Last week I wrote about how I fell in love with trains and train games, including a tabletop version of Railroad Tycoon that I ran into early in my hobby. This week I am talking about 18XX games, which it took me until this year to try, after 13 years of playing other games. Why did it take so long? Looking back, I have played much more intimidating games than 18XX. Heck one is literally based on rocket science! There are several answers to this question. For one thing these games are not at all visually appealing. With a color palette of Red, Green, Yellow Brown and Black 18XX games are pretty ugly. They are similar in this way to the early austere cube rail games I wrote about last time. The second reason is just how mathy they appear. There are not one but two excel sheet looking boards in every 18XX game. As much as I have grown to like math and excel, neither have much sex appeal when it comes to selling a game. And thirdly I always heard how intimidatingly long these games were. People would talk about a game taking 6-8 hours, and while I do play longer games I couldn’t figure out how such a huge time investment could be worth it; especially when I was newer to games. So it took until 2024 to try an 18XX game, and to be honest I wish I had done it sooner. In this blog I hope to explain what the appeal is of these games in case you are the most train-curious type of player.

But before I get too much further, what is this 18XX thing I keep mentioning? Well, these are huge train, stock and business simulation board games that started with 1829 by Francis Tresham back in 1974! The game made waves at the time for being a long, involved strategic game that didn’t involve war as was more common of the games at the time. When it came time for a sequel, the designer kept the same naming convention and made 1830: Railways and Robber Barons. It was useful in terms of clueing in existing players that this was another game in the series they had enjoyed previously, but gosh is it confusing from a marketing perspective. And now, every 18XX game as the genre is now called starts with the number 18 and some sort of year. Fans talk about their favorites such as 1862 or 1846 and if you are not in the know you wouldn’t even know what country these things are set in much less what makes one unique compared to another. Needless to say, the name of the game doesn’t really sell it as something I would want to try.

Fast forward to 2021 and I backed a kickstarter for Shikoku 1889. I am still not 100% sure why I did it. Perhaps it was some Omicron Covid lockdown fueled retail therapy, or just the dream of more board games in general during that time. But I will say, part of the reason is because this was finally a good looking 18XX game, at least relatively speaking. I had heard it was beginner friendly, and when you combine Japan and trains, two of my favorite things I figured I’d give it a shot. In 2024 I finally had a group willing to give it a shot and from the word go I knew it was something special.

18XX games take the stock and track aspects of cube rails games and dials them up to 11. Players alternate between stock rounds, focused entirely on buying and selling stocks, and operating rounds where tracks are laid, trains are bought and routes are run, e.g. the actual business behind these stocks. As I mentioned above, stock rounds have a living breathing stock market where the company value can go up or down based on buying, selling, and company performance, just like real life, if quite a bit simplified. There are hostile take-overs, dumping stock of a company that doesn’t have great prospects, or starting up a rival train company to jam up the effectiveness of one that is surging ahead. The important thing to emphasize here is that the company and the players are entirely separate, right down to having different pools of money they are working with. There’s a reason these games are often played with poker chips as money is flying left and right and there is indeed quite a bit of accounting going on. But if you want to be a stock shark without the dangers of investing in GameStop there might be something here for you.

Operating rounds, however, are my favorite part. This is where the money is made as company presidents (whoever owns the most stock of a company) build tracks and buy trains to run rail lines out on the map. Unlike in cube rail games, track is limited, so if you need a simple curved track later in the game you may be out of luck. And secondly the tracks progress in different eras corresponding to the trains that are operating. Simple yellow track with one entrance and exit is available early on, which then evolves into green tracks that have multiple exits and finally brown tracks that are congested with many different exits. This is both compelling strategically as more complicated tracks allow longer and more profitable routes but also captures a bit of the sweep of history and the evolution of trains.

Speaking of those trains, these are also more complex. Trains must be bought in order so only 2 distance trains are available at the start, good for a route that connects two towns. These get longer with 3 distance trains, 4 distance trains etc until finally there are modern diesel trains that can run circles around the whole map. But in another strategic and historic nod, modern trains render older ones obsolete. So when anyone buys the first 4 distance train for example, all 2 distance trains “rust” and are out of the game. This means the little mom and pop railroad that was doing decent for itself with small local routes could be in a lot of trouble as they are suddenly trainless and maybe out of cash as well.

All of this makes for a very compelling, cutthroat game. Having played it I can see where the length of the game doesn’t matter to fans of the genre. As long as there’s not somewhere else you need to be, there is a wonderful arc to these 4-6 hour games. There are cunning moves on the stock market, interesting decisions and evolutions on the track and operating side and some interesting shared incentives between players who are both invested in the same company. While I will not be collecting these like I do trick taking games, I am very happy to have Shikoku 1889 in my collection. I also recently picked up another more beginner friendly title that broke the 18XX naming curse called Railways of the Lost Atlas. The hook in that one is that players build the map before each game, allowing for games that have a different map each time. It also boasts being 2-3 hours which seems much more palatable to most people. I am curious to get this one to the table and will certainly report back with a review when I do. 

If you’re looking to learn more about 18XX there is a great history located here. Check out the chart of all the different variants and their family tree. There’s also a way to play online at 18XX.games. I hope you’ve enjoyed exploring the wide world of train games these past two weeks and who knows, maybe you’re more train-curious than you think!

Let me tell you a story. It’s Christmas morning when I am ten years old, and I unwrap a Lionel Train set under the tree. I proceed to spend the rest of the day fascinated by the giant metal train engine model and the fake smoke it puffs out as it runs endless circles around the track. The passenger car lights up as well and these little touches of realism make each loop around the track feel real. For years the train would come out every Christmas time to circle the tree, and it started a love of trains that lives on to this day.

Let me tell you a story. Years ago I was a preteen in an EB Games perusing the clearance section of their PC games. I found a CD version of Sid Meir’s Railroad Tycoon for MS DOS for $4.00. A perfect price for someone operating on an allowance and lawn mowing. I snatch it up and manage to get it running in spite of the hells of MS DOS, and I’m transfixed. Truth be told, I don’t know a lot of what’s going on. There’s something about shares that sounds like math or grown up talk. But the fundamental drive of the game is to connect cities with rails, add trains to those rails and build routes that make the cities grow, year over year. I play it on easy, and I play it for hours with afternoons melting away in visions of an enormous rail network. I play and anticipate each of the sequels as crumby DOS art becomes clean 2d art becomes true 3d rotatable landscapes, and trains you can zoom in on while they chug away.

Let me tell you a story. Years later I am at a friend’s house and there is a Railroad Tycoon board game. Having recently gotten into the hobby, I was intrigued and had to give it a try. The gameplay lived up to the memories I had of the video game. There we were, building rail networks into the open countryside, delivering goods to the towns that demanded them and watching them grow into cities. I never dreamed that such a complex game could translate to the table so well, but the game proved to be up to the task.

So today, I ask, are you train curious? Do you too want to build tracks, buy shares and prove you are worthy of the title of Rail Baron? If so, there are many options, and I want to highlight a few of my favorites and make a likely vain attempt at defining what IS a train game anyways.

First, and foremost, the elephant in the room. I am not talking about Ticket to Ride. I have early memories of that one too. Our family got it back in 2005 when I didn’t even know what a Spiel des Jahres game was. It somehow cracked out of the hobby games space that was brewing at the time and into our living room and is still sitting on the shelf there now waiting to be played again. I introduced my niece to it with Ticket to Ride First Journey, and she recently graduated to her own full copy of regular Ticket to Ride even at a relatively young age. The game is great, and it is also not, to my mind, a train game. It is, at its heart, a lovely version of rummy with a complex map you use for scoring. Players collect cards in order to fill tracks with their colored trains and complete routes. But the routes are pre-printed vs players playing track tiles. There is no sense of cargo being delivered or the map changing through play. There are certainly no stocks, bankruptcies or money of any kind for that matter. So while Ticket to Ride is great, it is not what I am talking about here.

Instead, let’s revisit that Railroad Tycoon board game. It is sadly out of print, but is actually a licensed version of a game that is very much still around called Railways of the World. Railways and its cousin game Age of Steam are where I truly cut my teeth on these types of games, and they still hold up today. (Small aside, there are three different version of this same system and in the hobby world it is very much a Coke vs Pepsi type of debate as to which is better. That could be a whole separate blog post in and of itself. I personally have the RC Cola version of this system…). In the game players each own their own rail network, and the aim of the game is to build tracks between different cities that are colored to represent what type of goods they want from elsewhere on the board. Mirroring the arc of history, networks start small and engines start slow so players can only maybe deliver a good here or there, one city away. But as players expand, and their engines get faster it is a race of sorts to keep connecting longer and longer routes to deliver goods further and further away. All while managing your income and loans so that you can afford to build those tracks and maintain that engine. 

The version that I have Steam: Rails to Riches also has a turn order consideration as there are 7 special powers in the game. These powers can be simple like being able to build one more track or having the right to deliver first. Or they are more involved things like adding a new city tile to the map or turbo-charging your engine technology to get ahead of the pack. Each turn in player order players pick powers, but the power that they pick determines player order for the next round, with the most powerful action meaning you’re likely in the back of the line for the next pick. It makes for some delightful tempo considerations in addition to the core fundamentals of track building and delivery. I still have this one in my collection for its focus on these two fundamentals, but there are other games that focus more on stocks vs the sort of pick up and deliver feel of Steam.

The simpler of these stock games are collectively called Cube Rail games. This is because the company that produced many of them Winsome Games was maybe a bit … sparse on components. Just some colored cubes, some stock cards and a map. In these games the different colored cubes represent different companies vs different players. This is true of many stock games and takes a moment of adjustment as no one company is you, the player, but rather they are tools to get ahead. Games usually start with an auction where players bid on stocks of each different company, and whoever has the most stocks gets to make the actual track building decisions of that company. Further auctions may see players investing in each other’s companies to share in some of the profits or even as a hostile takeover. Unlike the focus on delivering goods, cube rails games focus on connecting rail networks to more and more cities to increase the dividends they pay to their shareholders. I realize as I describe this, some of you may be falling asleep, or wondering how this talk about your 401k made it into your board games, but it is genuinely a great time, I promise. Cube rails games are often very short and play out wildly differently each time despite featuring the same core pieces because it’s all about player interaction. Who owns a company, and how other companies interact on the map can allow for very expressive plays in under an hour. 

My current favorite is Irish Gauge, which adds a unique element where dividends are paid out depending on cube pulls from a bag and how they tie to those same cubes on the map. This adds a lot of uncertainty, but players are also using these same cubes to build up cities and increase their profits so there’s a balancing act where the more of that color cube that’s out on the map, the less likely it is to be pulled for dividends. The rules for the game are literally one sheet of paper double sided, so it’s very approachable but I want to give fair warning, this game is MEAN. You will cut people off, you will auction shares to make sure someone is left out of a company and you will pull dividends when it benefits you and no one else. Consider this fair warning if it ever hits your table.

Next week I’ll be talking about the enormous genre of 18XX games. Yes, that’s seriously what they’re called, and no, they’ve never been known for their marketing. These games are 4+ hour beasts and can be rather intimidating but have a lot to offer if you find yourself curious to explore more train games. So come on ride the train.