1830: Railways & Robber Barons

Welcome to Replayable, where we go into depth on our favorite tabletop games that keep us coming back again and again. I'm the start player Todd, and today I'm joined by David, Greg, and Paul. For our third episode, we'll be talking about 1830, designed by Bruce Shelley and released in 1986. How are you all doing today? Hey, I'm doing great. Good. Ready to talk about it. I'm good. Thanks. Awesome. Now, 18xx is a genre unto itself. I mean, it's a niche within a niche.

1830 is the highest ranked game in this genre at number 241 on Board Game Geek as of today. Why does it stand out from the rest? Dave, what do you think? Well, it's definitely the complete package of what I'm looking for when I'm going to play an 18xx game. It's not the first 18xx game, but it has everything I'm looking for. I like the dynamic market.

I like the route building, the operations portion of it. It feels really balanced as far as all of the elements that I'm looking for. So yeah, it's definitely, well, we'll get into it a little more, but it's definitely my favorite 18xx game. Greg, what are your thoughts? Like Dave said, it's kind of the complete package. It's the tried and true standard for what an 18xx game is, I think. It's not the first 18xx game. I'm sure we'll talk about that later.

It provides you the full experience of what 18xx games are, and it's the standard by which all other 18xx are judged. Paul? Even though 1830 was one of the first 18xx games, I think the designers almost lucked into what they created because it's a game which can easily change based on what every single player does every turn. And it's amazing in that most games, the designer maps out a plan of what the players should be doing. But I feel like 1830 does not have any of that guidance.

Basically, it just puts you into this world it created and says survive. Yeah, absolutely. What I find amazing about it is the different ways the rules end up getting expressed on the board and all of the different threats, all of the different ploys, all the different traps that you can try to put into place from what seems like a relatively simple set of rules.

And maybe they're not the most simple rules out there. We're going to talk about that when we get to complexity. But there is a level of depth and potential meanness to this game that I just find delicious. Let's talk train games. This is one of those often talked about and debated topics on Board Game Geek. What does a train game need to have besides trains?

Well, that's true. Although I've played some games that would probably call a train game that is using something else that's not necessarily a train. So a lot of people when they say train games, they say, oh yeah, I played Ticket to Ride and Ticket to Ride isn't even really a train game at all. It's a rummy game, right?

Yeah, it's a set collection rummy game. You're connecting routes thematically, I suppose. Yes, it's a train game, but the theme doesn't feel like you're necessarily building out a railroad company. So when it comes to train games, I mean, obviously this is a train game. Half of this game is a train game. And I think this definitely has to be divided into two kinds of games.

The operations part is a train game. You're making connections. You're actually running trains. Then it's a stock market game, which is almost a totally separate game. And you have to do well at both. And although you could just do well at the stock market game and win, but you have to do well at both. Yeah, you mentioned that about the route building in Ticket to Ride. And I think that is a true essential for any train game. You have to have some kind of network building, route building.

But the operational part is definitely also essential, in my opinion. And stock is a great addition to this game, but I don't think it's essential for a train game, like you said. I do find it interesting that there are other ways to simulate these things. I mean, you have a lot of train games that have either like pick up and delivery or maybe they simulate the route building in completely different ways like cube rail games. Those two to me are the essentials.

Yeah, I totally agree, Greg. Touching again on Ticket to Ride, it has the route building aspect of it, but it doesn't have any of the payoff. It doesn't have any of the earnings part of the train game. I guess you could argue that the end game tickets are a type of payoff. So maybe there is a leg to stand on calling it a train game. But I think the essential things are the route building and then the earnings part that you use the route building to accomplish.

And I totally disagree, Dave. You can win $18.30 by just being horrible at the train game. You just have to understand it. Well, that's, but then you have to win the stock game. That's how I amended my answer. You could. I mean, I've played games where I didn't run a company and did OK. You know, that's possible. Yeah. So, yeah, if you're good at the stock game, you don't necessarily have to be good at the train game part.

But it's in the subtitle, isn't it? I mean, it's not $18.30 railways. It's $18.30 railways and robber barons. I mean, you can play up the robber baron aspect and still win the game. Right. But if you don't play up the robber baron aspect, I don't think you can win. You must do well at that part. No, you just you sit down and think I'm going to make a good company and your game lasts for 10 hours. Yeah, I might resemble that comment. OK, so $18.30 definitely qualifies. It is a train game.

Can we kind of sidebar a little bit just since while we're here? Go ahead. What is the Mount Rushmore of train games, assuming $18.30 is on there because we threw around some, you know, is ticket to ride a train game? We mentioned cube rails. But really, when we talk about train games and debating whether a game is or is not, which games definitely are the train games? So on Mount Rushmore, I would say you've got $18.30. That's definitely there.

OK, that represents all the $18.00 games. I've just set the stage. I would say, yeah, yeah, that's fair. And that's 18xx. For me, it's not just a high strength 18xx game. In my opinion, it is also the best. You have to put Age of Steam on there, right? That's on their second. Third, I am going to put ticket to ride because I do think it's approachable.

There are route building, so it's going to be on there. Ooh, ooh. And then fourth, pick your favorite cube rail game. I'll go with Chicago Express. What about Empire Builder? The crayon rails has to, I mean, is it a five headed Mount Rushmore? Nope, you only get four. Then get rid of ticket to ride. Empire Builder is in there. Yeah, I mean, crayon rail is a contemporary of 18xx games. They've been around just as long. They've been just as fundamental to our modern gaming.

I mean, Power Grid was originally a crayon rail game. Right. I would even bucket Rail Baron into a crayon rail game. I think you have to put crayon rails on Mount Rushmore. Oh, so our Mount Rushmore is more of a terracotta army underground because we got like 10 games in there. I think you're talking about genres, right? You have 18xx. You have the Age of Steam genre. I don't know what to call it. You have crayon rails and then you have cube rails.

Yeah. Well, so I guess the Mount Rushmore of train games is really genres rather than games themselves. But we can pick representative ones. I think we have. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So I get it. My Mount Rushmore is going to have a different head than the rest of yours. So I can be a good man out on this one. Mount Rushmore. I love it. I like that Freudian. Yeah. So let's talk about 1986 as being an interesting year for Seminole Games. First of all, let's look at the designers.

So Bruce Shelley is a name with which I wasn't very familiar with within the context of board games outside of 1830. But I did recognize the name and it turns out to be the same gentleman from video games. So he worked on Sid Meier's Civilization and also Railroad Tycoon. And he went on to create the Age of Empires series. Along with it, a co-designer credit goes to Francis Tresham, who designed the original 1829, the godfather of all 18xx games.

And he also created a little known game called Civilization. So there's there's some amazing power behind this game going into its design. And when we look at other designs that were coming out in 1986, we have Die Macher, which is the game that has ID number one in the board game database. It was the first game they entered. There's Labyrinth, which is the sliding tile game. It's reminiscent to me of the staircases in Harry Potter and Hogwarts. There's Werewolf.

We all have played many games of Werewolf. And then Fortress America, which is the very archetype and example of what some people call a merry trash, where there's just a lot of plastic and bits and you're rolling tons of dice. So is it surprising that 1986 seems to have yielded so many significant games in these different genres? What do you think? I have Die Macher on my shelves, but I haven't played it in 12 years and I've only played it once.

I do occasionally play Labyrinth and Werewolf actually somewhat frankly as one night Werewolf. And I've never played Fortress America. So looking at these games, I don't look at this like as 2004 or maybe 1997, where it's just an overwhelming, you know, like 1984 when it comes to music or something like that was a year that just sticks out.

I don't know, maybe somebody else have a different opinion, but I don't look at these games and say everything changed in 86, but maybe I'm looking at it wrong. Well, I see it as these are all grandfathers or grandmothers of progeny games that are ubiquitous today. Yeah, everybody talks about the modern age of gaming started in the 90s, but as somebody who grew up in the 70s and 80s, to me, it really did start before then.

You had maybe the 90s was kind of the coming of age of these ideas that had been gestating for a couple decades. You had war gamers coming out of the 40s and 50s designing simulations of battle and everything into the 70s. And that's when things started, I think, to blossom where they started taking these simulation ideas into things like more rail games, 1829 and D&D and other things all kind of started to come alive in the 70s and 80s.

And so it's not surprising, I think, to start seeing some of these really quintessential titles come out in the 80s where these ideas are starting to propagate and get built upon and built upon. We couldn't have had our modern age without the earlier games kind of set the stage for what happened in the 90s and 2000s. Yeah, good point. Dave, you mentioned that this was two different games, right?

We had the operations portion where you're running the trains and you're setting up your route building. But then there's the stock game. And it's worth noting that there's actually a mini game that kicks off the whole thing that's almost unrelated in the way that it works. And that is the auction of private companies. What are your thoughts about having this completely separate mini game kick the main game off?

I don't know if it's an innovation that was unique to this game at the time, but it reminds me a lot of games start with unique player powers. Cosmic Encounters has different player powers. And there's a lot of games out of the 80s that had that kind of concept of, hey, let's all start with a different setup of how we begin the game.

The big difference here is you got to buy into your starting setup. The only randomization in this game is player order and who goes first and what order the table sits in. And so to have this other element of like, OK, now we're going to determine our unique starting position based on this auction. It's just a great way to set the game off of the rails, pardon the pun.

Yeah, I couldn't have said it better, Greg. I guess the only thing I can add is that there is incredible depth in the variations that happen based on these initial starting conditions that the players define. And it forces everyone to have a position of either having a lot of cash and very little income to start the game or having a little cash and a lot of income to start the game. And that just carries the player desires and strategies in completely divergent paths as you play.

Yeah, we play a lot of auction games and this little auction that kicks off, it's almost it feels unrelated to the game you're about to play. But this little auction that kicks it off, I find it to be a very interesting auction and especially the cascading effect that goes into place that I think if I let you win this, then you can't compete with me on CNA that we're both bidding on or something like that.

Or if I don't win this auction, I'm not going to get this private company and I'm going to have to end up with the B&O, which is the booby prize. But every time we play it, I think this itself is such an interesting little game. And I think the funny thing is, is the whole point of it is to just don't let anyone win. All I'm trying to get out of this auction is I don't want anyone to get away with murder.

Let's all just kind of, I mean, I want to, of course, but you guys aren't going to let me do that. But I'm just making sure the whole point is don't let anybody get CNA for cheap. Other than that, however it falls out, that's fine. I think that's also true for the game itself. It's not about making more money than everybody else. It's about making everybody else lose more money than yourself.

Right. Yeah, the chain rush. And I agree when it comes to the auction of private companies, there are some times where it feels like my play is forced because there's the thing that maybe I want to get. But if that means my putting a bid on that gives you the opportunity to buy a Schuylkill and start that zipper going, suddenly no one else is going to have a chance to come in there and compete with you.

So I have to jump in on one of the other private companies right now because no one was going to have the opportunity to make sure you pay an appropriate amount for the Mohawk and Hudson, let's say. I think that's subject to a lot of group think we have a certain way of playing and we have values that we've kind of assigned to it. But in playing on 18xx.Games, not everybody goes with what our group think is. And that's one of the great things about it. Yeah, shout out to Toby. Oh, absolutely.

Is Toby the one that manages 18xx.Games? Yeah, Toby Mao basically created 18xx.Games and it's been such a boon for the 18xx community. He's done a great job. It's amazing. Yeah, we were in the wild for a while because this is a four to six hour game. We'll talk about whether it actually is or not. We can't break this out on a weeknight and play it.

And so we early on went to the internet looking for where can we play this online so we can actually enjoy this game together because we're of ages where we can't necessarily get together all day on a Saturday or something like that. And there were a couple of different platforms that we tried with various levels of success. But this latest one has just been fantastic, almost preferable. Maybe we talked about that now.

I think that it is great for obviously asynchronous play and it allows us to play these games that normally we wouldn't have an opportunity to. At the same time, I feel like it's too fully featured. The ability for me to clone a game and then play out everybody's spots in private is potentially a weapon in my arsenal that is too good.

And yeah, everybody has access to the same tools, but it's whether or not you're going to put in the same amount of time playing asynchronously on 18 xx dot games does become a time investment thing, which is meta outside the context of the game. But it is interesting to see how this media has affected my playing of the game. So you do that a lot. How do you think I knew that you were going to win this game outright like back before we got into the stock round?

Yeah, how do you think he knew Asher wasn't going to bankrupt? Yeah. All right. So while we're talking about shenanigans, this game has the opportunity for lots of them. So what are your thoughts about opening companies strike prices, obviously dumping companies, if it makes sense to do so. And one of our favorite things to talk about would be putting the boot to small animals. Well, it's not what we call it, but I'm trying to be sensitive to my listening audience here.

When you beat up on a stock just for the sheer purpose of dropping its price. Yeah, all amoral and all necessary to win. I think where a lot of new to 1830 groups get it wrong is trying to play it as an operating game when it's really a stock game, because Robber Bear is right in the title. The stock market allows you to create money from in your perspective out of nowhere. What you're actually doing is taking the money of all the ignorant people investing your IPO.

And your plan is to turn that into personal wealth by removing it from the company and putting it into your own pocket. So this game is really about opening a company for 60 percent of the value that it's going to raise and then trying to get more than that 60 percent out of the company back in your own pocket to rinse and repeat. Open another company and then another company until the game breaks.

Yeah, do it as quickly as possible. And while you're at it, doing everything you can to make sure others lose money. There's the devaluing other company stocks, forcing somebody to open a corporation before they're ready. You want to make sure that whoever owns that B&O private doesn't sit there and earn 30 bucks a round off of it. You got to shut that down by making them run B&O. Right. And I think Todd mentioned kicking small animals.

Basically, if you're in a position where you have liquid capital, if you have money and everybody else is fully invested and has no cash, your best move is often to buy up shares of their companies and then dump them to the market, making the market think, oh, they're crappy companies because they're being sold, dropping their price and basically destroying the value of all of your opponents. We see that in all the games that we play all the time where somebody will say, are we done?

Everybody else done with the stock round? Because I've got some money and I'm going to play around and kick you guys around a little bit. The balance to that is the priority deal. But if you're in a position where you've already lost priority deal, then have at it. Just go around poking everybody in the ribs with your elbow and devaluing everybody's stock and then finally end up on the stocks you originally wanted before you move on.

But when we first started playing, having somebody, I remember feeling devastated having somebody come in, buy a bunch of stock in the company that I'm the president of and then selling it only to watch the value of my 60 percent drop through the floor. And it was after a few games where I started to realize, oh, well, you've just put a bunch of shares from IPO into the market. So now when I run the company itself is making money. So actually now I'm OK when you come and do that.

So and that was just a moving to a different level and understanding that market. Yeah. Well, it also is important in another way in that it affects the operating order of the companies. It's an amazing add on effect of all this is while you're bouncing things around and devaluing companies, you're also changing the order in which they lay track, buy trains and throw tokens down on the board. And that can be so important in how sometimes it's good to run late.

It's good that somebody kicked your company because you now get to run after it and you get to buy a better train. Yeah, that's a big one right there is being able to buy a bigger train that gives you more time to operate and run before you are forced to buy another one. But even the interrelation between the stock price and operating order and the way it can be manipulated, for example, in the game that we're playing right now, we had a stock round where you kicked one of Paul's company.

It dropped in value while my company, the B&O got sold out. And so it raised in value. And the knock on effect of that was I was able to buy a diesel train ahead of one of Paul's companies. And so Paul, who was ideally situated to be able to break the D's, as we call it, and force other people to purchase at full price, lost that opportunity. Now, he recovered amazingly well in a way I hadn't anticipated.

You know, I thought that there was a window of opportunity there to be more aggressive because the turn order had been manipulated, not just through dropping the value, but also looking at the other side when a stock sells out, it increases in value. 100%. And that's what sets 1830 apart from a lot of the other 18xx games is that two dimensional dynamic market. And often when you're playing an 18xx, that's one of the things you have to go for in the beginning.

How is this market different from the other games that I'm familiar with? If a company sold out, does it move up? When shares are sold, does it move down one at a time or in bulk? Whatever it is, is you kind of have to know what you're getting into. And the rules on this one, super clean, I think, for it being one of the original market ones, how that market functions.

It's pretty easy to grasp early on, I think, when you're playing the game and intuitive and it just really works well for the game. You know, one of the most extreme stock shenanigans can happen outside of the stock round during the operating round. And that is because 1830 does not prevent the change of ownership of companies during operating rounds. All other 18xx games after 1830 said, oh, that's just too extreme.

We're going to put a rule in that says president shares may not be exchanged during the operating rounds. But 1830 is like, hey, if you can think of a way to exchange your president's share with somebody else during the operating round, go for it. With the exception of the currently operating company. Yes, not the currently operating company. But if you own three presidencies, you can dump a trainless corporation on another player during the operating round. It's just amazing.

Talking about dumping companies, one of the other interesting relations between the operating side of the house and the stock side of the house is that priority deal becomes really important. Because if I can secure priority deal that allows me to invest in a company, put a second share into it. I'm going to be getting the dividends from it. But if you're trying to float something, I know you're going to continue to buy.

If I can secure priority deal, I'm not at risk of having a trainless company dumped on me at the next stock round. Or at least I don't have to have priority deal. I just need to go before you. Yeah, that's so important. At the intermediate level of 18xx play, people have learned, oh, if I buy more than one share of something, I'm in danger of taking on the liability of that train if the president wants to dump it on me. But what they do is they play cautious and only buy one share of everything.

I think once you get to be more advanced, like Todd says, you foresee where that priority deal is going to be and understand which corporations you can buy multiple shares in. Even if it's just for that next set of ORs and then you're going to get out right before someone can drop it on you. Yeah, I think having a balanced portfolio, six shares in one company and one share of every other company, unless that one company of six shares in is amazing, that's probably not going to win you the game.

And I think that's something that feels almost counterintuitive. When I first started playing this game, I thought I'm just going to balance my portfolio and then I'm safe. And this isn't a game where you're going to win if you play anything safe. I think you have to overextend yourself. You have to buy into a company at some point where you're... You have to try to go bankrupt if you want to win. Yes. That is such an amazing concept.

Yeah. Hey, Greg did that brilliantly in one of our earlier games. Greg tried to go bankrupt and ended up winning just because he was able to mop up so many cheap shares and his cert count was so high. Yeah, I think he had like a 90% ownership of C&O and just rode that to victory. Yeah, C&O is a D train. Let's talk about that a little bit.

Well, I think one of the super interesting things about 1830 is that it's sandbox enough to where when we start this game, Todd mentioned the end conditions of the game. Basically, we're going to play this game until something breaks. That's how the game ends when something breaks, whether it's the bank or whether it's one of you guys, you know, whether it's one of the players. And you're trying to break something.

And it was something that Paul told me early on when I was first learning how to play these games is that play in such a way where you're either going to go bankrupt or win the game because nothing in between really matters. If you play a safe game, because I think there is a safe path to this game, right? You open your first company at 67. You buy some trains and then you sell down that stock while you go open another company at 90 or 100.

And then you use those trains to feed your early company and then your trains just go off over the weeded planes off into the sunset and you get a nice third or fourth place in the game. So I think getting risky, getting into a company that might get dumped on you or really being predatory in your stock purchases. That's what it's going to take to win the game and playing a safe path unless you're playing against rookie players.

It's not going to work against anybody who knows how the game works. What I try to impress upon the people I play with, especially when it's not you guys, is that end of game ranking is meaningless in 1830. The person who had the second most amount of money is often not the person I consider to be in second place. Often I consider the person in second place to be the person who went bankrupt because they strived to win.

I think that's something that we benefited from you, Paul, is that when we first started playing this game, you kind of took us through a lot of that rookie phase very quickly. You gave us a lot of information on like, and this was one of the key parts is, like they said, don't play a safe game. Play to change the game. If you're not winning, you need to be changing the game.

You need to be either forcing the person who is in first to take a big hit or changing the stock value of something so that you can start doing the train rush or something. You need to change the game in a very aggressive way or you're just going to toast to a middling game. And we've seen that a couple of times, like you guys were talking about, where somebody feels like maybe they've fallen out of the game.

It's not going their way. And they just start getting chaotic a little bit and creating crazy drama on the board or in the stock market and end up like we talked about before, mopping up cheap shares and rusting other people's trains and just creating enough of a mess to kind of restructure what's going on. And there have been a couple of things mentioned. Let's look at the operations side of the house.

The train rush term that Greg just used, the idea that you are pushing those trains and getting them acquired by any means necessary. And the end result being other corporations trains are going to rust and now they're going to be forced to buy replacements. So if you talk about some of the shenanigans you can pull to make that happen, the other side of the operations functions of the game that we should probably talk about is this idea of tokening,

which is an investment, but it can be an excruciatingly offensive tactic. Is this game more about train rushing than anything else? Probably train rush is the designed mechanism to help players balance the game. Like I said, you have to be able to see at any moment who's going to win the game if nothing changes. And once you are able to notice that the rest of the table should collaborate to make sure that doesn't happen.

And buying trains quickly to rust the trains that are currently running is the most straightforward way to do that. Yeah, I think this goes back to what you said about the designers lucking into a perfect design here. I don't think this was the intended effect here. I think that they designed the simulation that, of course, over ages of time, trains would fall out of use, new technologies would come out. And so that was they wanted to force progression.

But the idea that you can use this as a lever to push to really shake up the game, it feels to me like it's an emergent behavior of the game and not really necessarily what was intended. And it certainly when I first started playing it, it felt so counterintuitive. It's like, wait, there's the way this game is supposed to be played as a simulation.

And gamers got a hold of this and found a way to make it into this super aggressive tactic to really just shake up the game and change their fortunes. I'm not sure I agree with that for one reason. Stock round one does not allow shares to be sold. Understanding why that's true is important to understand the ramifications of what can happen if shares were allowed to be sold in stock round one.

A player, especially in a four player game, because you start with more money, who does not win any private companies, they could open three corporations in stock round one just with their starting cash. And you just imagine the train chaos that would happen. Two trains would never run. Possibly three trains would never run because they would just be rusting before they could even operate.

So I think the designers saw that and decided to say, OK, no stocks are allowed to be sold in the first stock round. Yeah, that's a good point that you can't sell those stocks in the first round, because otherwise it feels like an abstract rule that just got thrown in there. That's another thing you learn early on when you're playing is when you come out of the privates auction, who's making the most money on privates income?

They want to slow the game down because they're earning money just on existing. Whereas somebody who maybe is making five dollars or zero dollars from privates, they want to buy up those trains and let's move past this phase in the game. So who's playing what tempo of the game is a super interesting component. When I'm looking at the other players and I think he needs the game to go faster, he wants the game to go slower. What do I want and how can I play into which part of that?

The private company Camden and Amboy is kind of quirky because its printed value is 160, right? But it comes with a free share of the PRR Corporation. So it is worth far more than 160, but they had to make the printed value lower because of the rule that a president can purchase a private company from a player for between one dollar and double the printed value. So you can already buy it in for 320, which is a huge boon.

I mean, I think we were arguing, Todd and I, about whether Greg paid too much for the CA private at the beginning of the game we're playing right now. Oh, I paid too much. What did you pay, Greg? Was it 215 or something? 222. Yeah, he paid too much. I probably paid about $10 too much. 222. But I mean, you almost won. If a bankruptcy had happened, you would have won the game. Yeah, but it slowed me down too much. It took me too long to sell that private.

The reason I bring this up is because a lot of players want to make sure they want to collaborate or collude together to make sure a 5 Train is purchased before the owner of the CA can start a corporation. That's crazy. Because when the 5 Train is purchased, all private companies are discarded. So if a 5 Train was purchased before the CA owner started a corporation, they would not be able to make their money back.

Well, Todd, you mentioned tokens. And since you're the token master, maybe we should hear your response on that. In my opinion, those tokens should just be shaped like the middle finger and you just stick them on the board because that's what they mean most of the time. Todd, you used to be the token master. And in fact, didn't we call it you got totted or something like that? Or just any other game when you screw somebody over, like there's Todd doing a token.

But the game we're playing now, it's come back to haunt you a little bit. Yeah, I think Greg's after the title. So originally, I earned that moniker while we were playing 1846 because I was fabulously in last place most of the time. And when you're in last place, all you're really looking to do is throw wrenches in everybody else's gears. And those wrenches are tokens. So I would even withhold just to get the operating capital to be able to token your big runs. So it's followed me into this.

I thought I had a great token place in our current game when I grabbed the lower New York spot, but I ended up getting bitten when just outside of New York, there's Trenton in Philadelphia. And then there's Lancaster and Lancaster is a great gateway to all of the juicy bits of New York and its surrounding cities. So warm. And knowing Greg had an upcoming forced diesel purchase, I didn't foresee him spending some of his remaining operating capital to drop a second token in Lancaster.

I thought I was going to stay open, but Greg did a Todd and token Lancaster. And it has severely hampered my ability to run a lucrative diesel train with Baltimore and Ohio. Unfortunately, PRR is too well situated in this game to hurt PRR. That's the company I really wish I could have put a little bit of a hurt on. Yeah, tokens are a double edged sword. Like you said, in the 1846 game, you'd have to withhold often to afford.

In 1830, the first token is free. The second token is only 40. But then any additional tokens after that cost 100 each to lay. Most games that we play, at least are fast enough and the purchase of trains that there is really no time to dedicate 100 bucks for a token. You would much rather spend that money on a new train.

But Greg, just to give you, I mean, just to twist the knife a little bit more on this one, had you had you gone inside and token Philadelphia, you would have hurt PRR a lot more. By token Lancaster, you destroyed B&O. But since that's where P&R already had a token, you're letting Paul run free. Yeah, it's a tough decision. You know, I mean, it's kind of like the play it safe versus try to change the game. And it was a little bit more on the safe side.

But I knew I was going to come out of buying that D train with only one opportunity to like get back in the game. And that's to make sure that the investments I had in B&M were going to pay out. And I needed to make sure it could have a solid earning going forward. Again, probably too conservative. But that's what I was thinking. Well, it was a brilliant play. I didn't expect you to do it when you did it. I was just gritting my teeth and doing one of those.

That was a really good play, Greg, kind of thing. But it was it was awesome. Oh, yeah. I mean, this game is full of those kind of plays. What a testament to how dynamic the game is, because I don't know, I feel like eight out of 10, but it's probably more like six out of 10 games. B&M is a stinker. It gets cornered off so many times. And in this game we're playing right now, B&M is a monster. Yeah. It always has the potential because of its proximity to New York.

If it gets the right token and doesn't get blocked in other areas, it can always make some good money with a D train. That's what I'm saying. It's very dependent on the president of NYNH and also NYC. Yeah. Since we're talking about corporations, let's talk about Dave's Canada Pacific Corporation. Oh, CPR. Yeah, it needs CPR. So in CPR, I was in a position where I wasn't ready to open another company. But if I didn't open CPR, the last company on the board, Greg probably was going to.

Absolutely. So I opened CPR. I wanted to open it at 100, which gets it a thousand capital. I was only able to open it at 90 after I sold down everything else. Opened the company. I had to hold on to the shares so nobody else could come in and steal it. But my intention was to never run it. And I don't know, what do we call that? Suit casing it or brief casing it? Suit case or brief case, right? The suitcase full of money.

Right. Yes. And I was able to open it, buy some trains and then sell those trains to my other company, C&O, that I own, purchase those trains. And then it starts to get a little risky because then you worry about those pesky southern New Englanders bringing their trains up and forcing you to open the company. Because if you don't have track that runs to another city, you don't have to run and you don't have to purchase a train.

So if you see me getting away with murder up there, somebody can just reach up and connect to me and force me to put a train into that company, which would destroy me. True. So it's a tricky play with the CPR. I mean, it's kind of a known thing you need to do. And it tied up a bunch of my shares because I had to open those shares at night. I put in $900 in that stock round that I couldn't invest anywhere else.

Now, immediately, once I drained it of money, I was able to sell it down to two shares. And technically, Dave, it was $540, right? 60 percent. Oh, right. Because I didn't buy all nine of them. That's right. And then after I sell them off and then continue to not operate it, those two shares that I own, they're no longer holding up certificate slots for me because now it's dropped into where it's not counting against my cert count.

But doing that was a clever little play to infuse my other company, C&O. But really, it hurt me on share count. And it's taken me a couple of stock rounds to catch up on share count. And now I'm going to get the uncoveted second place, I think, in this game based on share count because I just I can't catch Paul's share count.

Yeah, I think between that and Todd and Paul collaborating to open NYC, I think if the three of you hadn't done that, hadn't opened those three companies, I mean, that's what I talk about. Ultimately, I felt like I lost this game because I paid too much on C&A. But it came down to that time that I didn't have priority deal. All three of you got to go before me.

And I had to watch as all my opportunity to take my game to the next level and win evaporated by you guys opening those three companies. Right. We did have to collude to stop you from winning. That's true.

But that's part of the game. In fact, I think that's when you've gone to get another level of 1830. Like David said, you start out with the balanced portfolio idea. I'm just going to open my company in one of each and then you kind of move to the next and understanding where you can get your little edges and you can get an extra share here for a set of ORs and then you're going to get out before it gets dumped on you.

I think once you start looking at temporary alliances, that's the next stage of at least our evolution. I don't know what comes next. I'm excited to find out. But I think that's yet another way that this game just blossoms in front of you and you're able to find more strategic opportunities within the rule set.

Yeah. And I use the word collude, but we're not planning out how we're going to do it. It just happens. Like after Todd started NYC at an IPO level that he couldn't afford, I sent him a private message. I'm like, who's going to buy the sixth share? And he just messaging back saying, aren't you?

We were both motivated to get the threes to rust and that was going to force it. All right. Let's start taking a look at the prompts here. The first one is weight and complexity on a scale of one to five, no decimals. The idea here is how complex or how hard is it to understand the rule set of this game? I sometimes have said it's the complexity of the decision space. What is the complexity of 1830?

It's a five. The rules overhead is a five. Like we're playing in this game now. All four of us have played a ton of 18XX, a bunch of 1830. And somebody reminded Paul that you can't put your token on the same tile. And there's so many little rules like that, that I played this a million times. Like, oh, I forgot you can't do that. That happens in every game that I play. Like, oh, wait, you can't do that. So it's a five. I don't think it's fiddly. The rules, I've got the rules in my hand here.

Thirteen pages and some of that's tables. I mean, the rules are not long, but that rules overhead. It's unlike any game you've ever played if you haven't played this sort of game. And it has a bunch of those little edge cases, enough of them. It's a five. And then obviously playing the game itself, that's a seven.

Okay, we'll get there in a second. Craig? Yeah, it's a five. I mean, there's so much going on in this game. And there is no one right way ever to play this game. But there's a lot, a lot of wrong ways to play. A lot of things you can do wrong on any decision you're going to make. And then you have the fact that there's group think that you have to be adjusting to what the table is doing constantly and how they value things. And we've already talked about it. It's like three or four games in one, you've got stocks, you've got that initial auction, you've got a route

building game, and then you have to somehow, amongst all that also keep your own cash up and operate companies. Well, maybe. Right, Paul? Yeah, I want to talk about the rules a bit because this game came out in 1986. Avalon Hill printed the rules and left a lot of ambiguity in the rules and did not specify what to do in many edge cases. So if you have more than 60% of a single company,

and the operating rounds finish and the bank didn't break and you go back in the stock round, the rules say you have to sell down to 60% or if you're over the certificate limit, you have to sell down to your certificate limit. But it doesn't say how. So are you going to sell one at a time until you're within the certificate limit? Or is the game going to pause and not allow you to recheck the certificate rules while you're selling? Nobody knows. And especially back in 1986, there was no internet.

Different groups had to make their own house rules for what to do in these different situations. So there have been all these different pockets of 18xx players playing the game by different edge case rules. And so again, I have to give a shout out to Toby Mao on 18xx games. He has put in options for many of these different edge case rules that are not explicit in the rule book that you can either turn on or turn off when you start a game online. Wow.

And so I agree with both of you. It's a five. Definitely. So I'll be the dissenting opinion here. And that's just because I have to normalize the scale. So I think this is a four. And that's because there's another 18xx game out there called 1817. Oh, yes. Which includes variable interest loans, mergers and acquisitions and short selling on the stock market. So I got I got to have room. 1830 is the chess as 1817 is the 3D chess. 3D time travel chess.

Yes. So 1817 is a five, full on five, which means 1830 has got to be a four. I think 1817 breaks the scale. But yeah, I agree with you. Well, yeah, even this one breaks the scale, honestly. I mean, five compared to most modern board games, even this is just a whole other level. Yeah, I don't want to sit down and teach this to anyone. I will. But I don't want to.

That's what 1846 is for. The next one strategy. I would say same scale one to five. I think that on strategy, this one is a five. I don't think there's any question about it. I think being able to see several turns ahead is not just suggested. It's mandatory. There's a lot of math involved with those calculations trying to determine what's the operating order going to be? What effect is that going to have on my reserves?

Did I open a company with a strike price that's going to allow me to float it? And what does that mean in the operating rounds? There are so many things to consider for me. This is a five on the strategy scale.

Yeah, if you're saying it's mandatory to look a few turns ahead, it's also impossible to look at a few turns ahead. I'll buy a stock in a stock round. And what I'm going to do next turn, I have no idea, because it depends on what you do. And it depends on what the person after you does in response to what you do.

It's so dynamic that you do certainly come into parts of the game where you can see what everybody's going to do, assuming everybody does what's optimal for them. But there's these points in the game where I don't know where this is going to go. I have an idea and I know where I want it to go. But I don't know what Greg's going to do on his turn. And he surprises me, you know, every time like, gosh, I didn't think of that one. So I totally agree. Obviously, I mean, it's like I said earlier, it's a seven.

I think it depends. I think it is perhaps more than any other game out there. The amount of strategy is dependent on the number of players in the game. If you are playing a three player game of 1830, there is very little strategy. It's almost completely solo. You don't have to worry about what other people are doing. You have so much money, you can just play in your own little sandbox that you've built for yourself.

Whereas if you go all the way to six players, that is completely obtuse in what you need to do. You have to try to understand what you think other players might do. Unless you can read your mind, it's almost impossible to see where a six player game is going to go.

When I think of what the level of strategy is in a game, to me, it's very different than whether a game has a lot of tactical opportunities. It's about the long term planning. It's about how am I planning to get from where I'm at to to where I want to be two or three turns from now. And this has a lot of that. But there's so much tactical play in this, I actually feel like and to Paul's point, I actually almost flipped that scale on its head, though, is to me, when you have that less chaos, it's more strategic, you can really plan further ahead, you can lay

out your strategy and follow it through. In this game, I'm having to rethink my plan every single stock round, every single operating round. And even in just a four or five player game, I think it can at times be a five and other times, I'm just waiting till my turn. And then I'm going to make decisions based on what the current situation is. And it doesn't feel as strategic, it just feels really tactical. And, and that doesn't mean that there's not a lot of deep thinking and planning on how I'm going to try to cover my

basis for as many outcomes as possible. But ultimately, it's a little bit of a just making the best of the current opportunity, especially in the stock market. Right. All right. Luck. How would you think luck plays a factor in this game? Same scale one to five. Well, I thought I was lucky that I was seated before Paul this last game, but hasn't panned out. I hate being seated after him, that's for sure. But yeah, that's it.

That's the only point that I made. It's the luck is a one unless you count sitting next to the newbie. If you got lucky and sat next to the new player, that's the only place. Yeah, have somebody that's always going to be giving you priority deals. Yeah, that's about it. Zero isn't an option. So I had one. There's no randomness in this game whatsoever. Except table order.

Except for table order. Sure. Theme. So I like this one. How much do we think the theme has been integrated with a game versus paste it on? I'm not sure how you theme a stock trading game, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this one.

So I go back to the subtitle of this game, Railways and Robber Barrens. It simulates both so well, there's a lot of stuff that's abstracted. But Paul mentioned about how you have to kind of set your morals aside when you're playing this. You absolutely do. You have to be cruel and selfish. And you also have to know how to run a good railway. So yeah, I think it's a five for me on theme.

Yeah, we talked about this with the other games that we've talked about. I don't know what sort of inner child issues we all have. But we love these games where you're just going to be mean to your friends. Like we all legitimately like each other. And then we say come over to my house and I'm going to do mean things to you. But it is. I said the same thing, Greg. It's a five for trains and it's a five for Robber Barrens. Theming it both ways. As a train game that operations that we talked about 100% I'm building that network.

I'm making money off of it. And then not just as a stock game, but as a Robber Barren game, that it's not just a stock market. It's a stock market where you're manipulating each other and hurting each other and affecting the game by it. So it's 100% perfectly integrated theme. And like you guys were talking about in the beginning, as these simulations were turning into games and they start as a simulation before it becomes a game. And that really comes through on a game like this.

You know, a lot of people get upset at some of the design choices or perhaps manufacturing choices in this game, like the tile shortages. There's why is there only two of this tile? Why is there only three of this tile? How come there's zero of this tile that's in all these other 18xx games? And many groups have pointed to theme or come up with theme reasons for why there are only certain tiles in this. So it is definitely a thematic game to most people. I think it is to me as well.

So I would agree that as far as railroads and Robber Barrens, it is a five. If I looked at just the production and the graphics, I would say that it's very information centric. There's not a lot of foofy graphic design that that goes into many 18xx games. And we're going to talk about versions in a little bit. And I can't even evaluate the paper money that comes with it because we prefer to play with iron clays. So I would say

that from a graphic design perspective, it's probably like a two, at least the version I have. But the theme is still a five because I definitely feel like I'm out there to swindle people and get all I can out of these public corporations and stuff as much of that money into my pockets as possible.

That's an interesting point, Todd. I don't necessarily think of chrome when I think of theme, but that does make sense. There's a version of is it of this where there's little water towers and trees that you put on the board and that. You're thinking of Railways of the World? Yeah. Or the old railroad tycoon thing game. Yeah, which is in the Age of Steam family, by the way.

Right. I haven't played it, but something like that, I can see where that chrome lends to theme, but I hadn't even thought about that because we've talked about this before when I'm playing an 18xx game, I'm looking for minimalism. I don't want any board graphics confusing the way things are laid out on the board or anything like that. I want to be able to read that market, read the board. It has to be 100% functional in any sort of kind of decorative. Anything like that is just in the way at that point.

All right. So the game supports two to seven players. What is the best player account for a game of 1830? Where did you get two to seven players? Because I was surprised to see that in your notes and I pulled my rules out. My original rules from 86. It says basically you divide the starting capital between the number of players, but it does give a chart and that chart only goes up to six. So I wonder what version of the game said seven because I don't want to play this at seven.

There's variants, right? Well, it's straight up on Board Game Geeks page for the game. Oh, okay. I believe the Mayfair release has a variant for seven players. Okay. But even if we say two to six, my answer is not contingent upon six or seven. So what is the best player account?

I think for us at the stage we're at right now, it's probably five players because it has the most multiplayer chaos that we are still capable of handling and evaluating. I think our next level, if we play enough to upgrade ourselves and how we play, would be six player. I think six player is where 1830 is at its most dynamic, complex and interesting. Greg, what do you say?

I don't think we've had the opportunity very often to play this at six player. So I don't know really what that experience is like. I've certainly enjoyed five player. I've enjoyed some of our four player games. I would not play this at three.

For me, I would say five player, but that may just be the lack of experience at playing at the higher count. It's daunting to me. It sounds like it would be very chaotic and I would feel like maybe I had less agency. But coming out on top in that situation would still be fun.

I totally agree. Five player right now is a sweet spot for me. Four player is okay, but it does start to feel a little bit, I wouldn't say easy mode, but it is a little bit easier. Five player, you get yourself into a lot more uncomfortable situations that you have to navigate out of.

And I like what Paul's saying. I would like to explore the six player game because that opens up getting in a situation where you maybe don't own any companies or maybe you own one company and you got to figure out how to fund that company without opening a second company to feed trains into it. So it opens up a lot of new puzzles that you have to solve, advanced puzzles that I don't know if I'm ready for yet, but I would love to explore the six player game more. We just, we need a sixth.

Yeah, it definitely would force more temporary alliances, collaboration on opening companies, things like that. Interesting. Yeah, I also agree. I had five down for this as well. There's just enough hustle and bustle going on to get into some brutal actions to really pull off some great ploys. At least two people are going to be left out of getting a second company.

I feel like the entirety of the experience of 1830 is well represented in the microcosm that is the five player game. If we all agree, five is the best and six could be great. We're not there yet. What's the worst? What's your least favorite player account for this game? I already said it, the less players there are, the more agency each player has that, frankly, I think the more boring the game is. So I didn't know it could go to two, but that would be a sleeper. It's not a game at two, is it?

The table that's in the 86 rules where it shows the breakdown of money distribution, because it doesn't have a player count on the box. So the only way I could decipher from the rules is from that table where it has the distribution of opening starting capital. It only goes to three. But it does say on the back of the box, there's a chart that says, appropriate for solo play, and it says low. It doesn't say none. It says low appropriate for solo play.

Again, I mean, it's the simulation aspect of this. A lot of players back in the 70s and 80s, they were often taking these games and just simulating these experiences on their own. I mean, people still do it. It's not like that's gone away. But that was an expected thing because you didn't have the networking to build a game group like we do today.

That's true. Before the current era, you had to get creative for solo play. Now a new version of 1830 would come with a machine that you play against and automatic rules and things like that. But back then, you kind of had to just set it up and have fun with it and make choo-choo noises is about all you could do.

I agree. The lowest number that you can defend. I was just going off of the board game geek page that said it went down to two. At that number, play something else. Two would be the worst for me. Although if you really wanted to play something that was like an 18xx game and you had two players and maybe look into a game like Steam over Holland or even 18 Lilliput, which is more card based, but it incorporates some of the same mechanisms. You might be able to scratch that itch partially with two players.

All right. So what's the actual playing time? Now the box says 180 to 360 minutes. So three to six hours. Do we think that's a decent amount of time? Overrepresented, underrepresented, and of course, number of players is going to have an input to that. So what are your thoughts about the actual playing time?

If you rush the trains and are constantly jockeying for position and playing for bankruptcy, you could end this game in two and a half hours if the bankruptcy happens. The problem is if everybody survives, then it usually takes another hour after the last train is purchased before the bank breaks. So I think it's pretty accurate. I know when we get together in person, it usually takes us about four hours on average.

Yeah, it's very experience dependent for new players. You probably won't even get it done in six hours. That's true. It definitely takes the rules overhead being taken care of and everybody knows at least a little bit of what they're doing. That's a good point.

That actually, I don't know if we have this coming up later, it actually comes to a little bit of a complaint I have about the game. I do think it's interesting, like I said earlier, we play until something breaks, whether it's the bank or whether it's one of the players. But I almost wish there were some more finite ending to the game because there's been so many games where the game was over an hour ago, but there's two people jockeying for first place. So the rest of us are just kind of waiting and playing out our turns and it really starts to fizzle. I love this game until Stockholm.

Yeah, that's a good point. Which edition of the game is the best? Now I have the original 1986 version published by Avalon Hill. So clearly, I'm partial to that one. I mean, we don't need no tin type coloring on our components. But does anyone care to make a case for the Mayfair version?

I mean, they had so many problems. There was a board misprint. There was, I think, a missing tile. They've corrected it in a later release. But yeah, I much prefer the clarity of the original release. I don't like all the visual distraction that Mayfair decided to put in. Especially on their track tiles. Although admittedly, they are double sided. So you could go with the clean look on the Mayfair version if you wanted to. Has there been an addition since that Mayfair edition?

I think Lookout basically took the corrective Mayfair edition and printed that again. Oh, okay. When I bought 1830, which I guess this is a little while ago now. I'm sorry, the 1986 version, which was a while ago now. I actually didn't have much trouble finding it. I think I found somebody who had one for sale 60, 70 bucks or something like that. It wasn't ridiculously. I have no idea what it's like now. I didn't have much of a problem finding it, you know, in shrink original.

Edition, as I think it was mentioned before, this was not one of Avalon Hill's top selling games. I don't know if that was just from the notes or that Todd made for us, or if somebody said it. Yeah, that was in the notes. But I found it. I mean, the shrink was, I touched it and it turned to dust. I mean, it was still there. But it was, you know, 1986 shrink. And like I said, 60, 70 bucks and it's perfect condition.

Can I vote for the Toby Mao 18xx.games version of it? Sure. I'll allow it. Yeah. Great point. Because again, the implementation there is just wonderful. They've even now built in auto calculation of routes if you want, which is a nice time saver. So even for synchronous play, you know, if you want to do it in a single run, you can do it in a single run.

And it allows us to get that experience of an 18xx game without having to make a whole night of it. I have to mention it. Yeah, I think that's solid. And it's a big time saver because how many times have you sat there and you're calculating? Well, if I had to do it in a single run, I would have to do it in a single run. So I think that's a great option.

Well, if I had to do it in a single run, I would have to do it in a single run. So I think that's solid. And it's a great option. And it allows us to get that experience of an 18xx game without having to make a whole night of it. I have to mention it. Yeah, I think that's solid. And it's a big time saver because how many times have you sat there and you're calculating?

Yeah, I'm gonna put this tile down and see how much that other route's gonna run for. and then you forgot what it was the first time. I mean, you're almost having to keep a pad of paper nearby just to scribble down what the interim calculations are. Yeah, I love playing at the table, because I don't think anything really replaces replaces that face-to-face experience.

But these games, I think, as far as being able to really get into the strategic depth of them and enjoy them at their fullest, having that time to really work through all that stuff and not worry about, oh, I want to keep moving. I want to make my decision quick. I love playing online with these games. Having that auto calculator really plays into us as a game group.

One thing that I really like about our game group is when we're playing at the table, we'll outright tell each other, like, hey, you'll make more money if you do this instead. Whereas some gamers, like, I hope he doesn't see that, or I hope he makes a mistake, because we don't want each other to make mistakes. We want to beat each other while the other one's playing their best game.

And it's one thing that I really, especially while we were learning the game, alpha-gamering each other, but being stepping in and say, you actually make a lot more money if you put your token here, or something like that. But if I'm a shareholder in your company, I want you to earn the most. Well, yes. I'm not being nice. I'm being selfish. Yeah, if you have a vested interest.

I don't think it's $18.30, but some games even mandate, if another player points out a route that's worth more, you have to use that route. Exactly. I think that's $18.46 for exactly that reason, Todd. Yeah. I think you're right. All right, let's talk expansions real quick. Believe it or not, there are actually a few of them, although I have not played with any of them. Before I go through and list them, I'll have any of you actually play with them? I haven't, but I booked them up as well.

I'll run through some highlights, just because I think they're interesting. There was one promo card that Mayfair put out called Chattanooga, which adds the city to a less congested corner of the map. I'm assuming that's the southwest corner? Yeah. And then there were a bunch of small unofficial expansions. There was Take a Ride on the Reading and the Coalfields, which added two railroads. Both of those were by Ellen R. Moon.

And then there was Wavish Cannonball one by John Borwer, which I thought was interesting. Actually, the Take a Ride on the Reading was an official expansion that was released. It was initially released in a magazine, but then Avalon Hill did a print run of it, so it's technically official. Wow. OK. But I haven't seen or played nor have much desire to play with any of those expansions.

All three of those, Chattanooga, Take a Ride, and the Coalfields, all seem to be about offering more opportunity in the southern part of the board. And that's true. The southern section of the board, especially southwest, there's not a lot of action that goes on there. So I think Chattanooga, it's just about offering some opportunity on there. I think Ellen Moon's expansions, it looks like he's trying to, first of all, it makes it a seven-player game.

And second, it allows for a lot more opportunity in the southeast. There are two different takes on it, the Coalfields and Take a Ride on the Reading. They do different things, but they both open up some different opportunities in the southeast. One of them even moves C&O starting to the southeast. Wow. There's also other 18xx games that are predicated on owning 1830. I believe Dave got one of those from Winsome.

Yeah, that's why I bought the edition that I bought, because I was getting the Winsome essence sets for a while. And they would come with 1857 or something like that, which is a variant of 1830. And you have to have the original tiles and basically everything. It's basically just a map and some rules. Interesting. Now we get to the two prompts I'm really looking forward to. So the first one, the most recognizable comparison.

What's a game that makes you think of 1830 that's going to be the most recognizable? And we're eliminating all 18xx games as options. I think for style points, you should avoid saying it's like another 18xx game. Yeah. I'll take the easy one. So for me, it was Acquire. And it's not because it's a trained game. It obviously isn't. But it does have investment in stock holding. And the value of those stocks are being determined by how well you manage activities on the game board.

So I thought it's actually fairly close to one component of 1830. I went to left field here because to me, 1830 is the game that other games are like. So I just went back in time to a memory of playing it in public. I think we were at a coffee shop or something. And somebody walked over and said, hey, is this like Monopoly? The stereotypical. Yes. And we just said, yes. Please go away. So you're going to say it's most recognizable comparison is something it's not like at all.

Well, I guess maybe in the cruelty of the game, they're both talking about both treatises on the downsides of monopolies, I guess. It does have a Pennsylvania Railroad and a B&O. So it's just like the railroads in Monopoly. Monopoly is actually a much bigger game. There's a lot more going on than the railroads. How dare you? So I think the best modern comparisons are, you're right. This is absolutely a game where there's more games that are derivative of it than that it can harken back to.

Wabish Cannonball or Chicago Express was a clear comparison and maybe one that some people have played. The stock mechanisms are a little more abstracted out. They've put an auction element in there that really kind of gets a good flavor of the adversarial nature and also the cooperative nature of the game. And also the cooperative nature of 18xx. And then the rail building is there. The other one that I think is an interesting comparison is Airlines Europe ranked 523 on BGG.

Again, it's a stock game. You're building a network. And you can vie for control of companies. Oh, actually, I do have one other honorable mention, which is Imperial. I think that's it. Yeah, I'm just going to step all over the place. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. There's a follow-up question, right, where we're going to give another game. You should have gone last. Well, but these are all games that are top 750. There's just so many games that borrow elements from some portion of it.

Dave, what was your answer? Same as one of Greg's answers. And I do appreciate, Greg, that you called it Wabish Cannonball because if you put Chicago Express into BGG right now, it takes you to the Wabish Cannonball page. They merged it. And Chicago Express doesn't exist anymore. That's the new release that's coming out this year, is Wabish Cannonball again. Yes, it's the original edition, the original Winsome version.

And then now it's going to be the new release, which is plaguing my game collection as I constantly buy games that I already own as they're being re-released. But anyways, I definitely, yeah, Wabish Cannonball because you're buying stocks, you have those tentative alliances, you're earning dividends from that. That it's, in some ways, feels like an abstraction of an 18xx.

And I picked Wabish Cannonball just as a stand-in for tons of cube rail games, Irish Gage and Ride the Rails and Railroads USA, those kinds of games. All right, how about a less recognizable comparison, one that's not as obvious? Paul, I'll let you go first this time. I'm going to go with Rolling Stock, which is basically a distillation of the stock market game of 1830. And it has another connection in that I believe it was the first game implemented on the web by Toby Mao.

And it'll soon be on 18xx games as well. Wow, OK. Todd, where are you with Rolling Stock? You like it? So Rolling Stock, to me, felt like it was even closer to spreadsheet the game than 1830. I like it. I'll play it again. It's been a while since we have. But it didn't have the same differentiation between the operating rounds and the stock rounds that I get out of 1830. So if I had to choose between those two, I'd pick 1830 every day of the week and twice on Sunday. I like it.

I want to like it more. But Greg and Paul just mopped the floor with me so hard with that game that it's hard to have fun with it. They're grokking it on another level that I can't grok yet. But maybe if it shows up on 18xx games, then I'll try it again. I'd love it. I'll play with you, and we'll collude against them. Yes. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead. All right, so Paul, that was yours. Greg, what's your less recognizable game?

And I'm going to limit you to one, so pick your fave. I'll go Locomotive Works. Solid. It simulates the train rush aspect of the game wonderfully. It's just all about making money off of trains, selling trains to these rail barons. Look, how do you get priority deal in this podcast? Because Greg's stealing my answers. That's right. You know what? I waited on the first one. Because I had so many answers, I waited. There was dead air. Yeah. And you didn't answer, so I stepped in.

It's a great answer, Greg. It distills out the train rust portion of the game. We played a ton of Locomotive Works and eventually had to stop because the end just became such a math crunch, the penultimate turn. It's calculable. Another spreadsheet to game. But up until that point, such a fun game that abstracts that rusting portion of the game.

I'm also in the Greg stepping on my toes category because for my less recognizable comparison, I had Union Pacific, which was re-implemented as Airlines Europe. It has route building and it has some stock holding. It's not anywhere near. It doesn't have a separate market the way 1830 does. But it looks and feels like a progenitor of ticket to ride. But it has the extra complication of when you place a route for a certain railroad, you're picking up a stock of that.

And then the shares are going to depend on, I believe, how many routes have been completed with that railroad. So it gives you that feel of there's an operational side and a stock consideration side. You know, maybe I'll come around on throwing ticket to ride on Rushmore after all. Because Alan Armun was clearly, I mean, he made an official expansion to the game. He made these Union Pacific and Airlines. And then ticket to ride is just a further distillation of that.

So maybe we have to include it just based on pedigree. Or our Rushmore has five heads. It's a hydra. OK. So house rules, how would you improve this game? I've got a snarky answer. But did any of you have an actual legitimate one? Yeah, with a spreadsheet. So basically, the problem with this game that they've already pointed out is after the diesel trains have been purchased, there is no more opportunity for big changes.

There is no more opportunity to really alter the position that everybody's in. So I think just take out a spreadsheet, spend 10 minutes entering everybody's current position, and calculate the final scores at that point. That's my house rule. It's funny, because your legitimate house rule is my snarky one. I said, give everybody a spreadsheet. So the ability to clone games on 18xx.games is basically doing that. It's a preprogrammed spreadsheet that's going to show you what all the payouts are.

Given any portion of the game, you can undo, rewrite, whatever you want to do. So it does improve the game, because it makes the analysis part faster. Yeah, and another thing we also used was the route calculator. Even before 18xx.games, we were using an iPad app to calculate routes and make sure that we were finding the best routes and paying them out correctly. So spreadsheet and automation, it just makes the game so much faster.

All right, so if you like fill in the blank, and it's a game mechanic or an attribute, a trait, then you're going to like 1830. What did you have for this one? I have a snarky answer. I will save that one for last. Greg, did you have an answer? I have a lot of answers. So I wanted to let other people go first. OK, Dave. Mine's a simple one.

If you like to play a game where smoke's coming out your ears and your brain is fully engaged for six straight hours, and a lot of great gamers don't enjoy that experience, but you're constantly running calculations over and over. I mean, it's great when we play 18xx, there's a lot of quiet time where we're staring at the board. But also for some reason, there's a lot of laughter in more so than other games. Like we get into some funny situations, and we say funny things at each other.

I mean, it's a very fun game for us the way we play. But for the most part, you got to like sitting down and just crunching numbers in your head for six straight hours. Dave took my snarky answer. Basically, I was going to say, if you like accounting, you'll like 18xx. But I like what Dave said, though. This is about us laughing over this accounting game, because it's not just accounting. This is a knife fight. You're elbowing people out constantly. This is a mean and vicious game.

Everything in this game is a competition. If you're track laying, tokening, train stock, the pricing of the stock, the initial private auction, everything is constantly you're vying for things and getting in each other's way and trying to upset what other people do. And it's just fun. So I would say if you like that head to head, in your face competition, it may not seem like it because of its accounting nature, but it is. It's all that. It's a really dirty, in your face game. Very nasty game.

Similarly, I said, if you like brain burning math problems with path dependency, every time you're looking at an either or, it's a math problem. And then you get everything lined up. You think you know how you're going to proceed. You make a choice. And then somebody's ags, right? Greg Tokens, Lancaster, and all of the calculations I had done in anticipation of what my follow on actions were going to be needed to be reevaluated on the next operating round. Through your strategy out the window.

You absolutely did. Well, in mine too. I bought into B&O before all this happened. That's why I thought B&O was going to be the place to be after this fallout. Yeah. But enough about that. Greg, did you have any others you wanted to add? No, I think that's it. If you like heavy competition and constant struggle for supremacy. Yeah. The corollary to this is, if you don't like fill in the blank, then you won't like this game.

And try to say something different, because obviously the same answer could apply to both of them. Did you guys have any additional insights into why someone might want to avoid 1830? Well, this is where I put the snarky accounting answer, because it has an investment. And you have to be willing to put in the work and crunch the numbers sometimes to find the optimal plays. I don't think you can really play this game casually and have fun with it.

To be honest, I thought you were going to remove this prompt, so I don't have an answer. Fair. And I think I probably will end up doing so. I wrote something that's a callback to our very first episode, which was on Tegress and Euphrates. And that is, if you don't like not identifying with an entity on the board. So you are not the Baltimore and Ohio. You are not the Pennsylvania Railroad, even if you're holding the president's share. You are a robber baron looking to exploit everything.

And if you are uncomfortable or you don't like feeling like you are an identifiable force for good, then 18xx in general, but 1830 specifically, is not going to be your cup of tea. Good one. Well, my response for this is, if you don't like feeling foolish for your first 10 plays of the game, the first bunch of plays, I was completely lost, to the point where I might even win the game. I have no idea. I don't know why you won. I don't know when I lost. Just completely lost.

Where this game went, what happened. It's like a car wreck. And you look around and I'm facing one way. I don't even know what happened here. But that's part of growing in the game, where you start to see, OK, I lost. But now I can see I lost on turn three. I'm starting to identify where it went wrong. But it really took me a long time to get through that just fog as to what even happened here.

But if you don't like that feeling of just feeling like the worst player, whoever played board games, especially if you're playing with people who know the game, and you're just going to get just beat to a pulp, if you can't handle that feeling, it's going to be a tough one to get into. So did 1830 replace a previous game for you? And I don't necessarily mean by release date. So a game that you were playing previously, did you stop playing because you learned 1830? I did.

And it's not really about the game as much as it's about myself. I used to play Railways of the World, also known as, what was that, Todd? Railroad Tycoon. Railroad Tycoon, quite a bit. But after experiencing Age of Steam and 1830 several times, I just haven't gone back to it at all. Dave? Something that you said made me think about it. Because my answer here was the intro 18xx games. At this point, I'm not even sure that I would recommend starting with that.

So I started with Poseidon and then 18AL before coming to 1830 and 1846, around there. I don't even know if those are worth it. Maybe you just jump into the fire and learn from that. But even if you did go through that path, you would never go back and play 18AL or any of those that are touted as the intro level 18xx games, because they're on rails way too much. They're not as dynamic. The game happens in front of you, basically.

But my other answer to that was there was definitely a shift in my gaming and a little bit in our game group when we started getting into 18xx, is we actually started moving away from Euro games a little bit. Because before we started playing these, we were playing Agricola and Brass. And then we still play some of those games now. That's still predominantly what we play.

But getting into these financial games, starting with the 18xx series, particularly 1830, it really shift my gaming as to what I'm looking for and what I want. Whereas now I see a basic Euro. I'm like, OK, I played Euros before. Let's get something a little more meat on its bones. Greg, did 1830 replace any games for you? I don't know that it actually replaced any games. I mean, it was definitely a broadening of my horizons. I think I would probably echo a little bit of what Paul was saying.

It made me look at games like Railroad Tycoon, Railways of North America, and Crayon Rail games that I might have been playing around that time. And I didn't really have much interest to play those anymore. But I don't know those were going to be games that I was going to play a lot to begin with. So I think it was just a progression into it. It opened up a whole horizon of different games and really changed the kind of gamer I am. So it's not really replacing something.

It's just bringing in a whole new world of games. Nice. I said it replaced 1846. So we played a lot of 1846 before we moved on to 1830. And 1846 has a linear market track. It doesn't have the two-dimensional market that 1830 has. It's easier. It's got partial capitalization of the railroads to get them started. And the best way to hurt someone in 1846 is to buy a stock of their company and hold on to it.

Because now you're depriving them of that money going into the treasury or them being able to buy that share themselves and increase their profitability there. So yeah, it's an economic snowball game. It is. Once we grew acclimated to the larger world in 1830, it was hard for us to go back. I do want to go back, though. We haven't played in a long time. I'm really curious about it as to now that we've had all of this 1830 experience.

I mean, I know it's more of a race, which is right in the title, Race for the Midwest. But I do want to try it again. All right. I look forward to that. But it's a good answer. I think you're right. We played a ton of it. And then all of a sudden, we just didn't play it anymore. Has 1830 since been replaced by something else? And if so, by what? So in my heart, the answer is no. But practically speaking, the answer is yes.

And that is we've replaced it with a great print and play version of 1849, the game of Sicilian Railways that Greg put together. The bad news is I feel like I've solved the game. I won the last two games we played. And I've lost my interest in playing it. But the good news for you guys is I forgot what I did. So if we did go back and play it again, I'm going to have a hard time replicating that success. I don't think these games are ever solved. I think you managed to have two good wins.

But two is not quite a trend. Two could just be coincidence. Well, that's the way these games always go for us. So Todd jumps ahead a little bit on the learning curve. We'll be there. And then you'll be like, now how do I win? Now you're going to be like, what was happening? That happened to me in 1846. I won like three in a row. And I'm like, I got it. And then I couldn't win again. Yeah, but for me, 1849 is definitely on the list. I'd like to say 1889, but really that's concurrent.

We kind of picked that up around the same time as we picked up 1830. I think there's just so many games out there that we can move on to that we just haven't yet. 18 Chesapeake. Just go look at 18xx.games. And there's so many options. Right. For people who play 18xx often, 1817 has overtaken 1830 because it is just stock shenanigans squared above 1830. I don't know if our group is ready for that yet. All right, so Paul has anything replaced 1830 for you?

No, I expect 1817 might, but I'm not ready. What do you feel, Paul, about the different flavors of 18xx replacing this? Is there something essential about 1830 itself that you feel like those don't really capture as well? Yeah, I think 1830 is the greatest example of a combined stock and operations game within the 18xx genre. And other 18xx games that have replicated it, like 1889, they've kind of sanded the edges down, so it's harder to cut yourself. And that's why I still prefer 1830.

Yeah, and some of the possible answers here are like Arkwright or City of the Big Shoulders, some of these more economic and euro games that are borrowing from 18xx. But for me, it's going to be in the 18xx family. I still like 1849. I'm hoping we're going to have a little 1889 Renaissance when my Kickstarter copy shows up. But for me, the answer is any 18xx we can play on a weekday night and still get a full robust experience. OK, I like that.

Nice. Rating on Board Game Geek's scale from 1 to 10, no decimals, how would you rate 1830? I currently haven't rated it 10. And I don't see that changing. Greg? For me, this one's a nine. It's a great game. I love it. And it's an investment, both in time and emotion and mental energy that I don't want to do every day. I'll jump in because mine's the same as Greg. It's a nine because it's an amazing game. It doesn't quite fit in with my favorite games of all time.

But part of that is just probably my level of play as I'm constantly frustrated. I go in bright eyed and bushy tailed and so excited. And at some point in the game, I'm like, I hate this stupid game. So that keeps it at a nine for me. But that's more on me than on the game. Yeah, and I agree with the two of you. Against all other games on BGG, it's a nine. In the realm of 18xx, it's undoubtedly a 10 for me. All right, is it a replayable game? And if so, how soon would you want to revisit it?

Greg, what do you have? Absolutely replayable. I think it's been clear just on the amount of conversation that we've had on this game. There's so much to talk about. Every single game is different and sometimes wildly different. You see new strategies and new tactics show up every time. And it's not because the game has randomness, but it has so much chaos and so much player dependence. And it keeps giving something new. Yeah, I think, of course, it's replayable.

The problem has always been finding the time to play it again. But as we've said several times, thanks to 18xx.games, you can play it again any time. So have at it. Absolutely replayable. Not like doing Imperium, where we're going to finish a game and just set it up and play it again. We have a few games where we'll do that, because it is an exhausting play.

And like we said for Tigers and Euphrates, if you're only going to play the game once, maybe don't bother, because you're just not going to see it. So either play it 20 times over the next 10 years, or don't bother. It's really an investment that you have to count the cost before you start. And I agree. It is totally replayable. There is a limit. It does have that mental and emotional cost that Greg was describing.

So I wouldn't want to have a game going all the time, even if we're doing it on 18xx.games. As soon as we finish the game that we are in right now, I'm not ready to crank up the next one and do it again. I don't want to have two of them going concurrently, because my brain just can't keep track of the game state of two boards at the same time. But I could probably play the game twice a month and be perfectly happy. I'll end with this.

My favorite quote from the rules, at least the version from 1986, said, the regulation requiring a full sequence of railroad operations after each opportunity to play the stock market is to prevent a financial swindle, which is too devastating even for 18xx. As the rules now disarm this ploy, you need not worry about it. But if you haven't yet worked out what it is, you ought perhaps to be asking yourself whether you are a big enough crook ever to make the big time as a stock racketeer.

Such a great find. I loved it. Did any of you figure out what the answer to that one is? Paul said it earlier. Gives you too much opportunity to just launch all the companies at once. Or if you could go to the stock market immediately after operating a single company, you could just trash that company, go to the stock market, and dump it on another player. Oh, yeah. I guess I misunderstood what it was saying. I thought it was implying about.

But yeah, being able to do stock changes at any time, yeah. No, it's being required to run a full set of operating rounds after every stock round. Right, right. So every company gets to run before the next stock round. Well, and it's because so much can happen during the operating round, like with this one. We couldn't just spreadsheet what BNO was going to do, because I thought BNO was going to do well. Well, it turns out it's not, because we had to run that stock round, or the operating round.

So it's not just a stock game. These trains have to perform. OK, so I believe the answer has to do with whoever has priority deal coming out of the operating rounds, could dump all of his shares of stock, and break the bank, and end the game right then, while at the same time, devaluing everybody else's portfolio in the shares that he just dumped. And so that is the ploy that they're protecting against by saying, nope, you're going to have to have a set of ORs afterwards.

Oh, you mean, why can the game not end at the end of a stock round? Why do you have to do a full set of operations after every stock round? And yes, given that question, your answer is correct. But here's what I learned. I'm the only crook big enough to make it as a stock racketeer. All right, guys. Well, hey, thank you so much for participating today. This was a long one. I really appreciate all of your insights and your preparation for it.

And I look forward to our next game, which a little birdie told me about. And that will be getting released on May 15. Have a great day. You too. All right, see you, everybody. Bye. Thanks for having me. Bye. Thank you for listening to Replayable. Support for our podcast comes from listeners like you. Thank you for your support. You can find us online at replayable.fm, on Twitter as replayablefm, and on Instagram as replayablefm. We're all new to this.

We're only going to get better with your help and your feedback. You can get in touch with us via email at todd at replayable.fm. Thank you.