) means that it isn't the best company to start. Still, I wanted to show my group that it was possible to make it run, since our groupthink was pretty negative about it.
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Sep 9, 2012 20:24
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So this week's session I tried something different, 18GL. Based around the great lakes, this game is fairly standard but has a HUGE difference: until the very end, the trains you can get are not standard trains, but hex-trains! What are hex-trains? Well, instead of counting stations, you count hexes instead, scoring everything you manage to reach. It certainly makes the entire game slightly different. I was the only one to start a company in the west in our 3 player game, which proved to be a major error, since I couldn't use the work of others in order to improve my network at the start and there weren't enough towns clustered together to take advantage of the hex trains. The other difference in the game is the creation of CONRAIL: it's only created if two or more companies have no trains once certain trains are bought. If only two companies merge, each CONRAIL share is worth 10%, but if three or more are merged, then they are only worth 5% per share: I somehow became the president of the company and it still managed to make a tidy profit. We used some houserules since apparently there are a few bugs in the game, but it was still a lot of fun and I certainly want to try it again (with completely different strategies this time). These were to swap the order of the privates auction since the top one (it's an 1830-like auction) is actually really valuable as well as change the order of some of the trains as well or otherwise the E trains are worthless. Here's a pic of the end game, as per usual: 
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Sep 13, 2012 23:19
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Gonna get to play 18C2C this weekend. Will provide mega huge AAR and also pics of the end game.
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Sep 25, 2012 23:58
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It's a convention about an hour out of London: the planners already know about us so they will provide a large enough table. It's gonna be crazy. Will need to read the rules before Saturday but I should have enough time.
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Sep 26, 2012 11:52
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Here's some pictures, AAR will be forth coming after I am slightly less tired than right now. Eleven hours of game play in total: Still early on in the game (3 hours in):   End game position (11 hours in):  East Coast:  West Coast:  More to come when I've had a chance to relax :P
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Sep 29, 2012 22:07
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So, how about that 18C2C? I kind of liked it, but my god it's a huge time investment and by the end I just wanted to get it over and done with. It's a lot about endurance and I suggest that if you do get a chance to play it, you have something to read/play with on the side because it might take up to half an hour for you to get your next turn. In the end, I enjoyed it simply because it did feel like a co-operative effort to build something and it was awesome to start with literally nothing and build this huge network of railways, building up America. There was something certainly rewarding about it from my end. So, game details. We played a 7 player game, which I have to say was even slightly too much. We pretty much gathered everyone from our regular group to play it and we went to a convention outside London to do it (we reserved a table). We decided to play the D variant of the game: the main change is that instead of 6-8-10-12 trains, you replace them with 3D-4D-5D-6D, which only double cities in which you have a token (meaning that token placement is still very important). This certainly speeds up the game because you don't have to worry about finding long, intricate routes which we would have never managed to work out in time. It also makes mergers slightly easier, since you don't have to calculate as much. Other changes are how tokens are handled (if you par at 100 you get a bull token automatically), new privates, grey towns, changes to the board etc. One major game is how merger companies work, with shells causing two advances if both shells run trains, which considerably speeds up the rise of stock prices. All in all the changes are made to make the game run better, although they do have some important gameplay implications. In terms of mechanism, 18C2C isn't too difficult, although it feels like it has a grab-bag of different features from different games. It has the same auction as 1830, although the privates are closer to 1870 (although some are also like 1830). Some of the privates affect the game deeply (like Mississippi Bridge Building and Colorado Engineers), while others are pretty much painted on and do nothing to the game at all. For example, cattle company, fishing and logging really do nothing: they add 10 to runs for a single city with a particular symbol, and that 10 is pretty much nothing in a game of this size. The mergers reminded me of 1861: although it isn't strictly necessary (especially in the non-D variant game), merging companies is almost necessary due to various advantages (being able to share tokens, being able to advance further up the stock market in the D variant). One of the major advantages is that you can run a train in each merger shell, then shuffle one of the trains to a single company and force the other shell to buy a train: due to how much money you will get in hand, it's always worth doing this. Also, merging means that you have two companies that work under only one set of shares, which is necessary since the share limit decreases as the number of companies in the game decreases. Also, there is no limit to the number of shares you can have in a company, so buying out of hand is much easier if you have 90% of a company. This is helped by the fact that you can privatise, allowing you to get shares from your opponents for a cost. You can also internalise your shares back into your company, although very few people did this. Strangely enough, shares in the IPO pay into your company, which felt weird for a full capitalisation game and I got caught out by it. The effect of the above rules is that the game attempts to make the game more manageable by decreasing the number of single companies in the game. Another rule is that when certain trains get bought, Amtrak/Conrail form, vacuuming up companies with no trains ala 1861 or 18GL. This didn't have too much of an effect on our game, really. Now for the things I sort of disliked: first of all, there are things called bull tokens that allow you to place a token in a city that has slots filled already. It kind of made it easier to get into the 4 big cities (NY, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago) and since you have a limited number of these tokens it sort of works, but it means that pretty much everyone will have tokens in those cities (which is necessary to make big bucks in the D variant). The game has enough space and tile lays (you get a number of points of track building, with 2 points needed to upgrade), which means that any city in your way is usually bypassed, with the bigger worry being a tile being upgraded to something unfavourable to you. I guess there isn't much that can be done about this without making some of the companies way, way too strong, but I think this is a bigger problem in the D variant (although I don't think the normal game is playable in a day like the D variant is). Another problem is the transcontinental bonus. It gives you a right shift on the stock market when you can make a run from the east to the west: with the way track building works, this is pretty much guaranteed so it basically adds nothing to the game, since every company will get this bonus easily. One thing I liked, though, was destinations. Destinations allow you to run trains again if you get connected to your destination and have a train to run it, and it works well in making people join up cities that usually wouldn't get connected at all since they don't provide enough income. Enough about rules, how did it actually go for me? Well, I started in the middle of the US with the Texas Pacific and it proved to be a BIG mistake. I was next to a few lettered cities (P cities) and i thought they became better at green: nope they only became better at brown, whoops. Also, I miscalculated my money and I could have started two companies at low cap instead of one at high cap: this created huge problems because two companies working together get a LOT more money than a single one since they can help each other develop routes. Also, my privates were pretty crappy, especially the cattle one. I pretty much thought I had it lost right at the start and there were still 10 hours to go. I managed to catch up by the end, though, although I never had a chance to win. While people had 4 companies I struggled to open my second, at full cap price of course. I started the Katy and finally managed to pick up steam as my two companies complemented each other well. Someone started the Frisco and helped me build track as well which meant that by mid-game I was out of the gutter, although not completely. I did own 90% of my own company though when it merged, which meant that I was able to make good money in it. I also managed to normal token Chicago and New Orleans and bull token San Francisco, which meant that I wasn't in a bad position by the end of the game, although I didn't get a single company/token in the east, which meant I couldn't get the really big bucks. In the end game I managed to get the Denver and Rio Grande which I then merged with the Milwaukee Road, which both had destinations to Seattle so they worked well together. I managed to get a respectable number of trains out there, but since my second merger didn't have tokens in the good cities, it couldn't run for very much. I managed to go 5th out of 7th, which I think was alright for having had an awful start. All companies got made in the game (although the Amtrak didn't form) except for the two crappy companies in Florida that nobody wanted to start. All in all I enjoyed the game, but I think this will be certainly a once-per-year thing since the game is so exhausting to play. A good time was had by all (except the guy that came in last that spent the entire game playing on his i-pod and didn't give a poo poo about the game at all).
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Sep 30, 2012 22:39
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I think the 30 minutes was mostly due to me having the highest and lowest stock price companies on the board, which meant an excessive amount of downtime for me. Also, it is important to do all your turns in advance, although this is not always possible. I think it was a mixture of factors that made it take so long. We don't have anyone too AP prone in our group but there were stock rounds in which any single decision would have made a difference, so they tended to take a long time. I think with a lower number of players the game would go faster and would be more fun as well as everyone would have a higher stake within the game, instead of some people being clear forerunners. I've asked my group about 18West but haven't heard good things about it. We have one guy in our group who is CRAZY About 18US and although I haven't tried it yet, the scale of it really doesn't appeal to me: the map just seems too small to really reflect the whole of the US.
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Oct 4, 2012 11:53
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One last thing: Deep thought seems to be producing again, I checked my order and now it's down to 585 from 609. Hopefully the production speeds up.
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Oct 4, 2012 11:57
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There's apparently a new one coming out, which is why the queue doesn't appear to have gone down much even though the production has been ongoing. Can't remember which one though, although 1835 pops to mind.
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Oct 4, 2012 16:44
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Alright, another weekend game of 18XX, one of the bigger ones that we can't fit in during the weekdays. This time it was 1822, which is currently a prototype (not by someone in our group, mind you, can't remember who actually designed it). It's based in England and southern Scotland (Wales is just a big offboard), something refreshing since most of the current 18XX games set in England are very archaic and old fashioned (see 1829 or 1825). It brings to the table some very interesting mechanism that made the game as a whole very enjoyable. First of all, it has an innovative auction system. The game is partial cap as well. Basically, there isn't only a single privates auction, with privates being available for sale in all the Stock Round within the game. The privates are also divided into three different kinds: Minor Companies, Private Companies and Concessions. In any given stock round only 4 minor companies, 3 private companies and 3 concessions can be bid on. Instead of buying shares in a major company (which are impossible to float in the first SR, since they have to wait until a specific train is bought before they can float), you can instead bid on any of the three types of privates, although you can't have more than a specific number of bids at once. Minor companies float at half the price you bought them for and give you a 50% share within the company, with the other 50% always being part of the company. They can be folded in major companies when the major operates: you can exchange the minor company share for two major company shares, with the difference in price between the major/minor company being paid to you by the major or by you to the major (the can mean that you can go over the limit of 60% in one company, although you can never buy more than 60% otherwise). The only benefit of making a merger is that the major gets an extra token either in the home city of the minor or as a free token, which is actually more valuable than it sounds. Private companies give special powers, they generally give revenue and can be bought by companies, but this is always done for 0 money, so you can't strip companies using them. Concessions, of which there is one for every major railway, are the only way to start those railways at the start (once you reach phase 5 you can float majors in the normal way, although you have to get at least 50% to float them). They give 100 discount when you buy the presidency of that company and give a small revenue if the company is unfloated. The implication of the above auction system is that two games are never the same: the minors and concessions could come out at completely different times, which means that no two games are going to be similar. Some of the other rules present within the game are destinations, which for one train doubles per OR doubles the destination for that company, as well as always ensuring that the major company has a token in its destination. Also, majors have a limited number of tokens: they only get one home, one destination, one free token and three exchange tokens, the latter only being accessible when they merge a minor company (one token per minor). Trains are L (which are 1+1 and are normally only bought by the minor companies), 2s, 3s, 4s, 5/5+ (plus trains ignore dot towns), 6/6+ and 7/E. E trains only count cities where you have a token (hence the importance of tokening up the larger cities), they have to have a legal route and they double their income, ignoring dot towns: also, the route the E takes can be used by other trains in that company. All in all the game was very, very good and I think the auction system really adds to the longevity of the design, since every game will be different based on the minors that come out. The bank seems a tad small (I only got to run the E in my company once) and some of the town choices are weird (Newcastle, where I've lived, is a major center in the north of england and was important in the development of railways, but in the game it can't ever upgrade past a green 30 city). Here's the pictures:  
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Oct 13, 2012 22:42
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I generally haven't heard overwhelmingly good things about 1856 but I'd still like to give it a shot since it's been missing from the games I play. Recently I have played 18Mex, 4 player this time. Still love the game, it was a really tight game where three of us were in contention for the lead and I just screwed because the person that wasn't dumped his own company into the yellow and I had already sold their shares that SR. The final scores, though, were like 5000, 4800, 4700 (me in 4700) thanks to me managing to keep the game going for another SR, making them dump their extra shares and allowing me to dump the share price of their company. Still, an awesome game: I also played a three player game of 18Neb. I really like this little game, it adds some interesting dilemmas that aren't present in other games. You want to scoop up small towns thanks to the + trains but doing so places you in danger of being tokened out because it's so easy to upgrade those towns into cities. The minor companies also work pretty well and I like the fact that token placement is very important, especially in the west where there are a few key towns that you really need to token in order to get a good east/west route: 
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Oct 28, 2012 11:27
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Managed to get some more games this week/last weekend, just Mex, Neb and 46 so I won't bother putting up picks. Mex was close as always: we managed to break the group-think that the NdeM always won and now we have a clearer idea of which companies are strong/not strong. I was kind of pissed because one of the players decided to really screw me over by not getting a 3 which meant I couldn't get out of my initial area since I couldn't upgrade/build any more track. Still, it was very close at the end and everyone had fun. Neb was very fun again, I like this one more and more although I seem to be bad at partial capitilisation game. 46 was alright: I started the Grand Trunk and was last by a long shot, I never seem to do well with this game.
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Nov 2, 2012 00:12
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That's what I like about auction-style privates because it means that you can balance the game based on what the strategies within your group are. It's one of the reasons why I mildly dislike 1846, since the privates are selected in turn order and there are ones which are quite obviously better than others. I've played 18MEX and 18Neb recently, no pictures because I am guessing that they are getting slightly old hat within this thread. Surprisingly, 18MEX seems to be getting better as we play it more: we managed to escape our original group-think phase and people are now having successful games with the Mexican Central, which originally we thought was awful. The NdeM which we originally thought was unbeatable has progressively become worse as all the players get more experienced with the game, mostly due to the fact that hardly any companies ever seem to fold in on it. I'm currently eager to try a new strategy in which the Tex-Mex works in conjuction with the A minor in order to quickly boost it's revenue and use the extra money to create an east-southern route into Mexico City, which would mean that it wouldn't need to rush for the town north of Mexico City. 'Neb, as fun as it is, has entered the group-think stage unfortunately. There seem to be only 4 viable companies in the game, those being the Union Pacific, the Denver and Rio Grande, the Colorado and one of the Missouri/Burlington/Northern Chicago. The Burlington especially needs to be careful early on, since if it doesn't token Omaha quickly it's almost dead in the water. Missouri hardly ever gets started (although it can have good routes depending on if it starts early) and the northern chicago can potentially get started if good northern routes develop, but it's shut out of the west if it starts too late (a problem the D&RG does not have, making it an ideal second company). It's still a good game, but we are starting to get into the 'you must do THIS to succeed' stage with it. What are your feelings about group think? Do you find it beneficial within the game or do you prefer that 'new game' feel in which no one is quite sure of what you are meant to do?
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Nov 8, 2012 14:39
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Yeah, generally my group is the same 3-5 people. We do play new things so at least we have a bit of variety: I've been pushing 1844 that I know you didn't seem to like, but my nationality almost requires me to play it. I really want to play 1841 for the same reason, but my group really seemed to dislike the game since it's apparently overly complex. I think groupthink is pretty much inevitable if you play the same game enough times. Of course, it is possible to win with pretty much any company in a game if you play your cards right: I actually think groupthink results from an inability to devise new strategies. The usual timeline is that at first you don't know any strategies, then the most obvious ones come to the fore and due to their relative simplicity are the ones that lead to groupthink scenarios. I do feel, however, that some games suffer from this more than others. Good examples of this are games in which a few companies are obviously superior to others, to a degree in which other strategies will pale in comparison. This is especially true in game that have a few, important towns. It's one of the reasons why I like MEX, it doesn't have any town which is overwhelmingly better than others.
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Nov 8, 2012 16:48
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Why try out new games when 18XX are Objectively More Fun?  To be fair, if I have a choice between 18XX and anything else, I'll usually go 18XX, unless I really want to play some of my wargames. One of the many reasons why I didn't go to Essen this year was because the upcoming board games didn't really appeal to me that much. It's kind of weird because I was really sceptical of trying out 18XX because I had decided to hate the entire train-genre as a whole due to trying out Age of Steam and hating it, but now that I got into them I can honestly say that I can't wait to reach Tuesday nights, since that's my usual 18XX night.
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Nov 12, 2012 00:18
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Anyone interested in taking a slot in our 1830 pbem game. We are a fair way into the game and the guy who left is not actually in a bad position. Let me know if you are interested!
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Nov 12, 2012 11:00
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Played another game of Neb and managed to win this time! I started well, managing to get three 2 trains with the CSR which gave me a huge starting cash advantage, even though I got completely shut out until the 5/7 was bought since I hadn't secured my route out. When I got out though I managed to get tokens in all the right places (Denver, Omaha etc). Things that I managed to do well were: - Obviously getting those three 2 trains (I was making 2 times as much money as everyone else) - Getting tokens in Omaha and Denver and securing two east to west. - Being thrifty with privates, buying it out for the maximum (105). - Buying the right trains (5/7 are excellent and I bought a 4D easily due to partial cap). And the picture: 
Tekopo fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 00:57
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Played a game of 1860 recently, which is based around the Isle of Wight (a relatively large island in the southern coast of England). It was pretty weird, since there are loads of strange rules: you can buy to 100% and sell a company down to 0% even if no one else has enough shares to take it over, if you lack a train, you 'borrow' a train of the correct size and get a set amount of money until you can buy it back, companies have different initial cap ranges, regular track can't be upgraded past yellow (although dots can be), dots are either halts or towns. I'll post some pictures I took later on and I actually managed to get a copy myself for cheap. About the only problem with the game is that the start is very, very slow (usually only two companies float, they are always the same companies and you need to wait until other people have money (which means several ORs) before the game really picks up. Fun, but weird.
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Dec 19, 2012 12:30
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Yeah, from the looks of it it doesn't look too bad as a 2p game. It's a shame that it's so unlike anything else available since otherwise it would make a nice introductionary game.
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Dec 19, 2012 22:33
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I'd say to jump in the deep end and go for the full rules but then again I usually hate playing games that only use part of the rule. Still, it really matters on your group, but if I remember last time I played the new edition of 1830, the rules were awful and playing the beginner version won't help to know how to play the main version all that much and might actually confuse matters since some of the rules might be slightly different than in the full version eg the initial auction for privates.
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Dec 29, 2012 09:05
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 11:45 |
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That reminds me of the game of 18MEX that I had where we got someone new to try out the game (3 player). Me and the other experienced guy were so busy screwing each other over that the newbie actually managed to win. Really want to play 18MEX again (some of you might know that it's my current favourite game), there's something new I want to try in it to see if it works. This weekend I might get a chance to play a game of 1880/1861 or the good old reliable 1846. I like them all, although I've only played 1861 once since the large number of minor companies can be daunting for people. 1880 is my favourite weekend game so far, mostly due to the different ways it can develop, it truly is a well developed game. Recently I tried 1895 Namibia, since the group split into two groups of 3 and Namibia is apparently designed for 3 players (the other group played 18GL, which I'm not a huge fan of). The game is half partial cap, in that you need 60 to float but the other shares are handled like partial cap. There's only one private in the game and there are things called obligations: they are basically destinations but they allow you to prevent someone else from getting the president share of a company when it is originally being floated. Once you destinate, you receive an extra share in that company as well. Companies need to open in a set order within the game, which is kind of weird since the third company is not all that good so one player feels disadvantaged. The game uses Hex trains, which means that you actually don't want a lot of 2H trains because they are crap (although dirt cheap, only 40 a pop). Green is reached on 4H instead of 3H as well, which is frankly weird. I came last but I had fun, it's a pretty easy game to play with not many special rules. Would like to try it again now that I know more about it. No pics this time because I forgot.
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Jan 10, 2013 12:28
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