Anyone in philly actively playing these games? My brother and I would love to learn, looking for a group that is open to teach?

Hi all,

After quite a lot of tinkering, I’ve finally reached the point where I’m comfortable sharing a little project I’ve been working on:

https://18bk.games

The tool is free to use, no sign up required.

The idea came from something I’ve seen discussed in different forums and on YouTube quite a few times — and something my own group runs into as well: bookkeeping can take a surprising amount of time in a physical 18xx game.

Poker chips help enormously (and I personally love playing with chips), but especially later in a game there can still be a lot of repeated:

• calculating routes and revenue
• working out dividends
• moving money between companies, players and the bank
• doing essentially the same arithmetic for several ORs once the board has stabilised

I’ve seen people here mention spreadsheets, calculators, revenue trackers, or simply doing the final OR sets on paper. 18BookKeeper is my attempt at making that kind of assistance a little smoother while still keeping the actual game on the table.

You don’t have to track everything

One thing that became important while building it was that different groups want very different levels of digital assistance.

So there are several ways to use it.

You can use it as a more complete bookkeeping companion, but there are also lighter modes where you enter much less information and mostly let it help with revenue/dividends and the repetitive calculations.

The goal isn’t “now everyone has to enter every transaction into an app.”

Quite the opposite: use as little of it as is useful to your table.

You can also start halfway through a game

This was another thing I really wanted.

You don’t need to decide before the game that you’re going to use 18BookKeeper.

If you’re in Phase 5 or 6, things are becoming repetitive and somebody says “can we please stop doing all of this arithmetic?”, you can create a game, enter the current board state and continue from there.

That’s actually one of the ways I imagine it being most useful.

Multiple devices

The game isn’t tied to one phone or laptop.

You can share the session and have several devices connected to the same game state, so different players can view/use it from their phones, tablets or computers.

That also opens up the possibility of putting the shared table view on a larger screen while people continue using their own devices.

And yes, you can keep using poker chips ❤️

I’m definitely not trying to turn physical 18xx into an online game.

You can theoretically let 18BookKeeper handle the money completely, but that’s not really why I built it.

I like chips.

The workflow I personally wanted was something like:

run the companies → let the app keep track of what happened → settle the chips at a convenient point, such as the end of the OR set.

That way the physical game, trains, tiles, shares and chips remain the centre of the experience, while some of the repetitive accounting gets out of the way.

It’s still an early release, and I’m sure people here will find edge cases, games that behave differently, and probably several things I’ve misunderstood.

So I’d genuinely appreciate feedback — particularly from groups who already use spreadsheets/revenue trackers or have developed their own tricks for speeding up physical games.

What would make something like this useful enough that you’d actually put it on the table?

For now I've implemented 1889 and 18SJ as per getting permission from those publishers.

If you find some issue with the tool, there is a built in bug reporting tool in the menu directly.

18BookKeeper: https://18bk.games

I was surprised to find 1830 at my local library. All games are free to borrow for 14 days :)

I would love to get this one one day and it doesn't look like it’ll hit the AA waves anytime soon. does anyone know where you can purchase it?

I am a seasoned boardgamer and I'd like to start playing 18xx games. Unfortunately it's hard to find people to play these irl. I know the 18xx.games site exists, but I feel that people there are experienced 18xx players. Is there a reason why there's not a single 18xx game on BGA (which I find less intimidating)?

Calandale puts PTG on the operating table:

https://youtu.be/5UZU8jqYzA0?is=wZDYdlJ9xe6iKSC-

For all those interested in a 1822PNW reprint, Scott Petersen added it to his P400 options, you can vote for it here if you're interested:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3362421/all-aboard-games-p400-waves-7-and-8

The original print run sold out so he only needs 200 votes as a proof of concept to launch a smaller print run!!

Hello everyone :)) I regularly play 18xx online with
my friends. We are all massive nerds and are quite mathematically inclined but none of us have a background in statistics. Any suggestions for fun and interesting graphs we can produce with Excel after playing an online game?

In my gaming group we have been playing Imperial, and I love the game. Now I'd like to try a game where specifically the stock mechanics are more complex (selling, dynamic stock price, etc). 18xx games seem like the perfect fit. However complexity and game duration are concerns. 1849 is listed at 180 mins on BGG, so it should be fine. Would you regard 1849 as a good starting point for a group which has never played 18xx before?

As 21Moon is out of print despite being around for only a few years I think it retired a little bit too soon. Many games probably ended up in big collections and will therefore very seldom find its way to the table, if ever. Maybe there are a few more out there who want to play a physical game of 21Moon but never got the chance. Hopefully there is also a bunch that have played the game already but would maybe enjoy playing a updated version with a twist.

My plan is to recycle the rules of Moon and maybe add/subtract 3-5 pages of rule changes/some changed components into a updated version of the game = 21MOON Second Campaign. Same, same, but different.

After having played Imperial a couple of times with my gaming group, and absolutely loving it, I'd like to get into train games with stocks. 18xx seems very appealing to me, particularly the ones with lots of stock shenanigans. Game duration could be a concern, however. I don't think I'll be able to convince my group to play a game that's longer than 4 hours, and that might already be pushing it. 1849 is listed at 180 minutes on BGG, and seems to have all the kind of stock mechanisms (dynamic stock price, selling shares, dumping companies, companies buying back or issuing shares) I'd love to try. Would this be a good starting point for 18xx games?

Alternatively, I've been looking at cube rail games, particularly Chicago Express and German Railways. As I am from Germany, I'd find it quite nice to have a game set there. However, the turn order mechanism is worrying me a little. I fear my group might get frustated if they don't get any turns.

Which of the two games do you prefer and why? What are your thoughts on the turn order mechanism in German Railways? Would it be better to start with a cube rails game or jump into 1849 (or another 18xx game) right away?

Apparently someone has hacked the site. It will be down for a little while until they get bored.

Saw the Kickstarter for The Old Prince today and it intrigued me as someone who's been interested in 18xx for a while but never been able to play one, especially with the high praise it's received from the 18xx community. Does this make any sense as a jumping on point?

Being honest with myself this would be largely an aspirational purchase but I don't mind buying a single 18xx game in this way. If I'm likely to only ever buy one 18xx game, as things stand now, would this be the one to get? I'm looking for whichever 18xx has the most interesting decision space throughout the entire game and the most replayability while not being completely unparsable for beginners.

Thank you for your advice!

Anyone know what's going on with 18xx.games? It's offline right now and there was a user going on about vulnerabilities this morning.

Hi, i want to ask about starting point from 18XX family for my and my friends. We used to play Age of Steam and want to take another step.

I thought about 1862. It has high bgg rating (8.1/10). We like heavy euros and wargames, so cheeky rules are not problem.

Second though goes to 1846, because it is availabe and lesser price in my country.

What do you think?

This weekend, I played a round of 1822MX with several fellow 18xx lovers. We had a blast, but the game took 7.5 hours. This was only our 3rd play with the 1822 system, and there was one completely new player, so the game length was not entirely unexpected. Nonetheless, the game started to drag towards the end. We were pretty sure we could tell who was going to win, but we lacked the experience to call the game. Also, people wanted to see how their strategies would play out even if they weren't going to win. 

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I often have this feeling when playing 18xx. The beginning and midgame are incredibly fun. The auction, the initial company float, jockeying for position on the board, the train rush - all superb! However, the game slows to a crawl towards the end and starts to feel like a chore. Simply put, 18xx has a brown phase problem. By the time the brown phase rolls around, the level of complexity on the board precludes rapid route calculation for most players. In a 4-player game, depending on the specific title, the board has changed enough that routes often need to be recalculated. Players in contention for the win often get "analysis paralysis" as they try and eek out marginal value while non-contenders lose interest.

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I have an idea for a potential solution, and I was hoping to get some feedback on it from more experienced players.

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Beginning in the first full set of brown phase operating rounds, at the beginning of the round, players take turns placing tiles and stations for all three operating rounds before running any trains. Once all of the tile lays/upgrades/stations are completed, the game reverts back to normal with the exception that no additional tile lays/upgrades/stations will affect the board for the rest of that entire set of operating rounds. I believe this would substantially reduce the time needed to recalculate train routes and keep everyone engaged. My guess is this would shave at least an hour - potentially more for some titles - for a given playthrough. The primary issue I foresee with this rules change is that there can be some critical withholding steps during operating rounds in order to pay for stations/tile upgrades. Additionally, this will result in a slightly more rapid/lucrative brown phase insofar as the board achieves its final configuration 1-2 operating rounds sooner. I believe that would be an acceptable trade-off for the improved flow of the game.

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Here is a draft of what these rules might look like and how I would suggest mitigating the "withhold" problem noted above:

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1. Beginning in the first full set of operating rounds after the brown phase is triggered, all active companies will, in order of descending stock price, execute a single tile lay/upgrade/station step.

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1a. A company may defer the tile lay/upgrade/station step to take a $100 dollar bank loan.

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1b. Taking a loan does not count as a tile lay/upgrade/station step. (essentially if you take a loan you would lay tile/stations last)

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1. Repeat rule 1 until all active companies have had 3 tile lay/upgrade/station steps.

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1. A company may not pay dividends until all loans are paid off.

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I'm looking for feedback on this. My hope is that it would accelerate the end game. We plan to play test this with Shikoku this week. Do you think this would be a viable way to accelerate the in-game? Any other suggestions to improve timing. (Tried spreadsheets, but I find it kind of ruins the flavor of the game and is a another set of headaches.)

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Thanks!

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Between 89 and 71 on ks, I'd like to have to have a 3rd that is different enough from them and would be good occasionally at 5 players. Currently I'm considering 62, 46, or 22mx, but am definitely open to other considerations

I've been working on training an AI model to play Rolling Stock Stars, and I thought the writeup/discussion might be interesting to people here.

RSS is really more "18xx-adjacent" than a proper game in the genre - there's no map, no trains or routes - but the financial mechanics and "rusting" through increasing cost-of-ownership are there. If you like, this can be viewed as a first step towards understanding what designing/training a model to play a "proper" 18xx game would entail.

The BGG thread has my writeup, and some interesting discussion between the game designer, publisher, and the owner of the 18xx.games platform. The model has had quite good results on 18xx.games so far, and the RSS game designer is currently in a game with it along with three of his most competent henchmen playtesters. ;)

Been getting more into the genre and wanted to know if they will offer enough differentiation between the two, or are there others that would be of greater value in their differences.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alephgamestudio/18zoo?ref=bggforums

So I've played 1889 once, and I found it fun, but the price point is now prohibitively high. I think I could find 1861 for a reasonable price, and this kickstarter seems like a reasonable price point.

I'm tracking that 18Zoo has a set number of rounds, so I imagine the development is much faster in order to get through a lot more train phases. It overall looks a lot simpler, which I'm not sure is a good thing, but maybe the theme makes it more beginner friendly.

I don't know what's different about 1861. I think there's some danger of company nationalization by the gov't.

Can someone compare and contrast these options against my experience?

Paolo has been working hard on this interesting twist on traditional 18XX games. Now there is a link for anybody interested to check out the kickstarter edition released by AGS.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alephgamestudio/18zoo?ref=bggforums

Looking at the Stellar Ventures crowdfunding campaign has me interested to look into other cube rails/18XX hybrids.

Specifically, I’m interested in games that preserve a lot of the economic systems but which simplify the track laying. I’ve always found parsing large tilesets, dealing with tile limits, and doing route calculations to be the side of 18XX in which I’m less interested. On the other hand I love the quickness of network building in the hex-based and point-to-point cube rails games.

I know there is Baltimore & Ohio but don’t know much about it. Also I feel like Poseidon maybe attempts this. Any other suggestions or recommendations for games to look into? Or I am I best avoiding this awkward in-between zone and just either choosing an 18XX or a cube rails?

What are the problematic tiles and how can I fix them in the revised edition? Will not fixing them affect studying/learning the game in meaningful ways?

Are there other problems I should be aware of?