18Ireland

anandyctedstar8.8

[edit] after five games: Playtime of initial phase has sped up, still, it takes a while to get to the 6H and 8H ! Merger and evaluation causes less brain burn, however we've come to notice that the weird tile manifest sometimes gets too much in the way and produces some weird surprises. Given the fact that it took long enough to grok the merger strategy, and that the game is pretty slow, this added complexity drags our games a bit too much. It's still an excellent title with excellent ideas. It just doesn't flow as much as we would like. [original comment] Plays nothing like 1849, although I assumed the contrary. A very solid, hyper interactive, extremely original 18xx After three games: love the idea and the interaction. The only downside so far is the slow pace we have before 8H come out. The decisions in order to prevent/facilitate mergers take forever and stock rounds (and even ORs) tend to last forever. This has resulted in incomplete games after 4.5h … we need to learn to think better and faster perhaps There is no real rules overhead, but the overhead happens because 18Ireland mixes some of the most interactive and dynamic mechanics of 18xx: - incremental cap - minor 5-share companies - mergers (with voting !) - narrow gauge bonus track - limited tile manifest - auction for company starting with market value based on auction. - reusable rusted trains - discount for any train after 10H - hex trains - randomised company order - randomized privates with some interesting powers All these, but mostly the incremental cap+merger voting can create quite some AP :)