18CZ

EvEvanstar7,2

With rules and three players, it took us about 8 hours to play. Longer than I'm comfortable with. The game was really interesting, and deviated from the 18xx style games we had previously played substantially, to the point that we were making play mistakes assuming things worked the way they did in other games, then needing to go watch the heavy cardboard play-through to confirm our fears of not having done things correctly. The rulebook is pretty good in terms of having the rules clearly stated, but it's not great in terms of showing examples to make sure we don't start mistakenly playing 1846: The Race for the Midwest. As it happened, I made a play mistake at about hour 4 that ensured my loss, when another player beat me to turn order on starting the first large company that I had worked to setup in a cushy position on the map. At the 6 hour point my eyes started to cross. I'm not sure what we can do to speed the game up, but it's such an interesting game, I'm planning to keep it around in the hopes we can get the playtime down to a more reasonable level with greater comfort for how things work. I really love the 18xx experience, but the playtime is such a barrier for me. ★ 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