 We've done several shows on 18xx games and we stopped doing shows. We've played more of them. We haven't reviewed them all because we don't want to turn Geek Nights into just the 18xx games podcast. Yeah, there's there seems to be a lot of things that we like that have series is right. And, you know, you could make an entire podcast about, say, I mean, we recently were talking about jack box games because a new one just came out jack box seven. And there's like game design stuff to say about every jack box that came out. But it's like they come out with a jack box every October. That's one. If we were to do a jack box episode every year about the new one that just came out, that's one. We only do a Tuesday show every other week. There's 52 weeks in a year. That would be one 26th. Every 26th Tuesday Geek Nights gaming episode would be about jack box. Leaving only 25 for other things. Like we can't just keep doing every episode about the same damn thing. Yeah. The problem is we're playing games. We're playing games that are easy to play during covid and what's very easy to play 18XX games. Right. So, you know, we already did two or three shows on 18XX games. What would possibly justify us doing yet another one? Hopefully the last one, unless a really revolutionary one comes out sometime. But 1817, the one we were talking about today is dramatically different from the other 18XX games in that the way the stock market works is basically more fully featured. It's not just buy and sell the end. It's buy, sell, short, merge, acquisition, acquisition, right? Loans, interest, paying off loans, hostile takeovers, liquidations. And it materially changed my relationship with 18XX games because we'll get into it. We'll review the whole game. But I knew about this one in the past because, A, it's the New York one because it's called 1817 because 1817 is the year the New York Stock Exchange like formed and as opposed to the year being related to trains or anything like that. And yeah, so the game, you know, it's actually a lot less focused on the train action and much more focused on the stock action. The train action, it's like those unlimited tiles. It's like they're really the train is more the it changes the values of tokens and things for acquisition, but it also is just information that you use in the course of deciding how to invest and manage the company. Yep. It's like context. It's all about stocks and stuff. And I knew that it had short selling, which the other ones didn't have. And I was like, ooh, but when you think about it, you know, the huge list of things you can do, it's like, man, that, you know, 18xx is already scary to some people. It's like this one's got to be extra scary to some people. And it would be to a point. This this is not your first 18xx game. You will not enjoy it if you've never played one of these games before. Well, you might if you are, you know, the kind of person who likes it, who can, you know, play a complicated game. I think also, you know, if you like the trouble you have is that it would it's very difficult to learn this game if you don't have the context of 18xx games. Because for us, all we had to look at were what's different. And that really increased our enjoyment. We can engage with it with fewer plays. And we had to play it one and a half times to review it. Playing it on the computer matters more than anything. I'm looking at a photo on board game. I don't think I would ever want to play this one physically of people playing this in person with chips and boards all over the place. In a clip on the table, it's even worse. It's like a disaster. It's like it would take you. People say it takes six, seven hours to play this. And like, I believe you if you're playing this in person, right, there are some things that might actually go faster than playing it online. Like merges around. Does anyone merging? OK, no, whatever, right? You can just skip that. But and online, you have to wait for everyone to click the pass button. But all right, now there's 12 train companies because people IPO'd like crazy and busy work involved in playing this game in person is just enormous. The rulebook is actually hard to read because I'm playing it online. But a lot of the stuff in the rulebook actually describes what to do with the physical pieces in the game. And I don't need that. All I need to know is how the system works of the game. I don't need to know the physical pieces because I'm playing online. But the design is elegant in that the physical system, like the physical pieces do completely encapsulate the system. And if you have those physical components, it does offload that from your brain elegantly. But if you don't have those physical components, nothing explains the mechanic. Yep, exactly. So but yeah, so what is the thing is as scary as it is, right? For with all the short selling, merging, buying, liquidating, all that stuff. You know, you think it's complicated, but it took me one game to sort of figure it out. Reading the rules, I read them over several times and I didn't really grasp it until we played once. Now I fully grasp it. So, yep. But 90% plus grass. Part of the way I grasped it was because I could do things like click merger. Look at what happened and decide to. Oh, that's a terrible idea and hit undo. But that's exactly what I do that was merging, undoing, converting undoing. That would literally be. All right, everyone, go take a break. Rims going to calculate the valuation of his company for the next 10 minutes and decide which of these three paths to follow. Yeah, but playing online asynchronously, no one's got to wait. So it's pretty awesome. But the TLDR on the like of the why we're talking about this game is that these changes together, which we'll get into in detail like why and how, they give agency to the players over the parts of the game that rank us the most in all the other 166 games, even though they're simpler, they have this fundamental problem that there will be one part of the game, usually player order. But sometimes it's something slightly different where you have almost no control over that order. Yet that order determines whether or not you even have agency at key points in the game. In this game, there are many ways to manipulate that player order more ways than in the other games. So as a result, you have more opportunities to do the crazy things that often only happen once or twice in the other 18XX games to the point to where in like in 18 and 1846 if I have the opportunity to rust a train on to someone, I'm fucking doing it because how rare is it that I have that opportunity? But in this game, I have the opportunity to do crazy stuff every round. The question is, do I want to do the crazy thing? That alone makes this game my favorite 18XX game already. And the listener in the stream already when we said, oh, we're talking about 18X 1817, Ghidota immediately said, 1817 is the best 18XX. All I do is eat, sleep and think about 1817. I mean, it is way it even though I've only played it once in a part time. Yeah, we're in the middle of another second game of it right now. Right. It is very great. I don't know if it's I can't say it's too soon for me to say it's the best, but I can see how you could say it's the best. It's my favorite to be the best. I saw complex strategies that I think I could execute that I did not need to execute because all of us playing are at about the same level of befuddlement in terms of how to be good at this game. But I had a great time with it. And at no point did I feel every time there was a problem like in the other 18XX games, very commonly, Mira Scott will say something like, well, I had no control over that. And now I'm boned and it's still fun. But I recognize the point after which I had no more agency in this game. Agency lasted for a long time for most of the players. Yep. That's so that's always the bit. That's always my number one thing that makes me mad at any game is if there is a time at which any player, especially me, but player is not eliminated from the game, cannot win. But even worse than cannot win is cannot do anything take any more meaningful actions, right? That even affect that you can't even king make. It's like you have no power in the game whatsoever. You can't buy a stock. You can't sell one. You can't buy a train. Just nothing is in your control. You have no decisions left, but you are still here and you're technically still playing. Yeah, you've got like one. Basically never happened in eight. You've got three shares and the presidency in one token off company with a five train and nothing and no cash like great. Right. In 1817, that if that happens, you'll go bankrupt. Yeah. And you won't be playing anymore. But also it's very hard to go bankrupt. Your companies can just liquidate and you maybe you can't win. But you can keep doing stuff. You can it's like it very hard to get to a point. We can't do anything. Yeah. So how does this game go? Now, if you haven't listened to our other 18XX reviews or if you've never played one of these games, I suggest you check out the like one of those things first because I don't want to necessarily explain the entirety of 18XX in order to explain the entirety of 18XX and also explain 1817 would take forever. So I'll just keep it to the simplest possible explanation, which is that an 18XX game is a train game. There's an outside game and an inside game and the outside game, you are human beings who are wealthy buying stocks in train companies. In the inside game, the train companies are the players and they are playing a separate game of maps with tracks and shit. Right. That inside game spits out money to the shareholders in the other game. Right. If you are the president of a company, you take its turn in the inside game, but the winner of the whole game is the winner of the outside game. Right. So you're investing in another game to win the real game. Right. So in 1817, the reason it's so great is because in a lot of the other games, the outside game of the buying and selling shares is a very simple and restrictive game where turn order matters a lot. It matters a lot and the decisions are usually extremely obvious. That is the best company. And they're extremely limited. It's like, OK, you can buy, share, pick, buy, share in the best company. OK, next person, I sell all these shitty shares and I buy, share in the best company. Well, next person, I start a new company. OK, there's only eight companies to choose from. I choose the best one, you know, it's like so few choices. In 1817, you can start any company anywhere. Then there's an auction. Then you can start short selling it. The companies are two share companies, five share companies, 10 share companies. You can merge them. You can convert them. You can buy, have one company, buy another company. Yeah, you can take loans and go out of business. You can do, it's just you can do one of our friends. Short, short sold one of my companies. And then a little while later, realized that was a bad idea because that company was just growing and growing and growing. And other people bought all the market shares. He could not, he could not cover his short. He was paying dividends all the way to the end. Yep, all kinds of ridiculous things can happen. So all the action is in the stock round. So at the start of the game, you know, you got your real private auction, the normal private auction, right? It works pretty similarly to the other ones except there's this government money, this seed money. The government wants trains to happen. So there's $200 in cash the government's given out. So you bid on these private companies. They have these set values. If the winner of the auction ends up bidding, their highest bid is less than the face value of the private company. Let's say it's an $80 company. The high bidder is paying 60. They bid 60 and that's it. No one's bidding higher than that. The government pays the extra $20. So the person who bought it and won the auction is getting 20 bucks. Yep, you get subsidized. Yeah. And then what do you do with the private companies? Well, in the other 18XX games, you would usually start a public company and then sell the private company to the public company sometimes at cost, sometimes at a profit, something like that. That's not how this works. Instead in this one, you use the private companies to help you start public companies. So I wanna start a public company for $200. I've got an $80 private. So when I start it, I pay the private $80 and $120 in cash and that starts the public company and the private company is now part of the public company. Yep. On one hand, so I have a $100 private. I use it as part of the seed capital to start my public company, but now that public company doesn't get 100 bucks. It just gets that company in the power. The private is in the company, but now my company doesn't have any cash. It has to take loans to get cash. All right, so that's the first thing that's different. The next thing, you start companies, these public companies. You're starting two share companies, which means you own the whole thing and that's it. There's no selling or buying shares. They're just a two share company. If I pay out, I just get all the money. If you withhold, the company keeps all the money. And in other 18XX games, it's often a very easy choice whether you withhold or pay out and sometimes half pay. It's a really easy choice. Yeah, a lot of them don't even let you half pay. Yeah, some of them would even let you half pay. And it's always obvious. It's like always pay out unless you have to withhold and only withhold if you have to or if you're gonna buy a trade right now. I think I used all three options like repeatedly in varying situations throughout the entire first game of this replay. In 1817, the pay out withhold and half pay options are, it's a meaningful decision every single turn. And it's never, none of the options are ever are rarely obviously wrong. It's like there's merits to all three like every single time. And it's an interesting decision that has huge consequences, right? You can withhold and pay off your company's loans and make your company really strong so it's stock price will not get out of control, right? You don't want the stock price to be too high because you can be short sold. Unless you do share a company. Right, but in 18XX companies, in other 18XX games, you just want the share price to go up. You don't really want it to go down ever. In 1817, you don't want it to get too high because it will be sold short often. Now in case you're not familiar with this concept, this is a real world stock thing where basically normally you think like I buy some stock from Scott, the Scott exchange. I buy some stock in Scott. Later I sell some stock. I pass these certificates back and forth. But imagine I don't have any Scott stock and I sell Scott stock anyway. I basically sell an IOU. You sell something you don't have. I sell an IOU to someone else. That is real in the real world. That happens in the stock market. It happens for a reason. It's probably good that it exists but let's not get into that. But the problem is I now owe that person a real share of the stock at some point in the future which means either I have to give them a real share at some point or I have to pay them anything that happens to that stock. So I sell RIM a share of company X, right? But I don't have a share of company X. I don't own one. RIM now basically, he doesn't own one either but he's got a contract from me that basically says, yeah, you have to pretend that I own one. So company X pays out a big dividend. Scott has to pay me the dividend that I would write for yet. It's like RIM saying, hey, if I had actually owned a real share of company X right now, I'd be getting 100 bucks. But I don't. I just have an IOU from Scott that says IOU won company X share. So Scott's now on the hook to pay RIM 100 bucks. Now in the real world, there's this concept of like borrowing the stock. Like I actually would, like someone selling short borrows the stock from someone or there's a naked short. It gets complicated. This is a board game. It's not that complicated. In the board game, the way this is reflected, if I sell short in someone else's company, I basically just put a short share marker to say that I'm short in the company and I sell it to the market and get the cash as though I'd sold it, free money. Right, so this is really interesting because now short selling is, A, it is a way to say, hey, that company is overvalued, right? I'm gonna sell it even though I don't own it and then it's gonna go down and then I'll buy it back and make a profit that way. That is the basic fundamentals of stocks, right? Buy low, sell high. Well, if it's already high and you don't own any, sell high. And then when it goes down, buy low. It's just the opposite, right? But in an 18XX game, a game in which you don't start with a lot of money and you spent a lot of it on private companies and all your companies are two share companies that you can't sell, you need to get cash to do business, right? You can, and the companies can take loans but you can't take loans as a person. So what the hell do you do? You sell short in something to get instant cash. You sell something you don't have and poof, a pile of dollar bills appears in front of you that you can invest and if that investment pays off and the company you shorted sucks, you're making money on both ends. You sold something high, it goes down and the money you got when you sold it high is making positive gains in a company you started with it and then you'd use those positive gains to buy the cheapo share in the company that was failing that you shorted in and it's good times. So this helps players who in other 18XX games might be stuck saying, well, nothing to do this turn, I got no cash and I don't wanna sell anything can instead say, well, what's overvalued? I'm gonna short something and suddenly I'm gonna do business. So there's a lot more activity because you can have a lot more liquidity. Yep, there's a little bit of push your luck though there because in the real world, shorting stock, like the common line, if you talk to like an investment manager or like take a basic class and this stuff is. Risky as hell, don't do it. Shorting stock has modern upsides and unlimited downsides, literally unlimited. In the real world, I short Apple and Apple just keeps going up and up and up and up and up and up and up. I am fucked. Yeah, so if I buy a share of Apple, what's a share of Apple cost? Probably a fortune. Laura, now. Yeah, okay, so I buy one share of Apple, whatever it costs, right? The worst case scenario, Apple goes out of business. I lose the money I spent. Let's say there's another company that's only $100 a share, I buy a share. I can lose $100. That's all I can lose. I put $100 in a slot machine. Well, how much can I lose? A hundred. Imagine it as a slot machine and you can lose infinity because the price can just never stop going up. Yep, and in the real world at some point you are forced to cover that share, meaning you are forced by law and contract to go buy Apple stock no matter what it costs. And give it to the person. Okay, I sold short when Apple stock was $100. It's now a million dollars a share. You just lost $9,999,900. So the shorting is really interesting. That's a way that unlocks the game by letting players have an option to take risks to get capital, but the companies can also take loans. The combination of the loans and the fact that half pay, full pay, withhold, dividends are all valid options means that you have a lot of flexibility in how you run your company. You can do things like take a bunch of loans, every time you take a loan, your stock price drops, but you get capital. Use the capital by first. But if your company's overvalued, maybe take some loans to bring it down. It seems a good idea. Or maybe take some loans to drive your stock price down, then buy back shares in the market into your own company treasury. Then next turn, pay the loans back, your stock goes back up, and then you or other players buy those treasury shares and put even more money into the company. Yep, all kinds of shenanigans are now possible. We could spend an hour outlining all the shenanigans you can get up to with this simple set of rules. In other 18XX games, a company would be capitalized. It would get its cash by selling all the treasury shares and that would probably be the end of it. Like it wouldn't get any more cash ever. Like it buys trains with that money and then it just never buys trains again the end, right? It's like, unless some other company comes along with its money to help that first company out, that first company might just end up being ruined and ruined the president because they had to buy a train with their own money. Here, loans, it's like, oh, I need, all my trains rusted, I need a new train. I'll take some loans and buy a new train. Yep. Now, like I said, every time you take a loan, not only does the stock price of your company just move left in the market, like every loan stock price goes down, every payoff stock price goes up. Loans have interest and the interest rises depending on how many loans everyone collectively has taken out. So every operating round, you've got to pay that interest on the loans you have not paid off. Yep. That can be a problem. This is why you're gonna be half paying and withholding. So the company keeps more cash because the company needs cash to pay off loans and pay off loans. Or merging, your company's in dire straits. You merge it with another two company that has a lot of cash. Now you got a five share company that can pay off all its loans. And if a company merges or converts, there might be more shares in the treasury that can now be sold to infuse the company with more capital. Yep. And the company now merges their tokens together. You're effectively issuing more shares. And now you have a larger space, a bigger footprint on the map to operate and make more revenue theoretically. So there's two companies, two share companies. You can convert them to five share companies. There's a process for that where you then get the opportunity to buy up treasury shares. You can also merge two two share companies together into a five share company. And then five share companies can themselves be converted up into 10 share companies or two five share companies can merge into a 10 share company. Oh yeah. The whole aspect of the game by itself, there's a big set of power plays around things like make two companies that are near each other that kind of synergize, then merge them, take a bunch of loans, buy a giant train and now you're cooking. Yep. You can also, there's selling companies. So if companies stock price gets too low, they enter the acquisition zone. If a company is in the acquisition zone, any other company is forcibly buy it. Yep. For nothing. Well, potentially nothing. Yeah. For very little. If a company enters the liquidation zone, it just goes away. So you never can, you don't get ruined by being in a situation where your company needs a train and doesn't have one because the company will just go. Yeah. That's the biggest difference of all train games. This is a train game where at ATX game, you are totally allowed to just not fucking buy a train. But you will have to pay off any loans that are still in there. The president of the company is on the hook for the loans of any company that gets liquidated. Yep. That can be. The acquisition part can be the forced acquisition if the stock price gets too low. There's also friendly acquisition. You can just say, hey, you know what? This company that's not doing poorly at all, it's for sale. Who wants to buy it? Yep. And just sell it and see what it's worth on the market. If it ends up being worth more than its current stock value, like you just made bank. You basically got to buy like all the shares in the company, but the game just handles it like there's a whole process for it. But yeah, Scott might, the company might not be doing well for Scott, but I have a company that would really, really be able to leverage all those tokens, Scott. I might pay a premium to Scott. So Scott can cash out on that company. He's doing better. And I get all those tokens. Now I'm doing better. Screw everybody else. Yep. So many interesting, ridiculous things. Now we haven't even scratched the surface of how all the systems work either. Right. Now the one big thing that I think is the best is that so few things, the turn order matters. And when the turn order does matter, you can manipulate it more. So the biggest way the turner doesn't matter is that so many things are now auctioned, right? Where versus before where it's first come first serve. Yep. Even an IPO. I do an IPO brand new company. I say the price I want to open it at, like what's the share price? I say where the token is going to start. And then we go around bidding on what that IPO is actually going to be. If Scott starts in the spot I wanted, I can outbid him. There's also bidding for the privates and there's bidding for, there's something, oh, if something is going to be sold, if someone wants to sell a company, there's bidding to sell the company. Yep. And one other like fiddly aspect that's really nice, during stock, you can take loans at any time with your companies, both during stock rounds and operating rounds. Yep. So during the stock round, you might take a loan randomly, like in the middle of a stock round, to lower the value of your company. So it goes after some other company that is going to buy the last shitty four train so you can get the five train. Or you might be sitting in the stock round and saying, man, my company is going to get sold short. That's not good. I mean, you know, it's valued at $300 a share right now. It's maybe worth 200. RIM's going to sell it short. That's not a good deal. Let me take 10 loans. Yeah. Now the stock price went down to crap now. RIM can't really sell it. RIM sells it short. He's going to get $100 less per sold short share. And that's going to be good times, right? Yep. But you can only pay off loans during one specific phase in the operating rounds. Mm-hmm. See it. There's a lot else we could talk about, but I think that another thing that's interesting is the train situation is very different. In the first OR operating round, there's an unlimited number of $100 two trains. So you don't have to play that game of buy all the two trains. They rust immediately. And you can buy them with loans. So you can start a bunch of companies and get a bunch of two trains. But like the operating order in the first rounds only matter for tiles because everyone can buy as many two trains as they want. So the choice is not how many two trains do I buy based on what everyone else is buying to get the game to a certain phase, like push it to green at the right time. The decision is now, how many two trains do I want for this company? Mm-hmm. And then there's some two plus trains. How many are going to make up the $100 loan I had to take to get it? Yep. There are two, two plus, three, four, five, six, seven and eight trains. Like the game is a long, slow cycle of trains that give you a lot of time to mess around. And the game basically ends when someone buys the first eight train or the first eight train gets exported. Then it's the end of the game. Yep. So yeah, if you are someone who likes a stock market kind of game, right? And think, you know, because these stock markets and other 18x6 games are too simple. And you know, the train action is still there, but it's, you know, it's not as big as the train action in some of the other ones. Then this is the 18xx for you. If you don't want any trains, but you want stock market action, you should go play Black Friday. Yeah. The different game by Friedman Freese. I would like to play that a game. I really like that game. I do like that game a lot, yeah. But yeah, of the 18xx I've played, this one has the best stock market. There is still turn order, but it doesn't matter as much. And it almost provides too much freedom, right? It's like just because you should, you could, and doesn't mean you should. But that's a difference in feel in a lot of other 18xx games. If you can, you often should with weird stuff. Yep, exactly. In this game. Whereas here, there's so many things you can do, but should you, probably not. Yep. So I think it's my favorite 18xx game because the only thing I don't like about them is how little agency I have over the player order, which itself tends to control a lot of the opportunities you might have. In this game, you have a lot of agency over the player order. Well, more so than you do in other 18xx games. But also, you aren't as tied to that in terms of your opportunities. Yeah, well, I mean also the player turn order, it doesn't just matter as much because in the other 18xx, there'll be like seven companies. That's it, right? So you want to go first so you can, you know, sell, dump on someone or, you know, buy a company, you know, be able to buy the good companies. You don't get C and O or whatever, right? Yep. Companies can start anywhere. There's a pile of companies. They're all the same. It doesn't matter. They're just different colors. Right? It's like, you know, pick the one that has the nice name. I like the big J. And even if someone tries to start one before you, they're going to auction it. It's not going to just be they go first and get it. So, you know, what if? Yeah. This has been Geek Nights with Rym and Scott.