 So yeah, let's get into it. We played another train game. We played this train game many times But now that I've played it multiple times in a row Not at a convention with no time pressure I have a lot more deep insight into it and a lot more thoughts about the 18xx genre as a whole Right. There is still so many 18xx games We haven't played and there is so much more for us to learn which is why I keep playing them despite having many criticisms But yeah 18 this 1846 which is the one we first played and did a show on yep This is the second one I played actually which is 1889 which is history of shikoku railways So shikoku is this island in japan shikoku that I yeah that I always remember because I was watching an anime And there was a joke in the anime about an old lady who couldn't hear And someone and they asked the old lady asked someone where they were from and they said shikoku Or no, I think they someone said shikoku, which is the Japanese right and the old lady was like Oh, you're from shikoku Because they saw shikoku is a japanese an island of japan That is uh shikoku literally translates to uh four districts So it has four districts right sort of north south east and west and it's sort of cut in half by these mountain range You can just look at it on a map and you'll see what i'm talking about you'll be like oh that place I know that i've seen it on maps of japan before yeah, that's shikoku. So this game is about Uh shikoku was mostly served transportation wise by ferries Um and then in the 1800s obviously like oh around 1889 or so It began to be served it began to be served by trains That would take you between the places on shikoku and this game is an evil game of capitalism About that takes place on that geography in that time period all right, so 18xx games we're not going to get into the whole story you can listen to our 1846 episode which was our introduction to the genre But they're train games. They're like Arch typical train games right when you think about Right when you think about oh those old guys at the game store playing train games This is that game. This is what it is Right the mystery has been revealed. It's not some mysterious place anymore This is how the game is and the fundamental thing about all these train games and the thing that draws me to them All regardless of the the details or problems is the fundamental mechanic of the meta game being the real game Yeah, right You would look at this game or any of these games and say aha There's this map. There's these trains You're trying to run trains to get the longest to get long routes that are worth a lot of points And that you would be thinking is that is the real game But no that game you're thinking of is rero tycoon right rero tycoon is the game That you want to run the trains and get the most money this game is more about Extracting wealth from the system into your own personal coffers while fucking over other players with a spreadsheet right so take rero tycoon And no longer are you is each player a train company? You are now instead a stock investor wealthy person right tycoon a literal tycoon The players of the rero tycoon are actually these Abstract company objects and you buy and sell shares in them You might at one point be the president of one in which case you will decide what it does on its turn You might be the president of two or three or or or all or none Uh, and you are you know, so you might take the turn of a company once in a while here or there But you are simply just trying to not make one company better or worse necessarily You are simply trying to Take the most money out of the system and into your pocket Yep, your money is not the company's money You want to own shares in the valuable companies You want to when trains are required to be purchased you want someone else to have to purchase them And then you want to get the revenues for when those trains run and passengers pay to get on them Right, uh when tracks have to be laid through the mountains You want someone else to dig the tunnel and you want to run your train through it Uh or better yet you want them to dig the tunnel and then put a blocking token so that they can't run their train through it only you can This is the kind of game this is Um And they're all what makes eight Yeah, all these 18xx games are basically that same fundamental theme but with crook Like rules are crook slightly so like in some games the companies if they like someone buys enough stock to start one They start with all the money that they could have started with from the bank In other games they start with the money the players put in Right, so what makes 1889 different from the other ones, right? Well, I'm not going to go into all the details of everything that makes it different because I don't know them all Yep, we're going to focus more on like how it feels like why how does it feel different to play? Right 1889 is mostly from what I've heard based a lot on 1830 Which I think is the original 18xx game with a few minor changes And obviously the map is different and the trains are a little different, right? But the first big difference is that you know, there's a this is concept of a company floating, right? So it's you know, every company starts with no one owning any shares and you start buying shares, right? And and you when you when enough shares of a company have been bought regardless of who bought them The company comes into existence and can start playing the game And the company has its own money which is separate from players money So in 1846, which we did an episode on long ago, which I'll link to uh Right the way it works is that you buy IPO shares And I forget how many you have to buy to make the company float, but it's some number And then the company will have money equal to The money spent on those IPO shares sort of like the real world, right? Like if I buy an IPO share for $100 the company now has $100 to invest in it that it can use, right? Um, but then you know after the company floats, there's still IPO shares sitting there And if you were to say buy one in 1846 that would put more money into the company, right when you bought more shares In 1889, let's say a company opens at $70, right? Yep, so you're setting the initial share price at $70 a share Right, so and I buy five of the shares So $350 is spent on buying shares The other five shares are still there available to be purchased at $70 each the IPO shares the five That I did not buy that someone else could buy later or I can buy or whatever The company immediately as soon as it floats the company will immediately go open And it will have $700 in its coffers, right buying those additional IPO shares will not put money into the company The company starts with its full amount of money from all the shares Even though only five have been purchased and when those remaining five are purchased that money just goes to the bank Right yep, and what this means is that you can sort of get you get this mechanic happening that doesn't happen in 1846 so much where you want to just float a company Suddenly all that money you spent is doubled But it's in a company and you want to yank that money out of that company and into your wallet You can't just embezzle it directly. You can't just steal it You know there's a fiction you can't do that like you need the company to buy a smaller company that you own Personally from you at an exorbitant rate or you need to invest in a second company And then basically have that company once you trick some other morons into investing into that company with you You have your original company buy Something from that company for like a dollar like buy all that company's trains and then sell all that company shares and fuck it Yep Things like that happen Exactly and the main thing and there's the main rule in this game is that if a company has no trains It must buy a train at the end of its turn right And if a company does not have enough money in its coffers to buy a train The president of that company must contribute to buy the cheapest train available from their wallet On top of that different trains like you can only buy trains in sequence And there's like a level two a level three a level four train Once you buy certain trains of certain levels All the trains of certain earlier levels just instantly disappear and are gone forever and worth nothing Right, so the game starts only the two trains are available the weakest train They can only go to two spots right so they they don't collect a lot of money They just go from point a to point b like a shuttle Um And so let's say a company loads up on two trains Well as soon as I think a four train is bought those two trains will all disappear from the game Yep So if a company is full of two trains and it doesn't have enough money Then as soon as someone else buys a four train that company has no trains and has to buy one So the trick you want to do would would be be the owner of the company with the two trains It suddenly doubles money. There's a big fountain of money in that company because it just it floated You want to use all the money from that company to buy trains From this other company that you started your second company So you moved all the money from company a that has the shit trains to company b Which has the good trains, right? And then uh company a Loses all its trains But luckily by the time that happens You sold your shares in that shitty company and now someone else is the president and now they are forced to Purchase a train with the money from their wallet and now you're ahead Yep And your wallet is full of money that you didn't spend on trains You spent some company money on trains and then you can use that money to buy more stocks and rinse and repeat And everyone's right and now that right How can that person now who just lost all the money in their wallet buying trains by you know out of pocket? Uh invest in stocks They're their funds are depleted. Yeah, they're not gonna be too good at the stock market game out of this game pretty easily if they're not careful And the game is always tense as soon as anyone has two companies they could There's a lot of ways they could screw everybody else over Right, so I think the major the major things going on in this game is That the turn order matters Too much that is probably like what one thing this review is true of I think all the 18 xx games But it's especially true of this one Yep, and that's sort of this interesting fatal flaw and why we want to talk about this game because I enjoy 18 xx games I enjoyed this one more than the other ones like this is I think my favorite. I know I enjoy it But but I still have problems with it. Yeah, but what we're realizing is that there are specific Mechanics in these games that we like But there are other mechanics in these games that either obscure the reality of those mechanics Or are kind of broken or arbitrary or limit how much you can engage with the fun parts of the game So right so like you would think that like choosing the right stocks to buy Like figuring out their values into the future would be The like a really good heuristic that you would want in this game It would be that only if everyone playing the game had never played 18 89 before sure But that only helps you a little bit that helps you like a tiny amount Yep, when we were playing our game before all four of us knew Which stock was the hot stock at all times no one disagreed about the value of anything at any point Right, it's like it was pretty much obvious like if you have money to buy a stock and you're gonna buy one Which one to buy there wasn't it wasn't a hard decision And it didn't change the course of the game that significantly what changes the course of the game significantly is like well I'm going third therefore blah. Yeah player order was much more important in terms of determining who was gonna win This is my real problem like the the deep flaw of all 18 xx games is that The basic game like operating the trains like there's not much there, which is fine The stock rounds are the real game But the stock rounds can be extremely massively disrupted by specific things that can happen in those otherwise unimportant operating rounds like Someone buys the next train that rusts a bunch of trains now the whole game state is broken But because it's not just the turn order of this of the that you have in the stock round There's a separate turn order of which order the companies will take their turn In the company round. Yeah, but you can't manipulate the turn order of the stock round during the operating round But you can write the stock round is determined Basically, there's an order that's set randomly at the start of the game and as a first player marker and basically Whoever takes the last stock action buying or sell and or selling and then everyone passes The next person after the person who took the last action. So let's say I buy a stock Everyone else passes then I pass. Yep. Whoever is to my left is going to now go first The order is always the same. It's like clockwise around the table And that's the fundamental thing That I feel is holding these games back from being great Generally as opposed to being great in this extremely narrow niche Right the second thing is so the order that the companies operate is from most valuable to least valuable Yep, there's this whole complicated market Listen to our 1846 episode if we'll talk about that because Because companies can only buy trains on their turn. They can't at the end of their turn also They can't sell trains, right? So if you want if you have two companies and you want company a To sort of take trains away from company b and company b To then buy a good train with all of the money that it has now and then get rid of company a You need to make sure that company a That's going to do the buying right to pull the shitty trains into itself Has to be more valuable than company b so that it goes first Yep, but at the same time you also have to make sure that other companies that could buy a train in the wrong order Don't exist and operate before you and fuck it up Right. It's like I want to buy a four train Well, there's only a few of those in the game if too many other players go before you They'll buy all the four trains before it's your turn But if too many go after you you might buy the four train And then other people can execute their plans and move right into the sixes and you get rusted in one of your companies And it's your bankrupt Right, so that turn order just matters so much and you can pay attention to it and manipulate it Which is a skill, right? But you have very few levers With which to manipulate it and you're very much at the mercy of the other players and the physical turn order Yes, you do have few levers with which to manipulate it But you can see it so you can at least avoid falling into its trap, right? Um, if you're watching it closely But the biggest problem is that it's just disappointing not to say that that's a bad game It's just like you come to the train game wanting to do train stuff And it's like you're not doing train stuff you're doing turn order stuff But then you think oh well what I actually want to do like you realize the fun of this game Is the corporate shenanigans and the stock stuff like that's real fun But then you're like oh, how do I execute the plan? How do I fuck scot over loot this company leave him with the shell the rotting husk like how do I pull that off? You know how to pull it off But the only way to actually execute it is to manipulate the turn order Thus the turn order becomes the primary driver of success or failure But even worse the turn order becomes the primary determiner of whether or not you even have the option to do the fun part of the game So the second thing in this game is that Um, it is not as bad as monopoly Um, but we talk about this in a lot of our panels. Oh, the games that are the games that are over But they're not over right so a perfectly designed game of any kind a sport You know the children's game whatever Pong is actually like the first video game is a hundred percent perfect in this regard Right pong which and well tennis is perfect, which is why pong is perfect because they're the same Uh a game at the start of the game a perfectly designed game All participants teams or players right in an ortho game by the way a game with winning and losing Yep, uh should have a perfectly equal chance of winning So now player player skill is a separate factor here We're talking about in terms of the actions that a player game state Yes, we're talking about based on game state alone at the start of a game Right all if it's a four player game all of the four players should have a 25 chance to win If it's a two player game at the start of the game both players should have a 50 chance to win right Then as soon as or before Right one or more of the players reaches Uh a hundred percent chance to win the game should end if someone has that a hundred percent chance to win And the game has not yet ended. They're still playing the game, which is for example What happens in monopoly you've won the game your chance of winning is a hundred percent But other players have not yet gone bankrupt. So the game is not officially over The game is you're continuing to play a game meaninglessly garbage time. That is a bad game design It is also a bad game design if one or more players have an extremely low or zero percent chance to win And they are still playing and not eliminated. Right. So I think 1889 of the three We've played suffers from that the most it's hard to say because 20 38 I am incapable of reaching the end of that game. Well, I think part yeah I think in 20 38 we weren't we only played it once and we weren't capable of necessarily Feeling the percent chance to win right so like if you don't realize if no one is good enough to realize That they have won or lost already Then the game can actually continue to be fun. Yeah as you continue playing We talked about that way back way back in a review of railroad tycoon how even if you're losing The manipulation of the game state is fun enough to where people tend to not care that they're losing or even realize it Right. Well, that's losing should be fun Right is that the game should be fun even if you are losing and know it Yep, but I'm saying is that if you don't know you're losing Right, then the game can still be fun if it wouldn't be fun If you knew you were losing exactly right or if you knew you'd already won Right, the game could potentially still be fun like 1846 if you didn't know you already won I feel like there are more players have a little more agency in the very end of the game to alter the the final sorting but in 1889 like The game ends and then it's just it's a spreadsheet of all right the last operating rounds 3x revenue that player wins and we know the game's over Yeah, so it's like, you know, you might get I got burr. I made a mistake early, right? And that's every time I play these games. I've never won ever ever not even once But I keep playing them anyway because every time I play I learn I make some horrible mistake that makes me lose And I learn and I don't make the same mistake again And I just keep doing it and I make less and less mistakes later Right, but unlike go which is the same exact learning pattern I hate playing go even though I respect go as a game Is because in go there's too many cycles right and there's no heuristic I don't actually learn well. I'll play go and lose and not know why I lost Yup 18x whereas if I play 1886 or 1889 I'll I just lost a game that took a couple days I learned 10 different things I did wrong and I'll never do any of those things more than once again Yep, and we're playing this online implementation So we can actually step back through the log like I'm looking at the first game We played the three player one just to have it up on the screen I just look back through the log and you can pinpoint the exact moment a player made the mistake that loses them the game Right and notice how those mistakes I made in the first three player game I did not make in the second one Yeah, the second one you made a mistake way later The problem was the mistakes you made in the second game Set me up to get completely screwed when up to that point. I had a chance of winning Right, I think that I'll get to that later, right? So So the point is is that in this game, right? I had made a mistake and lost relatively early I knew my percent chance of winning was basically zero once I had made that mistake It was still fun to continue playing to some extent, but the game that's a that's a poor game design The game should have eliminated me or ended the game, right? And then b we had reached a point in the game where we knew who won But the game was not yet over He had to do two more sets of whatever just doing math to figure to reveal who would won But the game should have ended because someone so interestingly at least 1889 One of the rules is if a player actually goes bankrupt The game it's not that they're eliminated the game just immediately ends That is a good rule that if you do actually go fully bankrupt the game ends I feel like that's the fiction there is the government comes in and like what the fuck just happened in here Yes, exactly. That is perfect. That actually happened to me the first time I played Or the second time I forget second time But anyway, the point is that that's a good rule But you could get really close to bankrupt without being bankrupt and the game would continue But you would be suffering and losing the whole time stuck in this game for no reason Yep Now I guess the other the interesting thing about the games is that the stock rounds as fun as they are They're extremely constrained in very specific ways to where a lot of the clever things you think you'd be able to do You really can't because you can sell any number of shares Or buy and or buy exactly one share Right, you can sell a whole bunch and buy one you can buy one then sell a whole bunch Usually you would sell first to get the money to buy with yeah, right because it doesn't really matter what the order is Right, but basically you can buy exactly one share And you can sell as many as you want and you have to you can't mix them up You can't like sell buy sell. Yeah sell buy or buy sell And then it's the next person's turn and you can only buy one total share This is why the turn order matters a lot. I can't just come in I mean, I guess the turn item might matter more if you could buy as many as you want because like I go first I buy 10 shares But that that's where the turn order that stock around is a little is not quite granular enough Coupled with all these other rules that really constraint like there's rails on the game Get it But the rails are things like If once someone's selling stock because you never buy and sell stock between players You're basically always selling it to the market and buying it back from the market But there's all these rules like no one player can own more than 60 of any company No one player no one can sell stock into the market once there is 50 percent of the shares of that stock in the market There's all these sort of guardrails that prevent a lot of potentially interesting things from happening I know the reality of why those rules are in place is because with these rules as written The game does not work and breaks without those rules But I feel like a better designed stock round Could remove a lot of those restrictions and let players go a little more hog wild While still being interesting and while still giving players The agency to pull off those ridiculous maneuvers without giving other players no chance to defend themselves There's a sweet spot there that no one has found Yep, uh, you know, I'm not sure if it's people trying who designed these games trying to stick to some sort of historical accuracy Or a little bit of cargo cult design and that a lot of 18xx games Do things because other 18xx games a person liked did them Oh, yeah, it's definitely it's it feels a lot like You know, there was dnd and that everyone had their dnd mod, right? This 18xx is like well There was the original 18xx game and then everyone published their little mod and actually made them into real games As opposed to just their home brew, right? So it's like it's like it is a whole world of every single person's dnd home brew where they Change the rules just the way they like but they have you know They've changed them in ways that do significantly make them different games like 1846 and 1889 come I engage with them completely differently. I feel completely differently about them while i'm playing I like them both equally for different reasons Yep, but they're still at their core the same sort of thing, right? It's not a bigger divergence, right? It's like fixing dnd with by making pathfinder. Yeah, it feels different, but it's still the same thing It's a turn based miniatures combat rpg kind of thing Yep, right even though you you you shimmied it over and fix some and that's the thing without you didn't leave the arena Without some testing and some futzing around and doing some math It's hard to tell from play Which of those guardrail rules are there because someone found a problem and that was their solution Versus which ones were basically copy pasted from a different 18xx game Right, so what I think is what I think is missing from a lot of these games is that a They're clearly political games because they're multiplayer games where you can interact with each other Like in the last game we played Chris had a choice of which of the two other players who because the like we're playing this online implementation One cool thing it does is it shows at any time the total Worth of any player because in the end your score is how much money you personally have Including all the value of your stocks Yeah, so it shows that at every point during the game and there was a critical turn where you were already done You were out of the game your worth was like half everyone else's But the rest of us were basically equal in worth and on that round Chris dumped a bunch of the stock in a company that I own the most of instead of someone else Which pulled me way down That that is a political decision I like that about these games like I don't want them to become a political That's a very different kind of game, but the politics is definitely there Though I think for a lot of players. It's highly obfuscated by the mechanics I think a lot of players think these games are more deterministic than they are and Don't understand. Well, there's no randomness. Yeah, there's no randomness other than the original turn order Yep, right So I think that what I want what I want politics wise is I wish there were more Enforceable politics just a little bit, right? So for example, let's say two people Bought too many private companies in the original auction and they can't float alone, right? But they could float together right if they wanted to But because of turn order one person the person who goes first would have to buy the first share And then that next person is not Man, they don't they can't there's nothing to enforce them to say you're floating with me It works Scott Scott starts to float a company is like room. I can float this if you help me And I'm like, yeah, sure it comes to my turn. I float a different company. Fuck you Right. It's just no, there's nothing to do about it, right? I wish there were some I'm sure some of these 18xx have deal making. Yeah, there shouldn't be just free wheelie deal deal making Because then you're just making a material up like a bad sidereal confluence Yeah, no, no, no, I don't want that level of stuff But I do want there should be some sort of, you know, there is a solution There's a very especially That also helps you with that problem of your chance to win is low You clearly see another winner if you could make a for sure alliance Right of some kind that's somewhat enforceable or Has actual in-game effects There is a specific Obvious solution that I one path to coming back that I almost want to try to Write down and try to play 1889. I might just play it by myself just to make sure the math all works There's an elegant solution to that but before I reveal my elegant solution I want to back up to another point you made about the politics One flaw in these games is that Political risk Which what I mean by that is there are actions you can take in this game That are not that do not expose you to political risk meaning because you bought 10 of a company No one can just arbitrarily fuck you over because of that but Once you buy 20 percent of a company that someone else owns Depending on turn order you've opened yourself up to political risk where another player may have if you have a better turn order You haven't opened yourself up But at least not in the next round because and but then if the turn order were because as long as you can make it To the next round you could just sell the shares and you're seeing but there's almost no Operational risk and minimal market risk in this game The only risk you can actually expose yourself to is political risk Which means that generally if you're tied or slightly behind the only options you have to get ahead there's no Like risk assessment you can do because all the actions that only incur market risk will not be enough to matter So you end up having to expose yourself to political risk But there's no low level political risk in this game If you expose yourself to a political risk in this game either you're fine or you're completely fucked There's almost no middle ground at any point You can't actually climb in this game. All you can do is push other people down See if you push everyone else down because they expose themselves and got burned and you're left on top You've got all this money. You can buy all the shares. You will just naturally rise all the companies just rise So I got burned once in the late game, which is fine. That's what you expect So now I was behind a little bit the two players who were ahead of me were neck and neck And there was nothing I could do to push down both of them and due to the way the stocks evolved I ended up not being able to push down either of them in any meaningful way Meanwhile, you were basically out of the game pushing you down would help me a little But it wouldn't hurt like hurting you doesn't matter and helping me It doesn't help you to hurt me Yep, I can help doesn't help you to hurt me if I've already taken a hurt. Exactly But simultaneously I'm already out. There was no action we could take together to try to rise up together Because it was late game. There were no right not with not what the not what the rules is written Yeah, exactly. Those are the kinds of I think the other things is that if you want to I would either So because the turn order is so important, um, I think I would either a put in more Direct turn order mitigation or management mechanics. So for example, you might bid on turn order You might uh, everyone starts with the same amount of money, right? But if going first is better Why should the first player start with the same amount of money, right? That's like a basic board game balance thing, right? Is like Puerto Rico the first three people get in to go the last two people get corn because going last is worse Yep, so the corn balances it out, right? It's like this simple stuff like that to to mitigate that turn order thing a little bit Yep, but you can't mitigate it too much without making others and even changes to or Or eliminate turn order and make it more about simultaneous actions If you eliminate turn order now the game is actually about that's what I'm on about I want a workshop and try not about turn order with the idea of a simultaneous market Like you basically write a limit price on a bunch of orders You've revealed them all simultaneously Players orders execute against each other and then anything that doesn't execute against a player executes against the bank there's a system you could come up with but One of my worries is that if you remove that obfuscation and remove the player turn order And made the stock rounds like more of a game I think what happens is you reveal How little most of the other mechanics matter to the point that they can be completely eliminated and you've made a completely different game Yeah, I think that's what it is is that all of the 18 excess games I've played it's that there's these multiple It's it's hard to develop heuristics and make decisions Because the thing you're directly interacting with is is sort of hiding the truth. You know what it's like It's like playing old people always talk about how it's a right well people talk about it's a spreadsheet game Right, but it's like well, okay. There's a lot of spreadsheet games out there You know people are talking about like, you know eave or whatever you've online, right? The way this spreadsheet works is that your the inputs you have Right, it's like you're taking turns messing with the spreadsheet first of all So when you when you get to mess with it matters a ton because who knows what it's going to look like by the time We get your hands on it You could only put an inputs on the far left Right those inputs directly affect things like on page two of the spreadsheet So you're looking at page one and page two, right? And you're like, okay, I'll type this on page one. This happens on page two I type this on page one this and that's where you're thinking right when you're when you're new to these games But actually page two is affecting something on page three and maybe even page four And that's what the real game is and you can't see that because it's not told to you You have to just like dig deep and be like, oh Buying this share here, right means that the value that is the tenth share in this company It's the end of the stock round. It will bump up. It will bump up. Therefore, it will go first It is someone else's company they get to go first Therefore that company will be able to put a token on that spot on the train track Which means that the company that goes after it is going to Its trains are going to run shittily because that token will be blocking them, right? So it's like, oh, you're thinking when you made that decision, right? Just like, oh that company that's a valuable share. It's going to increase in value Why wouldn't I buy it sound investment, right? But actually you have fucked over this other company quite a bit because of the token situation on the map Right by buying a share, which is you can't see that kind of thing happening It's so obvious you get to the situation where you can see it But you have no agency to manipulate the turn order to avoid it because of some other player passed And now there's like there's literally no way to get the player to your left to take an action before you pass There's no way to go first Right. It's like, okay. Now that I've seen that this token thing is a possibility, right? What can I do? It's like you're not there's no move you make. That's like the get ahead move. It's the avert Disaster or fuck someone else and get way ahead It's basically don't step on landmines, right? And then hope try to get other players to step on your landmines that you set now Don't think if they step all you know what this is everyone's everyone's always walking forward 18xx games are just spy versus spy on the nes Kind of that's what this game is everyone's everyone is always marching forward Right and you sort of snowball as you move forward because the more money you have the more money you make in the stock market, right? The more shares you own right all the shares are moving up mostly They can move down a little bit But you can't really like lose all your money on a bad event despite the fact that we just spent like 45 minutes kind of like really nitpicking all these fiddly rules and complaining about them These games are still very fun Yeah, I think that's the thing that's that makes this such so much discussion about them Is that there's this core that is crazy fun, right? Uh, and you you learn something new every time that you can you know Unlike go where you lose and you don't know why you lost you lose every time And you know why you lost and you keep improving which gives you this fun Cycle of learning every single time, right? You get lots even if you lose right you get this Sort of reward, right? You don't feel bad about it It's fun to play And you there's a strong desire, which is why every time we talk about these games I feel like people who play these games when I see them talk they talk about the game Whereas when me and rim talk we talk about how to fix the game Yeah, and the re we do that for every game, but we do it especially for these games Uh because there's this sort of disappointment and also sort of Uh Excitement of having like you found a buried treasure, but we need to drag it out of the dungeon Yeah, because like the game's bad. We don't nitpick the mechanics We look at the mechanics like wow fuck this game and we don't there's we don't want to save it We're happy to let it die We don't even we're like we're like oh man. Look at this great stuff We found in this 18xx game How the hell do we get this good stuff out and not and and remove all this mess? Wait a minute. So if 18xx games are just uh Are just five or spy on the nes then you and I playing 18xx games is just torch bearer We're just trying to get the stock round and the operating round out of the dungeon somehow Well, there are games out there the city of the big shoulders Oh, yeah, but they always leave something behind I learned about this other one recently Called what was I forget what it was called? But basically it's a game where there is still they have that meta game of stock buying and then operating right and I think That's a good that people have recognized that you could take that meta structure Where the meta game is the real game around some other game that could be literally anything Like you could take carcassauan and be like all right instead of you being a color We're gonna buy stocks in the different colors and then After we've done buying stocks Whoever has the most stocks in a color will place the tile and the meeple for that color Yep, and then we'll share holders get victory points split among themselves Right exactly and it's like, you know, you could just play the carcassauan like that right you could do it to any game Uh, so that's been recognized and done, but I think there is so much potential In that model that has been Unfulfilled. Yeah, it gives me a great desire to work on that for whatever reason 18xx games have Touch the face of god in all these places, but they haven't quite pulled it all together under coherent experience It's like they're sitting on the face of god, but they don't know it Right like they're riding around on a giant turtle, but they don't know they're on a giant turtle And I think it's partly because the games are like I see the turtle and I'm like, oh my god How do I ride on the turtle? But also I've noticed that the community around these games tends to hyper focus on the games themselves as relatively small And I'm not saying they don't recognize flaws in the games never opinions about them But they have to be very all have different opinions with which ones they like the best and you know But there's very little like willingness to discuss radical changes to the games like that It doesn't I know they want to play 18xx. They want to play what it is They don't want to play They don't want to just take these certain parts that we like right we like parts They like everything that's in there. They're not upset So to get back to the thing I said before and then I think we've talked about this game enough The way to fix that binding problem without making it a game where we're just making deals forever Like binding deals is to add without changing any other rule in 1889. I think this would work You add the concept players a third option during the stock round you can buy You can sell or you can sell a futures contract to another player Well, there is one that there's a new york one that has short selling Yeah, short sell well I have ideas about short selling but that doesn't solve the problem of you and I want to make a deal to float a company Right with a futures contract the way it would work is I would Sell you let's say we want to float. I want to float a company I want to get you to agree to help me float that company You actually want to but the game has non binding rules and we both know Whichever one of us moves first the other one's just going to fuck them over and go for someone else Right because that's the best move. So I sell you a futures contract. I say for $300 I will sell you a contract where in externs or in one turn or like I got to figure out the details on this you Must buy three shares of that company from me or or or have them Now buy them from me Oh, right, right. You give me cash now Now I have your cash and my cash you have a futures contract. You are obligated to buy those shares from me I am obligated to sell them to you We have agreed on the price of that transaction and cash was exchanged accordingly and then As I buy I buy all the stock I go through the whole float I float the whole thing and then I hand those shares over to you for the agreed upon price Right two turns later. Here's the shares. Yep And I think that would work without changing any other rule in 1889 But I don't know if I am non lazy enough to try it Yeah, who knows Play testing is the is the hard part of game making. Yep And you can only get so far just reading your own rules and playing your game in your mind or playing it against yourself Yep, that's a good way to design a game that only you are good at Sure All right. So yeah, 1889 now we've talked about three of these different train games If I had to rank them 1889 is still my favorite then 1846 and 2038 is Without a digital implementation unplayable by me I just haven't played enough of them to have a real opinion unfavorite. Yeah Well, I do want to play it. I want to play 1830. I do want to yeah I do want to call attention to uh on the gmt games website Um, there is currently it's sort of it's not it's not a kickstarter But basically they have this program. They call the p500 program Where when enough copies of a game are pre-ordered then they make the game So there is a game 1833 ne Which is 1833 new england Rarodding in new england and it is an 18xx game And it's on a new england map And there has already been 734 orders of this game and if you order it now It'll cost you 58 dollars if you wait, it'll cost you 84 dollars So I ordered it already for 58 dollars. All right. I'll play that Uh, and it's an 18xx game and on a new england map And I think that it also comes with an 1846 like mini expansion So if you already have 1846 or if you have a friend, uh, who has 1846 Then uh, you're good to go and also the designer of 1833 new england is Tom layman who has made almost most of the great games that we You know, so You know race for the galaxy, I think right Pretty sure that's the guy Right. Yeah for the galaxy pandemic, right? Did he make pandemic also maybe? Yeah, I'm just I'm looking at the map of 1833 ne right now Yeah, yeah, I got distracted This has been geek nights with rim and scott special thanks to dj pretzel for the opening music cat lee for web design and brand Okay for the logos be sure to visit our website at front row crew dot com for show notes discussion news and more Remember geek nights is not one but four different shows sci-tech mondays gaming tuesdays anime comic wednesdays and indiscriminate thursdays Geek nights is distributed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 license Geek nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience, but unlike those other late shows. It's actually recorded at night