A three-player game

Today we tried the 3-player game for the first time. It generally worked quite well. My testers enjoyed it and said they'd be happy to play it again.

Some recent changes worked well. The "Lawson-style" plain track tiles simplified the route building, and my changes to make the city tiles more uniform also worked. I'm even considering replacing the two-station city tiles with more conventional 18xx tiles, to simplify that aspect of the game still further, although that would change the style of the game somewhat.

As always, the test revealed some things that need tweaking. I was taken by surprise when one player started running a train that visited Glasgow three times on the same route. In an earlier version of the rules, a given city could only count once towards each train. That was a rule that I removed for the sake of simplicity, but I may have to reinstate it. (Alternatively, I could turn Glasgow into a 2-station city, which would bely its historical population; or perhaps players just need to put markers in Glasgow to stop this behaviour).

I had tweaked the Insolvency rules before this game and we agreed that they are now too generous. I either need to return to the 1860 rule whereby companies become insolvent at the end of their turn, or reduce the earnings that companies receive from leasing a train. (1860 actually does both of these, but that would probably be too harsh for my game).

We had to adjust the number of trains in the mix, but I pretty much expected that for the first game. (There is a different train mix depending on the number of players). And there are some minor tweaks to consider elsewhere as well.

Finally, the players said they would prefer traditional certificates rather than wooden cubes to represent shares. So 18GB is definitely becoming more and more of an 18xx game and less of a eurogame. I don't mind that; I now know how I would create a eurogame, learning from the experience of 18GB, and in the meantime I'm happy to create a new member of the 18xx family.