 So as you know, we a while ago reviewed a game called 1846 race for the Midwest, right? So though it's an 18xx game, it's a real train game. When people say train game, that's the game they're talking about. Right? They're games that, you know, often include things such as real historical representations of actual trains. Yup. You got like operating rounds and stock rounds. The basic core idea of all these 18xx games, right? I think we reviewed 1846, which if you are going to play, get into these games, that is the first one to play. Yeah. Do not start with this one. I don't even know if I want to recommend playing this one. No. We reviewed it in late 2017. Now I've played a lot more of these games since 2017. And basically the core of these games is this really, they seem complicated and they are complicated for the average person. But that's because of reasons. But the core thing of all these games is that you invest in companies in one round. Then the companies actually do business for two rounds, two identical rounds. And then you invest or divest in companies again and you repeat this cycle of invest, work, work, invest, work, work. And whoever has the most shares in a company during the work set turns is the person who actually controls that company during the work turn. It's like, you know, the company isn't you, it's separate from you. You have your money and you run companies that you have a majority share in. Right. So to win, you want your money to be the most at the end of the game when the bank runs out of money. But you know, so you sometimes you control a company. Sometimes you might not control any companies. You might buy a company that used to be someone else's. You might sell a company now. You might end up with three companies in front of you and now your turn takes for fuck it ever. Right. It's like, you know, the company's go in order. So it's like one company might go, then it's someone else's company, then it's your company. That's how it works is investing and then the companies do business and then you invest again. And you're controlling basically your investment decisions. Which companies do I want to have shares in along with trying to make certain companies do well and make some do worse. The ones that you have more shares in, you want to do better. So they spent out more money and the ones you don't have shares in, you want them to do worse. So that other people will not make as much money. So when the game ends, you win. That's all there really is to it. Yep. And if you want to know more about these details, like what these games are like on like this higher level, I will link to go listen to our old review of 1846 because that's where we talk about a lot of this in detail. We're going to review this train game in comparison to other train games. And in the context of, I was about to say normal, regular board games. If you don't understand the other train games, you're not going to understand this review really well. Because I would say it's hard to talk about it and except using words that only people who understand these games will understand. And the other thing I would say is that this game 2038 tycoons of the asteroid belt, if you have never played one of these train games before and you like the kinds of board games you see in a game like PAX, I doubt you will enjoy playing this game. Right. This game is not easy to play. Right. There is no reason for me to try to explain this game in simpler, you know, in terms to someone who doesn't know anything about these games because this shouldn't be your first one. And if you, right, the only reason to listen to this review is if you already know about train games, 18 XX games, and you want to know about this one. But the reason of that, because I like what 1899, 1889, 1889 is the Japanese one. That's my favorite one so far. 1846 is my like second or third. I like 1846. But the thing, the thing I'll say about these games that's relevant here is that they all have this fundamental problem of, I don't want to say naive game design. That problem. But they are designed for goals other than elegance and consistency of their mechanics. Correct. They're designed for the historical experience. People that people play them tend to like very fiddly rules that have like, there'll be more exceptions to a rule than the rule. Mm hmm. Like you, you cannot internalize all the rules to one of these games unless you play them a lot. If you play them a lot, they actually break down pretty poorly. Mm hmm. So the problem with these games for someone who likes to play normal board games is that you can't just learn the mechanics and then start to play. You need to be constantly figuring out all the exceptions and fucking with the rules. And unless you have a facilitator, basically these games only need a game master or an expert to help you play them. Or a computer. Yeah, we'll get to that. Then they're very difficult to play. But that said, I love the shit out of 1846. Right. Like I said, that core concept of investing in companies, controlling some of them, right? And trying to make the most money is a great game. And I still think. You could even replace, you could, and the best part is that simple framework can be expanded, contracted and rearranged to make lots and lots of different games. You could make the investment part simpler or more complex or even crazy complex. You can make the operating part a completely different game. There's a game called a show big city shoulders or something like that. I forget the exact name of the game. If you go to board game, you can type in shoulders. There aren't that many fucking games with the name word shoulders in the title. You're going to find it. I think it might be city of the big shoulders. Anyway, it's an 18xx game with an investment round and operating. The big shoulders. I got it right. But basically instead of trains, it's like a Euro game in the operating part. Like you invest and then you play a Euro game and then you invest. It's the same. Right. Or then there's games like Chicago Express. Take the core concepts of a train game and just like distill, distill, distill. Right. Anyway, or Paris connection. So 20 38. What it does is it gets rid of the historical part by putting you way into a theoretical space future. We know we're probably not going to have space trains in 20 38 at the rate things are going. But if we did, which already presents a problem from a game design perspective because the fiddly like fucking mechanics of the other historical train games at least are trying to model very real world history. Meaning if you want, if you know something about the 1840s in the Midwest, that historical knowledge will actually help you a little bit better. I'm not not a lot, but like a little bit. Like you can intuitively play the game by doing the things that make sense as an intelligent human being looking at a complex situation. And in fact, if you do things that happened in history, right? Or they tend to play out the way they played out in history. Right. They tend to play out. So it's like, oh yeah, that rail line was built there from the Civil War. But then this event caused it to be irrelevant. Right. And then they had to dynamite it. And that happened around this year and the game starts in this year. So if I do that at this timing, it'll. And it kind of works out. So the games are almost more experiences. Like if I play an 18 xx game and I lose terribly like go bankrupt or something. It's still really fun because it's almost like I'm playing this weird simulations like playing a Civ game just to see how the world. I've never won and I've never been upset playing an 18 xx. Yup. But with 2038 it has that same level of fiddly shit from a fictional inconsistent world. Right. And the thing is the fiddly shit is so fiddly that it becomes onerous. The operating round of this game where you run the trains like my train goes here here and here to make this much money is really fun and makes sense. And I liked it. But as soon as it scales up even a little bit it is it is a disastrous mechanic like it is it is own playable. So normally the way it works in most most of the 18 xx games is when you actually run your there's a point at which after everyone's done building tracks and shit we figure out how much each money each train spits out. And what you do is you look at the board and you say all right my train has to start at one of my spots. Right. And it gets blocked by other people's spots and it can go on pretty much any track. Right. My trains just can't my my trains can't overlap each other but I have to care about what anyone else's trains do. I just can't go through any spots they're blocking with their stations. Right. So it's pretty easy to look at a board and it might not be easy to a hundred percent perfectly get the best pot most money out of the trains. But you're close enough. But you can get very close and once you get very close it's like well what changed since last turn well one piece of track was upgraded while I guess my route is upgraded by ten dollars then. Right. I'll just run the same route again with that one upgrade. And you don't have to balance to where it takes it might take you a little while to figure out but that is downtime for the other players to figure out some shit that they're going to be doing. Right. It's not too bad. It's it could be improved a computer should just tell you the optimal routes and sped out the money with no thunking whatsoever. But it's not so bad that you're it's a problem that you're like frustrated with. Yeah. 2038 the way it works is each train each company operates in order. Ain't no tracks in space. Right. Going around with their spaceship mining asteroids and collecting ore. And but the problem delivering all that stuff. Right. When potentially refueling. Right. When a ship picks up or right. It picks up a little piece of cardboard off the board or flips it over and now no spaceship for the rest of the turn can get that or it's that turn might involve like five different companies each running multiple spaceships. Right. So you the first person sends their spaceships out and now you see which ores have been flipped over and then the next person goes and sees which ores have been flipped over. And basically each person has to wait for each spaceship every turn completely rethink and re figure out the exact optimal way to get the most best ores. Right. With each spaceship. No. And then you can't even begin to think about your spaceship until everyone before you has picked up resources with their spaceships. This it made the game interminable now on one hand and the early turns is not a big deal because it's like OK well this one picks up the only two ores it can reach and no one else can reach them. Fine. And there are also ways to state claims on certain resources and no one can take them and hopefully you would claim the best ones and that way you can quickly just be like well this ship takes all the claims spots no thinking necessary because no one else can take those are claimed but you still get when you get better ships and more of them and unclaimed spots or you ran out of claims you don't have enough claims those later turns in the game starting about halfway through become a big mess plus it gets part of that might have been that the way we were playing it because we weren't fully versed in like there's no history to look at. Yep. So we ended up making companies in a way that was a little bit weird. Yeah. The way the board broke down. Totally legal though. Yeah but totally legal but it basically means that there is a trap where if the game evolves a certain way the game will take four times longer than it normally would but even if the game performed optimally this operating around situation would still be a serious problem. Right. And even worse unlike say Eclipse which has a very elegant physical mechanism for representing complex resources this game gives you fuck all for physical bits you could solve this problem not completely. For the computer. But you could solve like a third of this problem just by having better physical components and ways to track this stuff better. The game doesn't give you anything to do this. Another thing to have another thing that contributes is also the lack of stability in the game and a lot of other train games there'll be a series of rounds where things pretty much stayed mostly the same like the turn order of the company stays the same mostly. Yeah. The ownership of the company stays the same mostly everyone just sort of operates and upgrades for a few turns just moving things along here. It's like all right well this turn is value went way up and it's going earlier so that changes everything. Yeah. Right. Oh and now these all these companies merged into the Asteroid League. Well that fucking changes everything. Right. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. I want to talk about that because that part's really cool. Right. That part is really cool. Yeah. There's basically you know in these train games. I'm just saying it contributes to the instability and that you have to rethink the gathering of resource part every single time you're starting from scratch again. Optimizing which or for each spaceship and it is just this busy work it's not even like decision making. I guess there's a little bit you could theoretically take a sub optimal route with a ship to pick up resources to deny another ship resources but not in a super significant way once the board is full of Asteroids everywhere to complicate this there are ways to refuel ships so then that they can move even further if they move a certain way making it actually a pretty difficult problem to solve and optimize for like I even give an unlimited time on a complex board. It would take me a while to fully optimize. Yeah I think it would actually be hard to write a computer program to optimize and the search graph would be enormous and you'll have multiple kinds of ships and when you're buying ships you got to decide don't want the one that moves further and picks up less of the ones that are like there's way too many variables for the operating round which should be the least interesting part of a train. It's not the part where you're making decisions and I think that's a fundamental problem with all the train games is that the part of the investing part of the game the stock round is what actually most determines the victory condition which player wins which player loses which shares you have right the second part of the game the operating rounds are are only sort of secondary to who wins and loses right they're important because they control how much money each company is spitting out but if everyone's good any good gamer can operate a company not optimally but optimally enough that it's you know right and the actual decisions made during the operating round aren't as crucial to the actual victory condition of the game but they take a disproportionate amount of the time and effort and the stock rounds are usually oversimplified and don't take long at all so you're just buying and selling shares going in a circle it's real simple the really cool part about this game which is why I really wanted to like it and this is why I want I want to make a computer version of this game and then fix a bunch of stuff but 2048 2058 and some of the other train games 2057 or 58 different time you understand different spaceships the independent companies tend to be pretty simple and disappear pretty quick in this game they're all very different and you run them like real companies and there's this whole complicated mechanic where based on things I don't want to explain too much depth because you can learn this game if you want to play it they can either join the asteroid league or not join the asteroid league at some point in the future and the asteroid league then becomes this company and there's a whole like system around this that is really cool and I really wanted to interact with that by playing the game until I ran into the operating ground deadlock that made me never want to play this game again yeah I actually had the asteroid league I was the asteroid league guy I know which made it pretty cool because I started the game with one space company understood that I could withhold or pay out with like I had the option with these into these privates I would have done something way different right and you can also take a private and like turn it into a company early like there's there's a company which is like a company that's worth like nothing at the start of the game and basically instead of joining asteroid league you'd start this little like I little startup who like ships like one good basically and sucks ass it starts with no share value but I bought those shares for nothing right but those shares were worth nothing because the company was like a guy with a like a space truck is like galaxy trucker but I didn't and then theoretically if you start one early enough and work on being like a big-ass awesome company that's what I didn't understand I kept paying out because I don't I had ice finder which was a really like it was making a shit ton of money for a private because the way I'd set it up so I was making all this money and I was paying out dividends to myself and it was awesome I didn't realize I could withhold even in these privates I with I'd known that I would have withheld and I would have gotten a couple fewer shares of like the other companies having a discussion about how it should be oh yeah but train games are about your evil capitalist exploiting a corrupt system I understand yeah no I would do the completely unethical thing yeah I would withheld I would have turned ice finder into into a growth company and I would have made bank I played this game way different I had the asteroid league and it was way fun when the asteroid league formed that was way fun but the problem was is now I had to control this giant ass asteroid league and that kind of sucked so Chris in the chat says the asteroid league minors thing comes from a different 18xx game that's more normal okay okay I want to play that one whichever one that is our friend Chris you see him in the forum and he if you see a guy hanging out with us like playing train games at PAX's it's that guy Chris brings us the train game that's right I don't own any of these fucking things I would well I would consider owning 1846 I would make one before I bought one I would own it to start ideating on how I would make one because this game taught me something I can just read a rose pdf if I need to I would play 1846 1889 a lot of the other train games again I would never play 2038 again no not not in its default tabletop form but a video game that was designed to feel a lot like this tabletop game but take advantage of the fact that it's a computer and have a little more complexity like these games would be more fun if you could have a little bit more complex stock market like if I could sell options from a train company to other players or have a player sell futures that would be fucking impossible to do elegantly on in the tabletop and if you made it too complicated it would just turn into sieve or I mean there is a New York one I think that has a selling short and the stock market is a little bit more complicated but yeah like I said before the victory condition of all these games is mostly in the stock ground the operating round is like a separate mini game of optimization I would really like to play one where the stock round was more advanced and had more decisions it was more complex and the operating round was simplified and made more elegant and streamlined and abstract and this while the theme and some of the detailed rules and cool thematic things like the asteroid league and the mining at least the theme of the mining make it awesome the reality is this is the exact opposite of not in a train game it is the a much simpler stock market or at least a normal level of complexity stock market for these games and a ridiculously tedious operating rounds that are have fun aspects but just too many busy work aspects that take too goddamn long but here's the line to make it worth my while and so with 1846 and 1889 it's like I'll still play those games that are worth my while enough yes the TDM is not insane 2038 is impossibly tedious in the operating round alright so if you want to play it get into these games you can go listen to our old episode of 1846 or go play 1846 or 1889 yeah you can play that one too sure but do not play this one 1889 is actually better in a lot of ways some ways do not play this one 2038 as your first one you can find some TDM and you just want to see what the deal is there's a lot to there's some good stuff to see here in this one so I'd recommend like you play it learn it maybe not play a whole game of it because it would take too long or maybe you just have a ton of time and our game went on so long we got kicked out of packs and couldn't finish it I would not recommend this one though for serious buying playing and replaying but I realized something fundamental the primary problem with these games is that because they are tabletop and because they have very fiddly rules everywhere else they end up needing to rely heavily on start player order and the mechanics to determine that are just terrible and it matters too much to be a terrible mechanic that is the thing I think you could solve with all of these tabletop games you can make them more elegant without ruining what makes them unique and different from the euros we tend to like more simultaneous market and not an ordered market because I learned after playing it took me like a year it's got mule, mule, mule it took me a year or two to learn how important the priority deal is because that means you go first in the stock round how that gives you having it at the right time is how you win the game and I've played several games of this and I basically got burned by it over and over that I learned it but got burned by it even though I saw it and was trying to grab it I basically had the start for most of the game because it was a three player game and neither of you were willing to rust stuff there was a game of 1889 I played I think a magfest where I finally understood it and was trying to grab a hold of it it's like I understand it now but I can't get it I understand this raging bull now I will attempt to ride it I understand what I have to do in a video game even though I know when I have to push the button at that time but I keep pushing it and it's not the right time and I keep dying anyway when we played this it was the first time where I finally managed to grab a hold of that priority deal mechanic at the right time move my trains from one company to the other force the shitty company onto rim get everything in order I didn't do it perfectly I could have done it even better but that's just because I didn't understand exactly when the trains would rust but the problem is the squishy of rusting is also so important and also relies so heavily on the turn order right but I could have screwed rim more but the point is I was the first regardless of which one you played this still would have been the one where I figured it out because it's the same mechanic in all of them basically so coincidence there so yeah space trains is the only one I've played so far that I would never play again which is a shame because stylistically a plus a plus it feels very do all the characters and art and you know everything about space wise is really great so that's a shame