Yeah, getting in reps and frequent play helps a lot.

I agree handouts help players feel more comfortable, but I find without handouts, sink-or-swim, they internalise the rules more quickly and move faster from solo-optimisation to competing. But yeah, also rougher on the players.

The hardest thing I find in teaching the #18xx is how all the little rules and trains and track and routes and market movements etc don't matter so much, and really, it is all about managing & exploiting liquidity.

Alpha order:

1828 (mine)
1830
1839 (mine)
1841
1847
1850
1871
Fresh Fish (Plenary/Kyle's rules)
Lokomotive Werks
Quo Vadis?

Several things like Bridges of Shangri La, Die Dolmengotter, Kaivai, Pampas Railroads, Stephenson's Rocket etc are close calls.

Nice train display: cute, but also really effective. I splay each rank vertically -- using the rust colour stripes so counts are obvious -- and then make a line of those down an edge of the map.

Vaguely, arm-wavey, yes: 70 years to a little over a century is common. eg from somewhere in the earlyish steam age (say, shortly after fish plates) up into the diesel age.

Operating round sets generally represent about a decade, with many games lasting ~7 sets, ie 70 years. Technologies changing, advancing and making prior technologies entirely obsolete within decade timeframes is pretty common/expectable and on-theme.

While each game generally has its own map, that's usually a less significant difference. The important differences, important in terms of defining strategy, tend to be in how money, prices & shares move. The map is not irrelevant, but is largely incidental.

Sure, but I'm also not considering the perceived tone of the game as significant to the game.

I'm happy to limit my game design interest to multi-agent (player) algebraic systems. Not that dance instructors are bad, but I'm not interested. Not my bag. How to tie players into intractable knots with simple discrete logic? You betcha.

So yeah, just the colours matter...in terms of what they can abrade from the players.

Sure, for some, mechanism is king and many games support that; a focus on mechanical systems and their interest. There's also a third line that ignores narrative and mechanisms (except as a constraint) and focuses on the predatory management, exploitation & abuse of other players within the system.

Sure, that may be the design basis or even the intent and presentation, but nothing requires the players to be aware of or engage those aspects, or for them to have any effect on the resulting game. You may decry that narrowness of focus and context, but they are playing the game per the rules.

I'm not playing for emotional engagement. I'm playing to understand the system and how others understand it, to manage one against the other, and thus beat them. Gameplay.

There are three ways 1860 can end, and yes, the bank breaking is one of them. In descending frequency, they are: nationalisation, topping the stock market, and bank breaking.

And at least here, or with nearby players, it is prone to blow-out wins.

#18xx

Ended up with two systems: ACL+GC and SAL+N&W with, collectively, 6/6/10/12 and the ACL+GC at a $400 stock price.

SR2 sell a GC to buy into GM&O and L&N. OR2 the GC withholds (so the London Investment would keep paying $6 difference to me). SR3 tapped the GC again -- which setup 5 ORs of the GC with a CMV well below IPO and paying out with 40% paying to treasury.

Our bids on privates were so wrong. We didn't play well. 5 hours end-to-end.

I'm not going bother fitting the change list into BSky's inane short post limit, so see the geeklist entry instead:

- boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/507...

Somewhat surprisingly, raw share count won it. The winner had just under 40 shares, with stock prices averaging just over $40 and mediocre routes. The other players had teens of shares, but with average share prices close to or over $200 and great routes. Share-count won.

Train counts (finally) seemed right. Starting capital wasn't clearly wrong. Stations were over-priced. Rotational priority isn't wrong. Par choices were meaningful. Cousins were over-powered. The market....wasn't inactive, but also wasn't properly active (changes with more players?).