18GB tile design notes

Many of the tiles in 18GB differ from those found in other 18xx games.  These notes explain the main differences.

The plain track tiles are standard.  Indeed, I use the bitmaps from John Tamplin’s 18xx.info site.

For the town and city tiles, the income values are 1/10th those of standard 18xx games. The money system in 18GB divides all values by 10, thus removing the need for notes or chips of values less than 10.  In fact, this decision makes it possible to use a track for recording player’s cash rather than needed notes or chips at all.  This is intended to speed play. 

Apart from the difference in values, the single- town and yellow single-city tiles match those in other games.  The green single-city tiles have only one station space instead of two and the brown single-city tiles have value 30 instead of 40.

As the tiles had to be redrawn anyway, I have taken the opportunity to make the graphic design more consistent.  So the yellow single-town tiles use circles to represent stations instead of the bars used in many 18xx games.  Also, the income value of each tile is shown in a diamond instead of a circle, so that it is a different shape from the station spaces.

The double-town, double-city and triple-city have different track layouts from the usual OO and double-town tiles.  Rather than lay track to both (or all three) towns and cities at once, the yellow tile connects one town or city and the green tile connects the second.  This reflects the multiple companies that built their own track in an area covered by a small map.  It also gives a different track layout from game to game, and happens to yield an interesting take on 18xx track placement by insisting that the company must be able to trace a route to the new track on the new tile.

The layout of the double-town tiles is different from the standard tiles that have the same layout.  This is an attempt to make the change from the green tiles to the more complex brown tiles easier to follow.