A promising first playtest with Larry

Larry and I had a good time playtesting 18IA. He's never done any 18xx game before, having been turned on to Eurogames by me a few years ago. We regularly play Power Grid and we've done Caylus before, so he's got the chops for train games.

We actually managed to spend about two hours on the testing. Remember, this is having to learn all the 18xx concepts up-front, including basics of an 18xx stock market, my novel auction system, how corporations actually operate in an operating round, and so on. He was a real trouper, and had a good time learning the basic framework.

We made it through a simplified setup (dealt out the private companies 4 for him, 3 for me), and then tested my overbid system on the railroad corporations. Larry ended up with 3 presidencies, and I ended up with two. Of these, 4 out of the five companies floated during the first stock round, although I think I could have edged Larry out of one with a little work. By the luck of the draw, he had the two "best"/most expensive private companies, and I had 3 token-placement companies, including Iowa State University.

We ran through one operating round, where Larry sold off a couple of private companies and I sold off one. He had floated one corporation at $85, and had the last corporation's par value set at $100, but easily had the cash to float it. (In fact, I started us with $1200 each, which may be too much.)

I'm very happy with the auction process for the corporations, which I will describe in a later post. It worked exactly as designed - the results were a little random, but overall, the player most interested in running a particular corporation set the par value, and in some cases, the other player got an additional share. I am curious to see how the mechanism works in a 4 or 5 player game, or if the results are almost totally random.

So far, I've also spotted that one of the tokens, as written, is almost entirely pointless. It was written where it only gave a bonus for trains running through the town. It also went away after the first 4 train was purchased, making it only really useful for perhaps half the corporations for one to two operating rounds. I'm considering just dropping the token and making it a no-power dividend. Not everything has to involve extra chrome all the time...

Larry and I finished the evening with a lively discussion of the auction results. He was happy with them, and felt that they are well-integrated with the rest of the game setup, without feeling tacked-on. He was enthusiastic about trying again in two weeks, to see how far into the game we can get. We also trimmed and cut out a few more station markers and trains.

I also have been following with interest a discussion on the Houston Gamers website about the merit or folly of the entire existence of private companies. Lewis Wagner and Ray Mulford are both experienced gamers, but Lewis is against private companies, and Ray is stauchly for them. Iowa has a rich history ripe with smaller railroad corporations, so there's historical precedent for a game involving 6-7 major and almost any number of minor companies. My problem there is setting up mechanisms for acquisitions and mergers. If I get this version to the point where I like it, I might consider a reworking, but I'm trying to stay close to vanilla 18xx as possible; For me, network-building is fun, so maybe to incorporate Lewis' idea, I see a game where building with minor corporations is made more interesting, perhaps by scaling the building costs based on distance. Juggling shares back and forth in multiple mergers isn't my goal at this time.