The 1835 Family

1835, designed by Michael Meier-Bachl, was published in 1990, when it was the third 18xx game to be released (after 1829 and 1830). It introduced several features that have influenced many designs since, the most important of which is the idea of minor companies that merge to form a major company. It also had a flaw, which in turn inspired a “fix” of an initial auction of minor companies, which became another feature common to several games. In my opinion, the influence of these ideas has created a recognisable “1835 family” of 18xx designs.

Let’s look at the design features that were new in 1835:

• Six minor companies, each represented by a single certificate, that pay half their income to the owning player and half to the treasury. When the first 5 train is bought, these merge to form the Prussian state railway and each certificate is exchanged for a share of the new major company.
• A “start packet” containing private companies, the minor companies, and the directorships of two major companies.
• A special tile for Hamburg that give reduced income if a route crosses the River Elbe.
• Each major company has one certificate that represents two shares (20% of the company), in addition to the director’s 20% certificate.
• Stock sales reduce the share price by one box per sale, instead of the one box per share found in 1830.

Of these, minor companies are the most influential, and can be found in many other 18xx titles, including 1893 Cologne, 18Mex, all the games mentioned below, and even the financial behemoth that is 1817. There are variations on when and how the minors merge into major companies but the origin of minor companies in all those games lies with 1835.

The Hamburg tile and the 20% certificates are more niche but can be found in several other titles. For example, 1849 Sicily and 1847 Pfalz both have 20% certificates, and 18Rhl has Hamburg-like tiles for the three Rhine crossings.

The rule that the share price is reduced by one per sale is found in many other titles.

Although the features listed above have influenced many other games, they don’t include the one that, to my mind, really defines the 1835 family. This is because this feature arose not from 1835 itself but from a reaction to a perceived flaw in the way that 1835 distributes the private companies and minor companies at the start of the game. The 1835 “start packet” required players to take turns selecting items from those on offer, which were available in a particular order. Many people felt that this procedure disadvantaged the fourth player in a four-player game, and a number of fixes were proposed. One of these suggested fixes was simply to auction the items, one at a time.

Another designer, Lonny Orgler, created a game called 1837, which built on these ideas. It includes minor companies that merge into major companies, and the equivalent of private companies, all sold item-by-item in an initial auction. Lonny’s later 1824 design also uses these ideas.

Lonny’s games then influenced two other designers. David Hecht’s 18EU and Ian D Wilson’s 1861 both begin by auctioning minor companies which later merge to form majors. Unlike the previous titles, in 18EU and 1861 the mergers are not predefined; any connected minor companies may merge. These games also use incremental capitalisation instead of full capitalisation. Ian D Wilson has used the same approach in his games 1812, 1858 and 1867, while David Hecht’s 18Ardennes is basically a refinement and enhancement of his earlier 18EU design.

I argue that these titles – 1835, 1847, 1837, 1824, 18EU, 1861, 18Ardennes, 1812, 1867, and possibly others, are sufficiently oriented around the initial auction and subsequent merger of minor companies that it makes sense to refer to them as forming an 1835 family. At first glance, it looks like Scott Peterson’s new title, 18NewEngland, will also fit into this family.

As with any “18xx family”, there is plenty of variation between all these titles. Playing 1837 is a very different experience from 1824, even though they are set in the same place, designed by the same person, and use similar mechanics. The David Hecht and Ian D Wilson games are effectively a sub-family in which companies are funded incrementally and mergers are not predefined, and even within this sub-family they are very different games.

My aim in coining the phrase “the 1835 family” is to show a history of ideas that influence certain 18xx titles, and perhaps to show newcomers to the 18xx hobby one angle of 18xx design that might otherwise miss. The games within the family contain plenty of variation that is worth exploring.

Repurposing this blog

The design that began as Britain Under Steam morphed into 18GB: The Railways of Great Britain, and that game was published by Deep Thought Games in 2018.  Meanwhile, I've left this blog to languish. But today I wrote up some thoughts about "The 1835 Family" and I need somewhere to post them, and I've decided to use this blog as a suitable site for this article and any other gaming articles that may or may not follow.

I'll put the new article in separate post to follow this one.

On Capitalisation

With the release of version 28 to playtesters, 18GB is basically ready for the wider world.  But if I were to revise it further, I'd be tempted to think again about the capitalisation rules.  Specifically, I might introduce par prices.

To recap the current situation: companies start with five shares and five times their initial price as capital.  Each share pays 20% of the company's income.  In a subsequent stock round, the director may convert a company to have ten shares.  This drops the share price by two spaces and gives the company five times the new share price as extra capital.

What concerns me is that linking the extra capital to the current price reinforces the benefit of an early lead.  If a player owns a company that is paying well, they obviously get the benefit of the early income; they also benefit from owning good shares that climb the stock market (possibly including double jumps) and enable them to convert at a comparatively high price.  Lesser stocks will definitely not double jump and may well have their price hit by players selling shares in those companies.

As an alternative fix, I did consider removing the double-jump advantage.  I could do this either by ruling that five-share companies don't double jump, or by saying the game starts with a basic stock market in which companies only move one space and only introduce multi-jumps from a certain phase change.  Either approach would limit the most egregious cases of early stock appreciation.

On reflection, it seems easier to record par prices and give converting companies five times their par price, rather than the current share price.  This is a familiar mechanism from other games (and would work the same way regarding the costs of buying from the IPO vs the open market).  It would remove the capitalisation advantage of well-paying early companies.

My intention is that someone who does well early on will still gain the benefit of the income (and the share price if they choose to sell shares), but the company itself gains no advantage and so the player has to look for other options to maintain their early lead.

Looking at other 18xx games, the "convert at current price" mechanism usually seems to be found in games with incremental capitalisation, where the cost of shares increases with the price anyway.  I haven't seen it in a game with partial/full capitalisation and multi-jumps.  It may be a combination of mechanisms that introduces an unwanted positive feedback loop.  So, if I were to tweak 18GB further, I'd experiment with dropping this mechanism.

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An even more radical approach to reduce early advantage would be to drop the notion of 20% shares entirely.  Instead, I could adopt the rules from 1880 China: companies would start with five shares worth of capital but shares would only pay 10%; "conversion" would just give a company its final tranche of capital. The impact of this mechanism is that when someone gets enough money for another share, the extra income is only 10% instead of 20%, so the additional advantage of buying the share is lessened.  But this change would remove a choice point from the game as to whether and when to convert, and I'd rather not make that change.

More streamlining?

In my most recent post, I reported on changes to address the third-company problem.  Players that managed to buy a third company had been winning a disproportionate number of games.  I'm very pleased to say that the changes seem to have fixed this problem.  So now I'm back to trying to streamline the game as much as I can. 

One of the fixes for the third-company problem was to change the number of shares required to be bought before a company starts, from 40% at the start of the game to 60% in later phases.  This is a new example of a rule that changes depending on the phase of the game, adding to several such rules that already exist. These rules can complicate play and run the risk that players will forget them.  So in a recent game, I tried removing as many of these rules as I could manage:

- Companies required 60% to float from the start
- Companies could be started as five-share or ten-share companies at any time, instead of changing halfway through the game.
- Five-share companies could convert to ten-share in any phase.
- Five-share companies in receivership would always convert, regardless of phase.
- As a side-effect of the above, companies could buy trains from each other in any phase, instead of from the green phase onwards.

These changes noticeably simplified the phase change chart and gave players fewer things to remember.

The two changes regarding conversion worked fine.  In general, players avoided converting early anyway, because they would have lost income and their companies were still quite low on the stock market.  I'll probably keep this change.  As well as simplifying the rules, it opens an extra option for play, which may be useful in some circumstances.

Allowing companies to start as ten-share was not a problem at the start of the game, as no-one could afford to take this option, but the two companies started with ten shares during the blue phase went on to be the frontrunners.  This seems unbalanced.   While I might be able to make it work, it seems a step backwards from a working game and so I will drop this idea.

The 60% rule worked, in that it produced a playable game.  It may also remove a minor issue of balance in the second stock round, in which weaker companies would tend to have their shares sold, thus dropping their share price and making them even worse companies.  With the 60% rule, players couldn't afford to cross-invest in the first stock round, which made this issue go away.  This change also makes it easier for me, as designer, to judge the number of each train type required, because players won't be able to start two companies in the first stock round. 

However, that exact effect - of making it impossible to start two companies in the first stock round - removes options from the players and variation from the game.  It's been a feature of the design from the start and I'm loathe to drop it.  So I'm not yet convinced by this change.

The final change, regarding buying trains, was not an issue, again because players couldn't start two companies early enough in the game for it to matter.  I can probably drop this restriction anyway, thanks in part to some recent tweaks to train prices and the train mix.  I'll investigate this further to be sure but I think this change can stand.

In summary, three changes out of five seem likely to remain.  The 60% rule could remain too, but I think the benefits in terms of simplification are outweighed by the loss of player choices.

Increasing liability

With a number of playtest games on record, I am able to analyze them for common patterns. One such pattern I found was that the player who managed to start a third company went on to win the game around 90% of the time. While this could theoretically be correlation rather than causation, e.g. that the players were already winning when they started the third company, it seems likely that the extra company cash that comes with the additional company is sufficient to swing the game markedly towards that player.

I had hoped that other aspects of the game design would balance this tactic; for example, it is harder to transfer trains between companies than in most 18xx games.  The rules for determining player order do give players the opportunity to put themselves in a position to buy the extra company, at the cost of buying fewer shares, but I don’t want this to be the dominant factor in the game.

Having observed the problem, there are several possible changes that may reduce its impact:

1. Increase the cost of starting the extra company
2. Make transferring trains even harder
3. Make the new company more of a liability

In two recent games, I addressed point 1 by requiring 60% of shares to be sold before a company starts, in later phases of the game.  This worked well in the brown phase but had an unfortunate side-effect in the blue phase.  To raise cash for a second company (let alone a third), players had to sell shares in other companies, which reduced the share price of those other companies.  As people had tended to buy the cheaper shares, either as value for money or because that was all they could afford, these sales tended to affect the weaker companies. In one game at least, the player with the strongest company rose above this pack and went on to win.  So the rule change solved one problem but has potentially created another.  I’ll need to keep an eye on this.

For point 2, one tester suggested that the minimum cost for trains could be half their face value.  If the third company bought a new train, this change would mean that an existing company would have to raise at least some cash in order to buy the train across, which seems like a fair deal.  However, it doesn’t affect the opposite tactic, in which the new company buys an old train from an existing company, putting more cash into the existing company.  The existing rule that restricts the maximum cost to twice face value is effective for yellow trains, less so for later trains.  (I could of course change the maximum cost).  The risk to the design of restricting these costs is that transferring trains between companies may become completely unviable, which would remove an element of strategy altogether.

Point 3 is the approach taken by most 18xx games.  Typically, you cannot sell the directorship of a company at all, so buying a company automatically brings an element of risk with it.  The side-effect is that players become reluctant to cross-invest, to avoid the threat of having a broken company dumped on them.  Mike Hutton uses an alternative approach in both 1860 and 1862, which is to make sales of shares in a trainless company yield only half the share value.  I have now tried this in 18GB and It seems to work. 

A consequence of adopting this last change is it becomes more advantageous for players to keep companies and let them become insolvent, rather than to sell them.  This is a shame, as one of the goals of 18GB is to have a fluid market with shares being bought and sold frequently.  Indeed, early on I did have the “new” rule and I removed it specifically to encourage players to dump their companies completely.  Sadly this turned out to unbalance the game as noted above.

I might consider also increasing the liability for insolvency, by reducing the income from insolvent companies (again, as Mike Hutton did in 1860).  This might keep the balance of choice between dumping a company or running it as insolvent.  But it would affect other aspects of the game in turn, as insolvent companies would take longer to become viable; indeed, later in the game they might become useless.  So I will probably leave the Insolvency rules as they currently stand.  18GB has a different overall flow from 1860 and I don’t want to change it in a way that makes the game longer.

In summary, I have made trainless companies worth less, which adds more liability when asset-stripping a company.  I also require more shares in order to start companies in later phases, which requires players to commit more resources when starting a new company.  (This may cause other side-effects that I will have to address).  I have also considered reducing the income for insolvent companies as well but am not adopting that change yet.

Streamlining

Someone commented that I haven't given an update here for six months, which is a fair point.  We have been testing during that time and I have continued to tweak the design in response to feedback, so it’s reasonable to give an update now.  Some games have been proceeding online and they have been quite slow, which accounts for some of the delay, although the online experience has been useful in testing the clarity of the rules as well as the game itself so it has its advantages.  It is definitely time for an update or two.

Apart from one significant exception, I'd describe most of the changes as tweaks.  There have been a lot of them; almost every aspect of the game has been tweaked in some way, including the map and tiles, the train mix, the private railways, and advanced features like the characters.  This is “game development” rather than “game design” and as a newcomer to the design & development process I’m finding that development takes more time than the original design.

I addressed some of the concerns about players gaining too great an advantage too early by changing the value of green tiles. To counter the impact this had on company income in the mid-game, the 4+1 trains have become 4+2 trains instead; the increased income come less from the extra +1 per se and more from the fact that this allows trains to run longer routes.  The impact of stock sales on share prices has been simplified further, which again helps to pull back a leader.

The extra cost for the LNWR directorship has been replaced with a new Private Railway that requires the owner to start the LNWR and reserves that right to that player.  This fits more in the spirit of 18xx than the extra cost for a particular company.  The other private railways have been adjusted a bit to compensate. The special ability of the Midland Railway company has also been replaced by a more general change to the tile mix.

The rules for building track across hills have been simplified.  The cost of building across estuaries has been halved.  Various minor map changes have improved the game.

A recent change has been to remove the yellow 3-trains. This simplifies the train mix and speeds up the start of the game.  I am also changing the cost of yellow and green trains in order to balance the game start.

I removed the WW1 rules completely.  Although they worked, they added fiddlier route calculations to the end game, when I just want the game to be resolved quickly.  The only remaining reference to WW1 is the ability of one of the characters, who gets to run an extra train starting in Inverness with the ability to run through blocked-out stations, once per game, as an homage to the endeavours to ship arms and supplies to Scapa Flow in the north of Scotland.

I have also moved the characters back to being an optional extension, rather than the “advanced game”.  If you use this variant, there is now a random selection of characters to include in each game, adding to the variety, while the process for players to choose characters is simpler than before.  Some characters are more valuable than others and have a small upfront cost.  Most have been tweaked for balance and playability purposes.

Overall, these changes have made the game smoother and more balanced.  Game development is a slow process but the game is better as a result.

18GB Status Update

I regard the core design of 18GB as stable and I'm well into the development or "tweaking" phase.  This requires lots of test games to evaluate all the tweaks as we converge on a final configuration.  This status report summarises the key areas that I am still working on. 

There have been fewer five-player tests than those with other player counts, which means the train mix for five players needs further validation, although it does seem to be about right.

The optional character cards are being fine-tuned and more experience is needed to make them both interesting and well-balanced.  Some of the characters have a face value that the player selecting that character must pay.  Refining those costs is part of the tuning process.

My biggest concern about the game play is that sometimes one player seems to get an early lead and other players don't catch him.  That could lead to a dull game (although I suppose experienced players could just call the game at that point).  The fine-tuning of the characters and companies is intended in part to  reduce this problem.  As I described in an earlier blog post, I also plan to try tweaking the rule on stock sales to allow players more opportunity to reduce the leader's stock value.  If this works, it will make the game more resilient to early leads, without negating the advantage of good early play altogether.

In version 26, I added a £20 surcharge to the LNWR director's certificate to balance its strengths as a good starting company. This is a slightly ungraceful mechanism and so I will try adding a new Private Railway that gives its owner the LNWR Directorship.

Another tweak I made in version 26 was to give a special ability to the Midland Railway.  This is the only public company to have a special ability, which again I find a little ungraceful as a mechanism.  I am experimenting with adding this ability to the Leicester & Swannington Private Railway instead.

In addition to the above, the playtesters are giving feedback about where the rulebook is not quite as clear and unambiguous as I hoped.  This is all very useful and is helping to improve the game.