Today's @18xx was a two-player 18 BosWash. I haven't tried this one before with two players, but as our afternoon group dwindled to just two, I thought we'd give it a go: it's sleeker than 18 India, and I know 18 India works well with two.

The rules suggest two variants for adding uncertainty to the shares. We used the second one, where we had a dummy hand and whenever you buy shares from your hand, you may draw a card from the dummy hand. That worked pretty well.

For some reason, this was a very high-scoring game. The final scores were 30156–29560, so very close (tied for the closest game in my records, just a 2% difference) and very high (previous high score was just over 20k). We had lots of companies at the top of the stock market and got a lot of good runs for the companies in the end. Bombay had the best runs, $1600 with 4×3 and a 4. Most companies were delivering opium at the end ;-)

I had a stronger start and thought I'd run with the game. I won, but the difference was small. One thing where I excelled was the upgrades: I got to decide all the grey cities, and having Nizam's home city remain brown hurt my opponent quite a bit.

This was a pleasure. It's fun to play these games with two players, as you get to do a lot of stuff. The game took about three hours, and half an hour of setup, teardown and score calculations on top of that.

(Edit: changed the group tag.)

#boardgames #18xx #18boswash

I går spelade jag brädspelet #TerraformningMars, ett spel som tog världen med storm då det gavs ut 2017, samtidigt som jag grottade ner mig ordentligt i tågspel (#18xx). Jag har lyckats undvika att spela det fram till nu.

Terraformning Mars är ett spel som många har älskat och många har ogillat. Jag gick in i det med en tanke om att det inte skulle vara något för mig.

Dock: jag hade mycket trevligt och tyckte inte att kritiken riktigt stämmer. Jag blev faktiskt positivt överraskad!

@18xoxo @18xx my #18Korea review, unfortunately quoting still doesn't work on my mastodon instance, so i had to create a thread.

#boardgames #brettspiele #18xx