1825, Unit 1
One unit of 1825 was acquired and played at ET yesterday afternoon. The game as a whole went slower than it might have, since people were doing more socializing than game-playing and there was, I think, too much committee-plottage (four "players" but two of them had two humans each).
At any rate, the online reviews mostly say this is a kinder, gentler 1830, and I pretty much agree with that. To start with, it's shorter; in 2 hours we were at least half done with the game. It's legal to sell the last share of a company, so there's no company dumping as such, and the receivership mechanic is such that after a round or two you wind up with a company with a depressed stock price, good trains, and money in the bank, which is suddenly a very attractive buy. If you pay out dividends, then the amount your stock goes up is proportional to your P/E ratio, so buying cheap stocks is even more attractive. The upshot of this is that some amount of stock churn to wind up holding on to the bargains is much more attractive here than in other 18xx games.
The downside of this is the amount of scripting in the game. Private companies are handed out randomly, have no specials, and determine how much money you start with. The public companies are bought in a mostly-fixed order, and operate in a mostly-fixed order, and don't have too many build options on the map. I suspect these problems mostly plague the game startup, so the first third to half of the game will look pretty similar, but then we stopped just when things started to get interesting.
There was some interest in trying this again. This one, in its current configuration, seems like it might actually go better with fewer players, so a small game at home could work. There are also a nigh-infinite number of expansions, and GPP has many of them, so maybe adding more money would make the game more interesting.
(I was hoping that nuclearpolymer would go for a shorter 18xx that doesn't have the "must buy C&O at game start or entire strategy will be ruined" nature of 1830, since she went for 1830 BC, but she just seems to not go for stock market games so much. Alas.)
At any rate, the online reviews mostly say this is a kinder, gentler 1830, and I pretty much agree with that. To start with, it's shorter; in 2 hours we were at least half done with the game. It's legal to sell the last share of a company, so there's no company dumping as such, and the receivership mechanic is such that after a round or two you wind up with a company with a depressed stock price, good trains, and money in the bank, which is suddenly a very attractive buy. If you pay out dividends, then the amount your stock goes up is proportional to your P/E ratio, so buying cheap stocks is even more attractive. The upshot of this is that some amount of stock churn to wind up holding on to the bargains is much more attractive here than in other 18xx games.
The downside of this is the amount of scripting in the game. Private companies are handed out randomly, have no specials, and determine how much money you start with. The public companies are bought in a mostly-fixed order, and operate in a mostly-fixed order, and don't have too many build options on the map. I suspect these problems mostly plague the game startup, so the first third to half of the game will look pretty similar, but then we stopped just when things started to get interesting.
There was some interest in trying this again. This one, in its current configuration, seems like it might actually go better with fewer players, so a small game at home could work. There are also a nigh-infinite number of expansions, and GPP has many of them, so maybe adding more money would make the game more interesting.
(I was hoping that nuclearpolymer would go for a shorter 18xx that doesn't have the "must buy C&O at game start or entire strategy will be ruined" nature of 1830, since she went for 1830 BC, but she just seems to not go for stock market games so much. Alas.)