A two-player game

This week, I tried the first ever two-player game of 18GB. It went pretty well, given the current state of the design. My opponent said that it felt like a real game, which made me very happy. We faced plenty of decisions and the game generally flowed well.

As I expected, the game revealed a lot of things that need tweaking. We even found a tile that lacked a valid upgrade! I also got a lot of ideas for how to improve the design of the various components.

My opponent found the range of tiles quite hard to cope with. It made me realise that although I have designed each set of tiles carefully, there is little commonality between sets. So 2-station cities have one upgrade path, 3-station cities another, and double-town tiles a third, with little consistency across the three. So today I'm working through some options for replacing some tiles with others that match those used elsewhere in the game. I haven't gone so far as to make them all exactly the same, but there are fewer "unique" tiles. I hope this will make the tile play easier to manage, without being any less challenging in terms of tactics.

I also have concerns about my current rule for multiple jumps in the share price. Usually, a company will convert from five shares to ten, use the extra capital to buy an express train and use the extra markers to claim a route. This gives it a higher income but a lower dividend per share. The income moves the share price several spaces - one for every 10 between the income and the current share price. The total result is that these shares are worth far more than shares in an unconverted company, so the choice of which to buy is pretty straightforward.

In most 18xx games that allow multiple jumps, the share price is moved two steps if the income is double the current price, rather than a fixed amount more. I might switch to using this rule, so that share prices are somewhat slower to increase.