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The double dits in 1813 haven't really been working. They're effectively single dits with noise, and that's not enough to justify their existence. So....now trying silly things with double dits.
3-player 1832. Tried something.
Bought the London Investment, Coal and Georgia Central presidency for $400, leaving me $300 cash -- just enough to float the GC using the London Investment.
SR2 sell a GC to buy into GM&O and L&N. OR2 the GC withholds (so the London Investment would keep paying $6 difference to me). SR3 tapped the GC again -- which setup 5 ORs of the GC with a CMV well below IPO and paying out with 40% paying to treasury.
Ended up with two systems: ACL+GC and SAL+N&W with, collectively, 6/6/10/12 and the ACL+GC at a $400 stock price.
3-player 1832. Called on time, but I think the Central player had it. I did not play well. Several really basic errors, starting in the auction. Still, there's a comfort in old familiar gloves.
3-player 1813 using the simplified capital calls, reduced start packet and train roster brought back from Seattle.
Train counts (finally) seemed right. Starting capital wasn't clearly wrong. Stations were over-priced. Rotational priority isn't wrong. Par choices were meaningful. Cousins were slightly over-powered. The market....wasn't inactive, but also wasn't properly active (I think this changes with more players). Our bids on privates were so wrong. We didn't play well. 5 hours end-to-end.
Somewhat surprisingly, raw share count won it. The winner had just under 40 shares, with stock prices averaging just over $40 and mediocre routes. The other players had teens of shares, but with average share prices close or over $200. Share-count won.
(change description follows)
5-player 1828.
I'm biased, but it is so good, so very good.
There's an extensive discussion along with most of a blow-by-blow analysis of the game on the 18xx Friends Discord, here Invitation:
@18xx 4-player 1871 (teaching game for one player).
The charm continues; more tactical and contorted than I prefer, but the gameplay is solidly there.
6-player Rolling Stock, so all the companies and thus all the synergies are in it.
5 company dumps and 4 company steals. I received one of the dumps, which improved both our positions, and had one of my companies stolen. Daniel won convincingly by perfectly timing his company order and movement to slide from $41 all the way to $73. Top 3 scores were $516, $498, $497 (me). Even more amusing: Daniel only held one more share in that company than I did.
I'd wibbled on Rolling Stock before, but no more, not with 6 players at least. Such an amazing game.
3-player 1813.
6.5 hours end-to-end...needs 2 hours taken off...and there's still slightly too many trains, and they're way too cheap. Taking out three more and making the privates a bit less volatile next, plus price-changes. Along with upping train prices, that should knock some time off. Also dropped the redemption model and went for a small mutation on the 1871 model, which was an improvement. That said, I've also reinvented most of the problems of 18Dixie. In different paint to be sure, but the same problems.
A player proposal for putting branch and junction lines back in... Nahhhhh. Scores were around ~$12k. Overwhelming impression mid-game: This needs 5 players.
There's a narrowly pointed edge here among capital demands slowing the game down, capital demands forcing players to differentiate, capital demands speeding the game (by making it not run fat), and lack of capital demands taking out all the tension.
4-player 1813 this week.
It tried to work, sort of worked, didn't work, but smelled like it did. Mostly, a lot of bits of it almost worked, and almost worked together...and for the first time it started to feel like a game that could have a direction.
More concerning is that it feels like I've lost sight of the core values of the liquid share system. Not sure why.