18AL Play-by-email game has begun

Awesome, I'm in a 3-player PBEM game of 18AL, "The railroads come to Alabama." We quickly ran through an auction for the private companies, and are now entering the initial stock round.

Second big playtest

Larry and I got a chance to play another game of 18IA. As it happened, I won bids on almost all the private companies, and he used his cash to float more railroad corporations than me in the beginning. I almost immediately raided cash and used it to float a corporation for $100 a share.

We had a good time, even though it was taking too long. I did make a change mid-game and remove several of the 3 and 4 trains to try and speed things up.

The other thing that happened that was interesting is that the pool of shares disappeared into the companies' treasuries, and didn't come back out again. Larry ended up in a position where two of his companies were trading a single train back and forth, rather than have to pay for it out of his own pocket. While legal, I'm not sure it was the best move for him, since it meant the two companies were always alternating between running.

In this game, the option to lay a second tile for $20 was almost always used, which means the price was almost certainly too low.

We also got to a position where every single corporation was constantly withholding dividends to race for another train... and both my corporations were at their train limit. I'm not sure what we could have done to break the deadlock. Do I want to offer a trade-in for trains? I'm not sure what the best approach is. At the same time, we were basically built out on the map, and we were only on the first 5 train, I believe.

I don't know. I am also not sure that having only 5 corporations is enough.