1830: Railways & Robber Barons

EvEvanstar5.9

My 18xx experience is limited. I've so far only played 1846 twice. Since I loved that game, i've been really excite to give other 18xx games a try. 1830 is the other game I've seen recommended to beginners. We also made sure to play the Avalon Hill version, since I've seen people didn't like changes to the game that were made by the Mayfair edition, although I don't personally know what those changes were. We setup to play at about 12:30/1pm, and the game ended at 10pm. The game started out fantastic, but once we hit the 7:00 point, the stock market element of the game stopped doing interesting things, as all the stocks were pretty much settled with their owners, and it felt like the game was just about to end. Then it went on for another three hours. We did mess up one major rule, thanks to no help from the rulebook nor the player aid I printed out on BGG. The rule we missed is that if a company doesn't payout to the players, then it's stock needs to decrease, even on the first turn where it's not allowed to operate, because it has to buy a train. The rulebook passage, multiple players read multiple times, but we thought that this might just have been one of the differences between editions, or a difference between 1830 and 1846, but in fact towards the end of the game when things were feeling ridiculous, I did some bgg rules searches and found the answer. The really frustrating thing was I even printed out these nice player aids that only said the stock goes down if the company runs and keeps the payout for itself, and goes up if the company pays out. No mention of what happens if the company can't run because it has no train. This brings me to the other issue I had. Twice in the game, a player sold off all the trains their company had, and then had turn order on me for stock selling, so they were able to dump their stock, leaving me with control of the company, and leaving me on the hook to buy the company a new train out of my own money. I guess that's the point of the game, and I was ready for it to happen once, but it happened twice, and really, once would have been enough to take me out of ever being able to win. I'm conflicted about this game, because while I felt like it was far too long, I'm not sure I got the best sense of it because of our rules error. I liked a number of things about this game over 1846. I liked the small town rules, I liked the three dimensional stock market. I kind of want to give this game another chance, but really what I'd like is to play a shorter length 18xx game that brings these elements with it. This game having three operating rounds, and infinite distance trains really drags down the time between turns. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ☆ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★★☆☆ Raw enjoyment

FiFinnTrollstar9.0

pc game roxx Legion has it.

anandyctedstar9.1

3-5 players