 So if you had to describe a game that most people would assume that Raymond Scott would have no interest in 1846 should be near the top of that list. No I mean it's not a game we have no interest in it's just one of those like stereotypical games we sort of always jokingly refer to right it's like we laugh about like a train game that uses crayons or grognard war game or train game where you only take four turns. Yeah this is this is a you know it's stereotypical grognard train game that we sort of you know the kind that you see in the game store and you look at and you go yeah I know that kind of game and then you don't ever play it. You very rarely see people playing these kinds of games and when you do they tend to fit certain stereotypes. Yes games tend to take a very long time. The games tend to be more simulatory than the sort of elegant machine building type games we tend to prefer. They tend to be more experiences where you explore a set of complex mechanics rather than a game where you read the rules and already have a pretty good heuristic about what to do. They also accurately represent true historical events at least related to trains in this case so that you can you know learn like so someone is a nerd about old trains would like get jolly's playing this game right regardless of the winning and losing factor. Now what's funny is that even games like not age of steam but railroad tycoon like the baby version that game all the cars when you buy trains they have that numerical like four two two like this is a four two two train and because of that I actually know what that means. I don't know what that means. It's those guide wheels versus drive wheels versus those trailing wheels. How many of each there are. OK. And I mean only on the locomotive that all the cars. Yeah the locomotive itself. Yeah. But 1846 has that amped up to eleven. So this game was present basically our friends Chris and Anthony like this game. They played it and well there's a whole series of 18 XX games that are all train games from different geographies and areas I guess mostly in the U.S. but I assume they've also got Euro rails and stuff like that. But you know that are you know so this one is about the Midwest and of course the year 1846 like what was happening with train companies there and then. Yep. And apparently the I have not looked at these other games but I've learned a little bit about them. All the other 18 dot dot games are very similar but have like soul crushingly esoteric differences or like very specific nuances that make them completely different games. Right. So it's like you could learn one and then easily learn to play another one in a short amount of time once you've learned one. But there will be significant differences. You'll probably not win because you'll like you'll mess those up right because but I guess if you're super studied on train history maybe you'll just anticipate those differences because they match real world events. Yeah like you might know about one of the like small railroads like like the Erie line or something and what happened to it. And then when you see what happens to in the game like all it makes perfect sense because actually there is this this line that used to go around Lake Erie. It's not in this game but it is a train line I know a lot about was it there in 1846 or before then or after then. I think it was around. It was around before then. Definitely. It just does not play in the 1846 game. I think its heyday was earlier but I know stuff about it because it's intrinsically tied to the history of this theater point anyway. So yeah but the other interesting thing about this game like the core point I want to get out in the review before getting the details is that we both enjoy it and I did not expect to feel the desire to not only play it but to play it again and having played it twice to actually really want to play it a third time. Well here's the thing is like I don't super want to play it right but it's like I totally will play it and it's sort of on this borderline where it's like it's got a lot of action right. One thing I really like about it is that even if you're losing and getting your ass kicked like you still do stuff. There is an exception to that. Amanda got into a specific situation where she was pushed to bankruptcy by nonsense and literally could not do anything meaningful for many turns in a row. I guess so but it's really hard to not do. It was it was such a like crazy situation a turn of events that happened that she had no control over. There's also like a lot is a lot of even though the rules are sort of as a tariff there's a lot of flexibility in what you can do in terms of like stock trading and train building and train buying it. So there's a bunch of very fiddly specific arbitrary seeming exceptions to general rules but they are further from the core of the things I asked to be able to do than the games or I would complain about that like there's limits on how many stock certificates you can own. But that doesn't really come into play until the very end of the game. So even though that is an arbitrary distinction it is not something that I bumped into in the course of natural play. But anyway so the main thing is like the game takes a little while to play. It takes a few hours. Yeah. You can play fast if you've got skills and help and experience but it still takes a while no matter what the game has sort of on this border between where it takes too long. It's not worth it. If it was shorter it would be like the best game ever. But it's not so long like monopoly long you want to kill yourself. It's like OK. I put the time aside. It's still and unlike say eclipse where there's a lot of time sitting doing nothing you're doing stuff the whole time. You don't get you know I haven't gotten bored and distracted usually when there's an eclipse playing eclipse takes as long or longer. But I'll spend a lot of time during an eclipse game sitting around being bored waiting for my turn in this. That's almost never happens right. Either. Either while I'm waiting for my turn I'm thinking about like stock value and like could I pull this off over the next few turns and wonder what Scott's going to do or I'm watching some drama unfold in the stock market. Yeah. And you can only do a very small number of things on your turn. So the the rounds go around very quickly and then everyone sort of calculates simultaneously. Yeah. So without that downtime like you're into it for those hours you're actually probably in sort of play per time. It's very efficient. Right. Whereas eclipse if you actually like to talk about if you took an NFL game and cut out all the commercials the game is only like 20 minutes of real time or something like that of actual playing from like start of place to end of plays. This game is like no it's actually four hours long and use the whole four hours. Eclipse is like five hours long but actually you're only using like one hour of your own time and four hours of waiting. But it is also interesting how such a sort of diversion and simulatory experience is crafted from a relatively small set of relatively elegant mechanics. Yeah. No there's not actually it's like it looks complicated. It feels complicated. But if you were to say redraw this game or read graphically design it to remove all the history stuff and the reality stuff and I would not be interested. Well yeah but make the symbology you know more I see where you're going to this right. You would see the game actually isn't really as complicated as it appears. Yep. It is it is actually not. It's like oh you have a round where you do stock stuff and then you do have two rounds of not of playing the game and then you do stock stuff again. But what's also interesting is stock market play play stock market games around and around like this that are reasonably simulatory like that kind of game style. The fact that it has so much history steeped into it like the proper nouns and all those like other train companies. It actually helps you build pretty reasonably good directional heuristics. Yeah. Based on just associating the fiction of the game with the mechanics like the combinations of some of those like independent railroads and certain things you might want to do in a region is very intuitive like it would be in the real world. So the only real problem I have with this game before we get into like explaining how it actually works is that there's so there's a concept in that book characteristics of games on called busy work like games that have busy work like does have one busy work in it. But I'm going to go one step further and there's I think I want to make a distinction. I've been using this word a lot lately in game reviews between pure busy work and what I like to call rituals. This game has a lot of rituals rituals are fine. Meaning but meaning that they are things that are moderately complex to do need to be done for the game to continue. But they can be basically entirely removed from your like you don't need to know them to play as long as at least one person playing knows that. I think it was. I think it's basically there's a bunch of stuff that a computer could do and then the game would take a lot of time. Chris had that spreadsheet that we used for the dividends and all that crap. And if you don't have that spreadsheet it takes longer to figure that out. So there and there is a ritual of moving the stock stuff up and down and figuring out the numbers on the dividends and all that stuff triple jump. That one makes a double jump. It's like I didn't need to know. I mean I guess I would have helped me have better directional or his tricks if I did fully understand that. But I thought you don't need to fully understand it to play well. I didn't need to. I was I was able to play well enough without knowing the exact excruciating details. But because the board game someone has to know them but only one person needs to know them and sort of be the computer. So that's my difference. Busy work is things that are generally equally spread among the players. Like imagine if you were playing civilization the video game on a tabletop but the rules were not changed at all. You have to be like OK this city produces this much food this turn. OK. It has enough food for population to increase. Yeah. Which means this much food gets eaten and this much surplus food is left over. And it's like a thing that when you play the video game the computer just does for you. But because you're playing a board game here you have to do that yourself. And you can you can choose to zoom in and pay attention to the specific math if you want to. But you don't need to for most you just need to know generally I want my population to go up. I need more food. So in this game the ritual is that as long as only as long as one person can facilitate all the details which Chris did for us then I probably couldn't play it. It wasn't. Yeah. The game is way more fun. And that's why I'd be very interested in a well made computer version of this game because the only other thing that has significant ritualistic well this one actually is busy work as players that's doing on their own is the busy guys are calculate the optimal set of routes to run your trains on. Right. So here's how this works is your each train company. Now let's talk about how the game actually plays. You have a train company. Well no you don't. You found a train company. Yes. Sure. Whatever. And you might have more than one that there is. Someone might steal it from you. Whatever. The train companies have money and trains and stocks. You as an individual person also have monies and trains and stocks. Right. And whoever has enough stock in a company controls that company. But obviously someone could buy all the stock and take the company. There's companies that don't exist yet in the game ever at the beginning of the game. Everyone buys one company or founds one. But there's some unfounded ones. You can always pick those up mid game. You might found a second one. You can have two different train companies. Yeah. It's like you know. But anyway there's an independent company. You can definitely have a third one. When it's your turn that when you operate you operate the companies that you control because you have enough stock in them that you're the president and you you you are the boss of that company. Now this is where it gets fascinating. The goal of the game is for you the player to have the most money at the end. Yep. But your money is entirely distinct from the company's money. That is the interesting thing. So when you operate a train company you spend the train company's money. Yeah. You can't use your personal money to buy a train for the train company. But you can buy stock in a train company. And that money goes to the train company. If the company still owns some of its own stock you could buy stock from the company does to move your money in and the stock out. And then when the train company gets revenues those monies go to the shareholders. So if you own shares in a company or your opponents companies when that train company operates and brings in revenue you would get some of that money. But the train company still owns some of its own shares. That's how it gets more money. If a train company lose all of its shares it can't really make any more money and it has to continue to operate without any revenues because shareholders are taking all the revenues. Yep. Now the other interesting thing is that the train companies they can invest in their own infrastructure which basically just means buying trains. Yep. And they can invest in shared track infrastructure that literally anyone can use. This is the most interesting part of the game. Right. Is that in most train games like in railroad Tycoon you're moving cubes around and stuff like that. Right. That's not what's going on here. Right. What happens here is on a train company's turn when it operates it can basically like do only a little bit. Very limited how much track they can lay out. They can like what do one upgrade and one piece of track. Yep. Pretty much or two pieces of track I think is not two upgrades. No. I messed that up like twice. Yeah. So you can only lay out a little bit of track and what you want and the thing is the tracks belong to everybody. There's no owner of track is just you're upgrading the tracks around the country or the city where the train station is. So if you upgrade centrally and have a better train station that's great for everybody. And now the train company has stations and if all the stations in the city are blocked up well then someone else can't run their trains past it. But as long as they basically your train start from one of your stations and then they run where as long as not blocked pretty much to wherever they're going to make the most money. And so this is the busy work part is basically you say well this train company has these two trains. These two trains can drive this far. Here's where my stations are. What are the routes that will make the most money for these two trains. And this is where a video game you could literally hit a button and it would tell you the maximum run. Yeah. It's not like a decision. It's just like what's the answer. You're trying to look at the board and figure out like how much money. It's like you are the rule is you make the maximum. But it's like what is the maximum. You have to some. It's like a little and you might choose to make less. But and there are situations where that might make sense. Yeah. Sure. But it's you make the maximum. Yeah. Pretty much. You might fail to figure out the maximum because it's trying to hard to figure out. It's like well I can use all the tracks on the board. What is the best route. Well I guess it's these four stations and you most of the time you get it right. But it's like annoying. I if you played in a computer the computer could just be like your revenue is X done. It would be a fraction of a second part of my brain. It's kind of fun until the map gets really complex toward the end. Yeah. And the early game is very obvious because you've only got like two stations like well. Yeah. It's these two stations. I get 80 bucks. But later in the game it's like oh no I can get 10 more dollars if I go this way. All right. And the other thing is that your your trains cannot share track. They can't like bump into each other. Like each track route or each hex edge can only be used once for you for you. But someone else can use those hex edges. You can't use your own hex edge twice if you have more than one train. So yeah. And there's all these other mechanics like so you can buy at the beginning of the game there's this whole draft where you can buy independent companies that do different things up to and including entire small independent railroads that run like a real company and eventually get brought into the big railroad. But you the player buy them with your own money. But then maybe you sell them to one of your train companies. But the game ends. There's a there's an amount of money when that amount of money is taken from the bank. Then you the game and imagine playing Monopoly and the bank has ten thousand dollars and I'm just making up a number. Yeah. Once that number one is zero and once the ten thousand dollars in the bank is completely gone. The bank has zero left. You keep giving people money for that round until everyone has the amount of money they're supposed to have. Yep. And then whoever has the most wins. So when that happens then the winner is whoever themselves not their companies just themselves has the most money between their money and the actual value of the stock they own. That's it. Yeah. So this game has like the interesting parts of the game. Right. You know the large macro strategy parts is the big one is the buying of trains because the trains go out of style and they become obsolete. And if the train company can't afford to buy newer better trains they're just done. They're screwed. Right. So you have to basically get a big pile of money in the train company so that the train company can buy a larger better superior train like two or three times during the game. One happens almost immediately. Then there's the next one is a little hard and the final one is super hard. And you can get into situations where older trains become like obsolete and run a little bit. And then they're just like literally worth. Yeah. Those trains get like one last to run and they're out. You better have the new train lined up and it's like you have to make your trains companies profitable enough that they can keep upgrading the trains and get that final up and you have to manage how much of the stock use you like you buy for so much to leave in the company. Yeah. If you leave too many shares in the company then you're sort of losing out on money and also leaving those stocks available to like be bought up by other people. But you're letting the company profit from its own work instead of extracting that wealth early. Yeah. But if you buy the shares to you know you got to buy it's like you got to buy them but you don't want to buy them too early or buy them too late. But shares in other people's companies which is crucial to like yeah it's like well Rims train company is better than mine doesn't mean I'm going to lose it. You know I could maybe buy all his shares out right now his train company doesn't. It's interesting how accurate to the time the corporate stuff is. Because you literally you're trying to extract as much wealth from the system as possible. You don't give a fuck about the train company. It doesn't your train company doesn't be the best one. You know the strategy I saw Chris use a lot was have one train company run it into the ground then have a second one that comes in later and that one runs to the end game. Because when you found a train company you do an IPO and you can pick the value of your stock. Right. So it's like he makes a bunch of early game money by running one train company in the ground uses that on a second train company that now has a bunch of money in its coffers so it can buy the better train anyway. So in terms of play and the way it feels you're using more real world fuzzy heuristics. Also when that second train company comes in doesn't really need to buy tracks because it tracks everywhere. Exactly. But you sort of have to just play it and explore these mechanics kind of bounce off of them. Like if you play this game with anyone who's played it before you'll have fun. You'll lose. Yeah. I think that's the one best thing I can say about this game even though it is a competitive skill game and also as a historical element in a thematic element. Right. You know it takes a while. Never been upset by losing or winning at this game. Yeah. It's an experience. It's just like it's just like oh you get to have a bunch of fun times playing trains running trains buying and selling stocks. And like it feels good. It doesn't feel like some roll and move garbage like monopoly. It's all decisions. This is not like what luck is there in this game. Nothing. Is there any luck at all in this guy. Just the initial drafting. Yeah. I don't think there's not a there's not a deck. There's not a dice roll. There's not a nothing. Yep. Right. And it just feels way good the whole time. So you don't really you know you don't get too upset. And even though I don't think I don't think I've ever won. I've always had done well enough had like a bunch of monies. It's not like I got blowed up and sat there getting you know the shit kicked out of me. But I could play this a few more times. I'm curious about trying the because apparently as from what I gather this one is probably the most accessible. Yeah. I don't see a reason to play the other ones unless you're a super trained nerd or unless you've played this one a bunch of times and you're kind of sick of it. Yeah. The one thing is that every time I play this I've played it three times. Now I'm actually playing one of the other ones might give insight like if the rules are a little different about a thing. Yeah. Like strategies back. You only do that if you're way into it. True. If you're just a board gamer in general it's like you're going to try one of them. Try this one. If you want to try a game that's more like these simulatory wargaming like weird stuff. This is a pretty good one for a Euro gamer to try as long as you have someone who is going to teach you and do the rituals. Yeah. Anyway. So the one thing about this game I played it three times and even though I played it three times just plenty of times to learn the rules of a game is that it's this much time between plays that I sort of forget the not the may not the general rules but these small details right when exactly do these trains expire when exactly can you start doing this versus doing that and whatnot and those details matter a lot. So what happens is I forget those details the next time I play and I'll make a mistake. For example the most recent time we played at Pax Unplugged I definitely made a huge mistake. I did something on a turn and there was no reason I couldn't have done that thing a turn earlier would have been just better. I just did a turn later then I could have for no reason just because I didn't realize I could at that time and that cost me some money whatever right. But it's like if I could play the game twice in a row or twice very close to each other. I would basically remember all those tiny details that I've probably have already forgotten since Pax Unplugged in the first game like the warm up remember how to play remember all the details game. Yeah. And then play a second game with no excuses and no forgetting of those details and probably perform really well like I give myself an actual above zero percent chance of winning if I could play twice in a row in game two in game one no zero percent chance but in game two. I think if I play twice in a row I would have a greater than zero percent chance of win. So you want to know the kind of person who plays this game. I'm looking at board game because I said like the screen shot up. Yep. The first comment someone commented on this individual picture and the comment is why is there a city tile on the Hex immediately to the west of Detroit. And sure enough there's one there because there's no city there in the game and the next response is did they house rule Ann Arbor in and yet a third person said that basically there's a lot of people chatting about this error in this one random screen shot on board game. You mean photograph. Yeah. It's not a screen. It's a screen shot. It's not a screen shot. No board game. It's not. I'm going with that. OK. It's a photograph. But someone noticed that and there is a robust discussion in this one thread about literally this one picture among dozens. Yeah. So yeah. If you are at all you know it's like you know if you hear people talk about like these you know things that you know it's sort of like I talked about back in the day fist of the north side. You keep hearing about fist of the north star but you never actually go to watch it. Right. It's just like a thing you know that's in your hobby a thing you keep hearing about but you never experience it yourself. You keep hearing about like super nerdy train games super nerdy war games or things like that. You never actually go and play them ever. You just know that that's sort of out there. It's like that is it's out there. You heard of it. It's a thing. Go check it out at least once. Yeah. It might be worth it. You might like it. You might discover something new. And even if not you'll learn something and then you'll learn you just want to do it again. Yeah. And actually to be honest this game is literally the reason why I was inspired to make that new panel on the top 40 or the 40 board games you should play. Well table top games because I'm a sneak some RPGs and card games in there. Yeah. Because yeah. So yeah we enjoyed this game and it's the kind of game that a lot of people who know us would assume we would not enjoy and shows what you know. I mean I wouldn't buy it. I wouldn't play. No. I would not play it without someone who was able to do the ritual. I wouldn't I wouldn't play it super frequently. But it's the kind of thing I could play. You know a few more times before you know I've had enough of it. And you know I don't think I could keep enjoying it forever though. Yeah. But it's like it's eventually you'll have explored all the sort of mechanics. Once you've explored them if you actually try to hyper optimize the game. Yeah. I don't know if it would still be fun. I'm no interested in that. But it is. It's just like it's a really in terms of even though it costs a lot of time to play I can't get over the fact you get so much value like you're constantly doing stuff that whole time. And it's like every time I've played it like time is flown by. It's like whoa it's already that time and it's like because you're just playing the whole time. There's no there's no downtime where you're getting bored or feeling like it's long. Yeah. I also do like the simple thing that I wish more games did of if you have a machine you can crank or a thing you can operate. The turns are do the stock thing and then you crank that machine twice. Yeah. And you're all the machine games don't like your crank at enough times. And you're making that does this is all my good. The decisions you're making are engaging and interesting and you have a lot of flexibility to be creative. It's like you can you have money. What are you going to do with it? Business man. Which is a lot of games. If you have a machine the players can crank. Let him crank it more. The game is going to feel better. Yep. Go my goods at the end of the game crank it twice. Yep. I like that. I haven't seen that enough. All right. I'm so hungry. I might I can smell what Emily's cooking in there. This has been Geek Nights with RIM and Scott special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music can't leave for web design and brand OK 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 SciTech Mondays gaming Tuesdays and Macomic 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.