Last week I wrote about how I fell in love with trains and train games, including a tabletop version of Railroad Tycoon that I ran into early in my hobby. This week I am talking about 18XX games, which it took me until this year to try, after 13 years of playing other games. Why did it take so long? Looking back, I have played much more intimidating games than 18XX. Heck one is literally based on rocket science! There are several answers to this question. For one thing these games are not at all visually appealing. With a color palette of Red, Green, Yellow Brown and Black 18XX games are pretty ugly. They are similar in this way to the early austere cube rail games I wrote about last time. The second reason is just how mathy they appear. There are not one but two excel sheet looking boards in every 18XX game. As much as I have grown to like math and excel, neither have much sex appeal when it comes to selling a game. And thirdly I always heard how intimidatingly long these games were. People would talk about a game taking 6-8 hours, and while I do play longer games I couldn’t figure out how such a huge time investment could be worth it; especially when I was newer to games. So it took until 2024 to try an 18XX game, and to be honest I wish I had done it sooner. In this blog I hope to explain what the appeal is of these games in case you are the most train-curious type of player.

But before I get too much further, what is this 18XX thing I keep mentioning? Well, these are huge train, stock and business simulation board games that started with 1829 by Francis Tresham back in 1974! The game made waves at the time for being a long, involved strategic game that didn’t involve war as was more common of the games at the time. When it came time for a sequel, the designer kept the same naming convention and made 1830: Railways and Robber Barons. It was useful in terms of clueing in existing players that this was another game in the series they had enjoyed previously, but gosh is it confusing from a marketing perspective. And now, every 18XX game as the genre is now called starts with the number 18 and some sort of year. Fans talk about their favorites such as 1862 or 1846 and if you are not in the know you wouldn’t even know what country these things are set in much less what makes one unique compared to another. Needless to say, the name of the game doesn’t really sell it as something I would want to try.

Fast forward to 2021 and I backed a kickstarter for Shikoku 1889. I am still not 100% sure why I did it. Perhaps it was some Omicron Covid lockdown fueled retail therapy, or just the dream of more board games in general during that time. But I will say, part of the reason is because this was finally a good looking 18XX game, at least relatively speaking. I had heard it was beginner friendly, and when you combine Japan and trains, two of my favorite things I figured I’d give it a shot. In 2024 I finally had a group willing to give it a shot and from the word go I knew it was something special.

18XX games take the stock and track aspects of cube rails games and dials them up to 11. Players alternate between stock rounds, focused entirely on buying and selling stocks, and operating rounds where tracks are laid, trains are bought and routes are run, e.g. the actual business behind these stocks. As I mentioned above, stock rounds have a living breathing stock market where the company value can go up or down based on buying, selling, and company performance, just like real life, if quite a bit simplified. There are hostile take-overs, dumping stock of a company that doesn’t have great prospects, or starting up a rival train company to jam up the effectiveness of one that is surging ahead. The important thing to emphasize here is that the company and the players are entirely separate, right down to having different pools of money they are working with. There’s a reason these games are often played with poker chips as money is flying left and right and there is indeed quite a bit of accounting going on. But if you want to be a stock shark without the dangers of investing in GameStop there might be something here for you.

Operating rounds, however, are my favorite part. This is where the money is made as company presidents (whoever owns the most stock of a company) build tracks and buy trains to run rail lines out on the map. Unlike in cube rail games, track is limited, so if you need a simple curved track later in the game you may be out of luck. And secondly the tracks progress in different eras corresponding to the trains that are operating. Simple yellow track with one entrance and exit is available early on, which then evolves into green tracks that have multiple exits and finally brown tracks that are congested with many different exits. This is both compelling strategically as more complicated tracks allow longer and more profitable routes but also captures a bit of the sweep of history and the evolution of trains.

Speaking of those trains, these are also more complex. Trains must be bought in order so only 2 distance trains are available at the start, good for a route that connects two towns. These get longer with 3 distance trains, 4 distance trains etc until finally there are modern diesel trains that can run circles around the whole map. But in another strategic and historic nod, modern trains render older ones obsolete. So when anyone buys the first 4 distance train for example, all 2 distance trains “rust” and are out of the game. This means the little mom and pop railroad that was doing decent for itself with small local routes could be in a lot of trouble as they are suddenly trainless and maybe out of cash as well.

All of this makes for a very compelling, cutthroat game. Having played it I can see where the length of the game doesn’t matter to fans of the genre. As long as there’s not somewhere else you need to be, there is a wonderful arc to these 4-6 hour games. There are cunning moves on the stock market, interesting decisions and evolutions on the track and operating side and some interesting shared incentives between players who are both invested in the same company. While I will not be collecting these like I do trick taking games, I am very happy to have Shikoku 1889 in my collection. I also recently picked up another more beginner friendly title that broke the 18XX naming curse called Railways of the Lost Atlas. The hook in that one is that players build the map before each game, allowing for games that have a different map each time. It also boasts being 2-3 hours which seems much more palatable to most people. I am curious to get this one to the table and will certainly report back with a review when I do. 

If you’re looking to learn more about 18XX there is a great history located here. Check out the chart of all the different variants and their family tree. There’s also a way to play online at 18XX.games. I hope you’ve enjoyed exploring the wide world of train games these past two weeks and who knows, maybe you’re more train-curious than you think!