Grand Trunk Games recently acquired the rights to do a new edition of 1889. I think they are in early stages of production and it has not gone up for Kickstarter/preorder yet.
The good news for 18xx print-and-play is that there’s no random chance or luck of the draw, so you don’t need to be consistent when making PnP components.
That said, it’ll be a LOT of cutting if you don’t already have a set of tiles you can borrow from. You’ll need to print charters (basically player mats for each of the 7 corporations), shares (each of the 7 corps will have 9 cards representing 10 shares - the director’s certification is worth 2), 7 private railroads cards (1 for each private), 27 train cards, and then the tile roster which is ~64 hexagonal tiles.
And then you’ll probably do a multi-page print of the board (map of Shikoku, Japan) and the stock market (grid of numbers with a few colored cells).
I have not yet done a PnP of an 18xx game for two three reasons:
- My dad’s been flirting with buying a laser cutter for a bit and I’m waiting to be able to use that to do all my cutting
- I already own several!
- You can play online! The recently released 18xx.games is a huge improvement over the previous tools, which were already pretty good (they just weren’t comprehensive and required a spreadsheet to track a lot of the financials
EDIT: went and looked at the 1889 files I downloaded (Carthanigian’s redraw I think) and forgot to mention the 27 train cards in the previous section… but also it appears the map and the stock market are on the same print in this version.
You’ll also need 7 different colors of tokens in varying quantities per color… Depending on what cube-laden euro-games you have available, you could probably proxy in some of those until you’re committed enough to place an order at Rails on Boards Shopping Centre – RailsOnBoards
Also: You need poker chips. If you’re really desperate, you could print off paper money in the amounts needed or just track everything on paper/spreadsheets. For learning, I would absolutely recommend poker chips or paper money; for speed of play, poker chips or spreadsheet.