As a relative newbie to the 18xx space, it’s been fun to hear from a variety of different people about the supposedly “best” way to introduce the system to new players.

18Chesapeake is one that comes up a lot. In my experience, 18Chesapeake fails at this mainly because the game’s opening draft and initial rounds of play are sometimes a bit stumbly and bankruptcy is fairly common. Worse, bidding on a private company that then doesn’t align with a specific strategy—which really gets painful when you realize that as a new player, you don’t have a specific strategy—can really put you in a hole.

1846: The Race for the Midwest is a game that I think works well as an introduction to the system, in part because it is friendly towards new players. Its main stumbling block for new players is the idea of “partial capitalization.” In this format (similar to 18xx-adjacent Euros like City of the Big Shoulders), investors can start a major corporation by plunking down 20% of the funds needed to “float” the company, as opposed to full capitalization.

Full capitalization is how the majority of 18xx games fund railroad companies. Usually, one player (or a variety of investors) finance 40-60% of a firm’s initial public offering to start operations. If a par is…

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I am relatively certain that I have never uttered the following phrase, but I absolutely adore the box bottoms of both On the Underground titles. Inside the shrink, LudiCreations included a paper print of the standard fare: barcode, description, picture of the board, etc. But my heart smiled—twice—when the glossy stock fell away, revealing a partner image to the box top. The London top is paired with a Berlin bottom. Likewise, the Paris lid features a New York bottom. The silhouetted watercolor style is the same, creating six-sided beauty.

My second realization upon opening the two boxes—for they arrived together—was that each box contained roughly 60% wasted space. This, perhaps unexpectedly, also made me smile because I realized that a fan of the games could combine the two titles in one box (with mixed and matched box parts) with room to spare. One man’s waste is another man’s opportunity, I suppose. 

[caption id="attachment_300742" align="alignnone" width="1024"] ...with room, and a box, to spare.[/caption]

As for the physical contents, London / Berlin and Paris / New York are approximately identical: a behemoth, two-sided, six-fold map board, baggies of sticks representing tracks, a handful of cardboard tokens, a few site markers, and, of course, the Traveler. The one notable difference is the absence of…

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“It’s like Ticket to Ride meets Get On Board meets Caesar’s Empire,” I said to our friends as we sat down to their first play of On the Underground. 

I enjoy all three of those titles on one level or another.

The game

On the Underground: London / Berlin dropped in 2019 as a reimplementation of the 2006 original, which was titled without reference to its London locale. The box design is clean and attractive, with splashes of watercolor creating a recognizable London skyline. In a break from convention, the box bottom is the Berlin edition of the graphic, a second cover.

The map is enormous, a two-sided, six-fold behemoth of squares the size of the box. The map holds to that clean, splashed aesthetic, littered with brush-stroked lines connecting various points around the city, which are either plain gray, yellow, or some variety of special. Kudos to LudiCreations for making this thing appealing. Despite the sheer number of dots about, the board is not at all claustrophobic. Some of the brushed lines are doubled and tripled, indicating the possibility of multiple lines passing through.

Players work their way through a deck of locations, using their line colors to create continuous paths around the city in…

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Back in 2020 I swooned over Village Green, a delightfully constricting game of card placement and fluid scoring designed by Peer Sylvester and published by Osprey Games. 

Fast forward to 2023 and Osprey are back with Village Rails, designed by Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert. It’s a sequel, of sorts. Like its sibling, Village Rails provides players with the puzzley experience of creating a grid of symbol-splattered cards with scoring cards around the edge, all wrapped up in a tidy and tiny package.

It’s good: compelling, compact and cranium-caressing. Worthy of the ‘Village’ name. And yet the experience it provides is markedly different and whilst I like it quite a bit, there is no swoon.

All aboard

The goal of Village Rails is points, tracked on gorgeous scoring dials shaped like old-fashioned train tickets. They’re a delightful highlight of an excellent production.

On each of your turns you take a ‘tracks’ card and add it to your expanding 3 x 4 grid. These cards have two train tracks traversing them, with a track entering or leaving each of the card’s sides. By the end of the game you have…

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(Justin loves train games! For more on his series of 18XX reviews, please start with 18XX: A Beginner’s Journey.)

Almost every outlet I read, watch or listen to says it the same way: to get a sense of 18XX games, you have to start with one of the first games in the series, 1830: Railways & Robber Barons. Published in 1986, 1830 is the sequel to 1829, the first game in the 18XX system created by Francis Tresham.

1830 is still the most popular game in the 18XX series—as of December 2023, it’s still in the top 300 games on BGG’s all-time favorites list—so it made some sense to give this game a spin. What I quickly found is that 1830 is a great game, but a terrible introduction to the 18XX system.

Oh, That Map

If you are new to 18XX games, please follow the links above to get a sense of how 18XX games play. I won’t cover the entire system in detail here; my 1830 review will discuss the base concepts to provide some flavor on what makes 1830 unique.

1830, like other 18XX games, positions 2-6 players as rival entrepreneurs in the nascent railroad business of the early 19th century. The winner of a…

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I’ve really scaled up the difficulty level in my 18xx journey this year. After treading water with some of the classics, such as 1830: Railways and Robber Barons, 1846: The Race for the Midwest, Shikoku 1889 and 18Chesapeake, I have begun to seek out more complex iterations of the classic system started with 1829, designed by Francis Tresham about 40 years ago.

As a part of this second-level exploration, our friends at GMT Games were kind enough to send me a copy of 1848: Australia (first published in 2007 by Double-O Games, then in 2021 by GMT). 1848, designed by Helmut Ohley and Leonhard “Lonny” Orgler, is set around the railway business of Australia at the start of the country’s railway business. This business was initially a horse-drawn railway in the 1830s before it became a more industrialized system, moving not just people but mining, logging, and cement factory goods. The Sydney Railway Company, the first of the big railways in Australia, began operations in 1848.

1848 shares many of the systems started in 1829 and prevalent in most of the 18xx games I’ve tried so far. If you want to learn more about how the basics work in these games, please take a look at my previous coverage. We’ll talk here about ways…

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As I noted in our SPIEL preview, the game that was my #1 most anticipated experience was Nucleum, this year’s heavy strategy game from Board&Dice. (Normally, this would be a “T” game co-designed by Daniele Tascini, but that’s not the case for 2023.) I have generally liked every game I’ve gotten from Board&Dice, and the last two—the strangely underrated Origins: First Builders and Tiletum, my 2022 game of the year—have been fantastic.

My source of excitement: Nucleum’s design pedigree. Co-designer David Turczi has been on a tear the last three years, and not just as a solo mode designer. The reviews for Voidfall are strong, the Imperium games (Classics and Legends) are well regarded, and even his lighter designs like the Vengeance: Roll & Fight games have been excellent.

And co-designer Simone Luciani is at a stage in his career where it seems like everything he touches turns to gold. Earlier works like Grand Austria Hotel (the best Euro I’ve ever played), Lorenzo Il Magnifico, and the Marco Polo games are classics, and future classics like Tiletum are never leaving my collection. Even the Luciani games I have liked but not loved (Golem, Darwin’s Journey) were still interesting, even if I am not itching to revisit them.

I was…

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I’m diving into train games in a big way in 2023. After learning the 18xx system a number of months ago, I have been aggressive in finding these games as I try to learn the ropes.

Earlier this year, I shared my project idea with Josh Starr, the person who runs Grand Trunk Games. About two years ago, I purchased 1861: Railways of the Russian Empire / 1867: Railways of Canada (the two games can only be purchased as a box set), the first Grand Trunk production following a successful crowdfunding campaign.

1861/1867 are beautiful second editions. It is clear that Josh only wants to put his name on sensational productions of classic games, while also finding ways to draw new 18xx gamers into the system. Josh’s second project is a reprint of a game long out of print. Originally released in 2004 as 1889: History of Shikoku Railways, the game is famously known as one of the best, if not THE best, introduction to the 18xx system.

I got to know the game a bit better through the 1889 implementation on 18xx.games. Now that I have a physical copy at home, I’m even more excited—it’s great to own a game that teaches curious players about a somewhat intimidating system. While Shikoku 1889 is an exceptional…

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Wouldn’t it be great to find a game that takes many of the best parts of a game you already enjoy, makes it a bit shorter, keeps most of the fancy production elements AND still offers a rich decision space?

Lately, it seems like almost every game I loved from five years ago has tried to find that space. Heck, in the last year alone, I’ve seen or played versions of Terra Mystica, Terraforming Mars, Twilight Imperium, Spirit Island, Scythe, Orléans, and Everdell that aimed to be a more streamlined version of the base game.

This year, I’m intentionally driving hard into the past. Why look at so many new games, when there are THOUSANDS of great games from just a few years ago? I recently reviewed Age of Steam, a 21-year-old design. I like Age of Steam quite a bit, but its complexity plus its length at lower player counts are a minor turnoff.

I didn’t even know about Railways of the World (2005, Eagle-Gryphon Games) until the publisher sent a copy for review. Railways, designed by Martin Wallace (Brass: Lancashire) and Glenn Drover (Mosaic: A Story of Civilization), was updated with a 10th anniversary edition in 2015. This newer edition includes maps for the Eastern US…

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When it comes to gaming experiences, great gameplay should matter. However, hundreds of games each year lean hard into a different approach: gameplay matters a bit, but production seals the deal.

I’ve played a lot of average games that were elevated by the production; Distilled, Ahoy, Brazil: Imperial, and Starship Captains are recent examples. Theme, high-quality components, and easy-to-teach mechanics all help, and make a game that might otherwise sit on the fence hop firmly onto the side of positivity.

Lisbon Tram 28 (2021, published by MEBO Games and Eagle-Gryphon Games in the US) fits this description. It’s a simple game at its core but I was impressed by how well it was elevated by the handsome look, straightforward rules, and—for reasons that are still not clear to me—a bell that players occasionally use during play to announce that a tram needs to move out of the way.

[caption id="attachment_276736" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The star of the show[/caption]

Bing!

28 (the name that is printed on the box, which is strangely not the name of the game on sites such as BGG) is a family-weight, pick-up-and-deliver, contract fulfillment experience for 2-4 players that plays in about an hour at its full player count.

A love letter…

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Right now, I’m digging into train games pretty hard.

Cube rail games, like Iberian Games. Short train games like Village Rails. Medium-weight games, like Chicago Express. Long train games, such as 1846: The Race for the Midwest. Online train games, on 18xx.games. Fantasy train games, like Empyreal: Spells & Steam.

If there’s a reason to play a train-adjacent game in 2023, generally speaking, I’m playing it. I think that’s because I spent most of my gaming career avoiding games like this, so I want to be inclusive as I consider this category. Are train games for me? I’m going to do everything I can to find out for sure, especially if I can break out my poker chips to substitute out crappy paper money.

I have spent a good part of the last two years with Meeple Mountain attempting to build a relationship with Eagle-Gryphon Games. I’m excited to share that this mission was a success. Over the next two or three months, I’m going to be posting a number of Eagle-Gryphon articles.

Most of my friends think of Eagle-Gryphon as the Vital Lacerda shop. Lacerda has designed many of the most beloved strategy games ever made, such as The Gallerist, Vinhos: Deluxe Edition and Kanban EV.

In fact, Eagle-Gryphon has…

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If people are a city’s lifeblood and downtown its beating heart, then the city’s transit apparatus is the circulatory system carrying that vital flow to and from the places it needs to go. And perhaps there is no public transport more ingrained into popular culture than the unassuming subway.

Spidermans have been born there. Evil villains have made them their lairs. People fall in love there all the time. There’s just something about those subterranean networks of rails and tunnels that call to the human psyche, begging to be center stage in our fiction. And it turns out, it’s a great setting for board games, too. Take Terminus, for example.

Terminus is an action selection, resource management, and town building game governed by a rondel-style track (called the Action Loop) which not only functions as the game’s timer, but also serves as the main impediment to the players’ ambitions. Building subway lines to score points is the name of the game, but you only get nine revolutions around the track in which to achieve your goals. Some actions are cheaper the earlier you get to them and some items are limited. So, Terminus is going to force you to make some tough decisions, passing up some things in order to get to others before your opponents do. And that’s…

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At the end of the day, the games business—like almost every other business I’ve had a hand in over a 20+ year career—is a relationship business.

After meeting Dan DiLorenzo from R&R Games at PAXU 2021, I gained a real appreciation for what it means for a publisher to hand a game—any game, really, not just the ones that are “hot” at any given time—to media members for review.

Dan strikes me as the kind of guy that I would hang out with whether we were talking shop or not. So, when I learned he would be at PAXU 2022, he was one of the only people I made sure to chat with during my 24 hours in Philadelphia.

Dan came to PAXU because he loves Penny Arcade, the team behind the PAX events. I know he loves these folks because Dan had suffered a serious leg injury the week before the event, but still decided it was worth going to ensure he could meet with customers and fans to pitch his upcoming slate of games.

We talked for about 10 minutes before I began to walk to another appointment. Dan stopped me in my tracks. “Wait! I want to tell you about our new game.” He handed me a copy of East India Companies.…

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