Scotland under Steam?

In my reading about the history of railways in Great Britain, I’ve taken a particular interest in Scotland. This is partly because I’ve lived in Edinburgh for most of the last 25 years, and partly because it is one area where the design of 1825 takes major comprises with history in order to make a playable game. I’ve already made an 1825 variant for the Scottish board and recently I had some interesting e-mail discussions with Stuart Dagger on the subject. Then Geoff C designed an 1825 extension board for the north of Scotland and uploaded it to the 18xx yahoo group. So clearly there is some interest here.

From what I’ve read, it looks like Scotland should make a good 18xx game. Although two companies came to dominate the country, several reasonably-sized companies were formed along the way:

• Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway: 1838-1865
• Glasgow and South Western Railway: 1838 onwards (starting as the Glasgow, Paisley, Kilmarnock and Ayr Railway)
• North-British Railway: 1844 onwards (originally running from Edinburgh to Berwick)
• Caledonian Railway: 1844 onwards (running from Glasgow to Carlisle), or possibly 1838 onwards, starting as the Glasgow, Paisley & Greenock Railway.
• Scottish Central Railway: 1845-1865
• Scottish North Eastern Railway: 1845-1866 (The 1845 dates refers to the formation of two constituent companies, the Scottish Midland Junction Railway and the Aberdeen Railway)
• Great North of Scotland Railway: 1846 onwards
• Highland Railway: 1854 onwards, starting as the Inverness and Nairn Railway.

Company mergers, such as the Edinburgh and Glasgow merging into the North British, or the Caledonian absorbing the Scottish Central and Scottish North Eastern, could either be represented as an explicit merger as in 1861 or 1812, or could simply be modelled as the same player running the two companies to mutual advantage.

Cutting the regions

When I first planned this game, one criterion was that is should cover the whole of the UK, excepting only those extremities where hardly any lines were built. So I was happy to have off-board areas for Cornwall, West Wales and North Scotland. I still looked at including regional companies such as the Cambrian, Highland and Great North of Scotland. It soon became apparent that those regional lines were just too insignificant on the scale of this game and I dropped them.

Now I'm going a step further. I intend to drop south-east England below London and with it the LBSC, the South-East Railway and the London, Chatham and Dover Railway. The map just doesn't have the space for these to be interesting companies to run. I had thought of including them as simple investment options, but the game has plenty of companies already and can do without them.

In Scotland, I shall also drop the GSWR, because its network was similarly constrained. I might also drop the GER in East Anglia, because that region also doesn't allow much development. On the other hand, historically the GER did at one stage compete with the GNR for a route north. The GNR won, but it might be nice to leave the possibility of an alternative outcome in the game.

This leaves me with the following companies:

• LNWR (London and North Western Railway)
• GWR (Great Western Railway)
• LSWR (London and South Western Railway)
• MR (Midland Railway)
• GNR (Great Northern Railway)
• GER (Great Eastern Railway)
• LYR (Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway)
• MSLR (Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, later renamed the Great Central Railway)
• NER (North-Eastern Railway)
• CR (Caledonian Railway)
• NBR (North British Railway)

Eleven is still a large number of companies, but at least it offers the possibility of a manageable game.

One way I might alter this is to vary the starting companies, e.g. by picking a set of starting companies from a larger initial pool. In this case, I might also look at some alternatives, such as the West Midlands Railway or the Scottish North Eastern Railway, which historically were quickly absorbed into one of the above companies. For now, I'm going to start with the above list and see how I get on.

Railway Towns

In 1825, several major companies have their home bases in low-value cities. The LNWR begins in Wolverton and Crewe, while the GWR begins in Swindon. In Unit 2, the GCR begins in Barnsley and the GNR begins in Doncaster. All of these cities have low, fixed values and fixed track layouts.

I was wondering whether this could be extended as a general principle. Perhaps every company could start in a small town. One of these “railway towns” could use the ordinary small town tiles but with the addition of a company marker, which would stop other companies from running routes through that hex. This would make the company “own” that piece of line. As an extension, we could let companies start in any dot town; the presence of the marker indicating that it has become a “railway town”. This would give more variation to the start of the game, rather than requiring companies to start in specific hexes.

Finding start hexes for some companies could be a challenge. In the south, the LBSC might have to start at Redhill, the SECR at Ashford, the LSWR at Woking and the GER at Colchester. In Scotland, the GSWR could start at Ayr, but I’m stretching to find start towns for the Caledonian and the NBR. But it might be doable.

I’ve been moving away from this idea recently. It would be yet another change from standard 18xx and I’m not convinced that it gives the best results for the LNWR, let alone the other companies. So for now, this is an idea that I’ll put on the back burner.

Time line

I've been a bit quiet lately. This is partly because I did some more work on my 1825 web site, played another test of Ian D Wilson's 1812 prototype, and have had a few other things on the go as well. I have still found some time for Britain Under Steam. Some of this has been spent on research; I'm reading Christian Wolmar's book Fire and Steam, and I've found a copy of Snell's Britain's Railways Under Steam to read after that. It's also worth mentioning that Wikipedia has a large amount of information about the history of early British railway companies.

I've been putting together a timeline that shows key events such as the formations of important companies, completion of certain railway lines, company mergers and so forth. I was helped immensely by Lou Jerkich's Historical Order variant for 1825, in which he collected much of this information already. To start my timeline, I took the background information from Lou's variant, put all the events into historical order, and then added other bits and pieces as I found them.

This is making a number of small effects on the game design. I've rethought the way I plan to start companies and I will come back to this soon, casting my eyes over the timeline as a whole.
Every so often I note something that leads to a tweak on the board; no major redesigns, just a tidying up or an improvement in one area or another. I've had another thought about how to represent difficult terrain, too. So all in all, this background reading has been worthwhile.

Buying trains

I reckon that newcomers to 18xx find it odd that companies buy trains at the end of their turn, rather than the beginning. In particular, this means that on their first turn, companies can't run a train for income. Now, this may be historically apt, as it is certainly the case that companies have to build track before they can run any trains, but as a game it seems odd.

There are, of course, many reasons why the games are designed this way. For one thing, if a company could buy a train from another company that has just used it, the same train could be run several times during the same operating round (by different companies each time). You would need some sort of mechanism to prevent this. For another thing, a company that just had all its trains scrapped at the beginning of a phase could just buy a new train and run that, instead of losing income and share price from having no trains for a round. This would be especially true is credit is easy to come by, in the form of loans or issuing further shares.

I think I've come up with a mechanism that may square this circle. That is to let companies buy a train when they are floated, as part of the actions taken during company formation. In fact, the rules could even require a company to purchase a train at this point. This would have a couple of effects. First, it may restrict the valid share price for starting the company (at least later in the game) - as is the case with 1825's minor companies. Second, it may dampen the effect of asset stripping, in that not all the company cash will be available to transfer to other companies. (Of course, other companies could just buy the new train, so the dampening is only mild).

I'll give this a try and see how well it works in practice.

Easy Credit

David Hecht has just posted an excellent message on the 18xx mailing list explaining how you can really push the rate of train purchases in Steam Over Holland, and noted how this is an example of how credit in various forms can be used to accelerate the flow of the game.

I think I need to check whether my design makes it too easy for players to loot companies. Currently I'm intending to allow companies to be floated once 3 shares have been bought (out of 5). This would make 5 shares worth of cash available to the company. This company could buy trains from another to transfer the cash, or possibly just buy new trains in order to start a new phase and sell the new trains to another company. The player could then sell the company, getting some cash back from the shares.

Let's assume that the shares are valued at x. The player has to pay 3x in order to float the company. The company gets 5x. When the player sells the shares, he gets 1x back (because players do not get any money from selling the director's certificate). If the company has no trains, the player would only receive 0.5x. So for an outlay of 2x or 2.5x from the player, the company gets 5x.

This is comparable to 1830 et al - actually it's less return than in 1830, which gives 10x to the company for 2x of player money (or even no loss at all, if the player can dump the company on someone else). The difference is that it may be easier to buy the second company in Britain Under Steam.

I don't see a way of avoiding this, unless I turn to strict incremental capitalisation, without the option of selling shares from the company to the bank pool. Anyway, this sort of thing makes 1825, 1830 et al rather successful games, so my hope is that is will do here too.

I will note one balancing element about the Steam Over Holland approach. In order for the company to get all its cash, it has to sell shares to the bank pool. If it sells more than one per operating round, its share price drops. So directors have to trade off the rate at which they get cash against the value of their shares. This is quite appealing and I may decide to go down this route after all, although as I previously noted, I don't like the idea of paying dividends to the company for unsold shares in its treasury.

Simplified train shuffling?

I'm wondering whether it's worth adding a simpler mechanism to transfer money between companies. The classic mechanism is for one company to buy a train from the other, at an arbitrary rate. This can be used to get a train where it's wanted or to get a large amount of money into the second company so that it can buy a new train. Managing this shuffling of trains can get complicated.

A simpler mechanism would simply be to let any company aid another when purchasing a new train. There would be no need to work out which existing train to shuffle between the two; one could simply add its money to the other's.

The downsides of this? Well, one is that neither company would suffer any disadvantage. In the existing mechanism, the transfer of the train means that the second company must lose some income (and possibly share price too) before it gets to buy the new train. So you have to trade off the benefit against the cost. With the simpler approach, there would be no loss of income. So the question is whether this level of decision making adds to the game or distracts attention from the larger issues of managing share portfolios and train runs.

In fact, that is perhaps the second downside. If this becomes too easy, will it remove an element of fun from the game? I'm not convinced; given muy target audience, I think this may be worth a try. I can always revert to the tried and tested system if the newfangled approach doesn't work.