I’m trying to find a copy now…
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If there is one 18xx title that I like the most, perhaps it is 1860: Isle of Wight (although the Old Prince is up there too) In the photo below was the first time I played with my copy (played it with Wyvern before, with his copy). We played with 3 players and all 3 of us had a great time. One never played 18xx but played boatloads of Power Grid so at least she understands some concepts.
And this game I’ve found out that the other player was born in IOW so he’s a bit sentimental with the place and was glad to play it.
1825 branch (if you look in the graph) is perhaps my fave one. So far, I liked 1825 the least from these. Followed by 1862, then 18GB, and then 1860. The lack of company liabilities means that they can be played at 2 players and they allow you to change companies so often like changing shirts.
The next branch is classic 1830 branch. But the problem with this branch is that they are so similar to 1830 that I’d rather just play 1830 instead. I now see Wyvern’s POV with how restrictive 1882’s tile laying is to the point that it’s not as fun as the others. 1889: Shikoku remains a fave due to the fact that 4 Trains can become pseudo-permanents (or not!) based on how people play and their choices. And I thought that bit was very intriguing.
The other fave from the 1830 branch was the the Old Prince where you start with a few companies and we are forced to be buddies, but gradually split off - the complete opposite of 1862: East Anglia. There is a fight for the national company where you try to jettison your competitors out of the national company via the splitting mechanism, or maybe you think it’s a sinking ship and you do want a lifeboat! The train rush here isn’t exactly very fast or very slow, but it does not stop. You see, in most 18xx, players need to recognise their positions and figure out if they need to push the train rush or make it stop. Usually the player on pole position wants the rush to stop. In TOP, you keep going. You’re in pole position. Tough. You have to keep going. Also, their roster of private companies is perhaps the best in this branch. No looting allowed (except for one specific company) and they are intead used to build combos!
Lehman’s branch I am not familiar. But I do love 1846, so I am keen on the other ones: 1833NE and 2038
1837 branch is perhaps the least liked one from me. They tend to be games where you invest on your own company and run it well. I do have faves from here like 1817, which is about betting (literally the reason why I dabbled with 18xx in the first place!). You think it does well? You buy shares. You think it’ll sink or under-perform? You buy shorts! 
(I always wear shorts outside of Winter season). Perhaps the most interesting stock market shenanigan game I know, yet it is a game that highly encourages to run your trains well. 1817 is how I envision 18xx before I start playing them.
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I posted last night in the recent games thread about my in-progress play through of Ticket to Ride Legacy so I definitely train on occasion. I like Railroad Ink and, as with most games I own and like, I don’t play it as much as I should.
Otherwise I’m not really big on train games. I don’t really care for base TtR, original or Europe. I don’t hate it and think it’s good for introducing people to the hobby but I prefer either more complex or less complex/ more silly. Some of the maps that add more complexity are ok, but nothing that wows me. I do like some games that have trains in them (e.g. Great Western Trail and either Brass), but that feels different.
There are a couple guys at my monthly game group who are all trains, all the time. If a game has trains in it, they love it. I’ve played a lot with them and don’t mind playing their train games, but none have wowed me and become a favorite of mine. Some of the trains I’ve played this way:
Iberian Gauge
Snowdonia
Chicago Express
Railways of the World
Paris Connection
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Yes. Roughly speaking: some.
Trains are fascinating; they represent power, money, success, but also doom or eventual disaster. And yet, it can also represent, in abstract, a journey or a portal to endless possibilities. Imagine how many Hero’s Journeys start or end with a train arriving at a station.
(incidentally, while working on this response, I got lost browsing through TVTropes’ RailroadIndex and lost 3 or 4 years worth of productivity)
From a gaming perspective, I’ve already somewhat covered the “hey boardgame designers/publishers, why trains?” but I think they can, if properly integrated with the mechanisms, provide pedagogical reinforcement; a way to keep the game and its mechanisms moving along in the correct direction (on rails, perhaps!?).
A few examples to show what I mean:
-
Ticket to Ride: You have ticket cards. You can score those if you connect those cities (the rulebook uses “continuous path of routes”. The rulebook doesn’t spend a lot of time defining terms or showing diagrams, because a “train ticket” showing two cities is already evocative and looking at the board immediately starts connecting what people know about trains with the core game mechanisms.
-
Colt Express: you’re a criminal on a train trying to steal valuables. Why are there valuables on the train? Why can you climb onto the roof? Why do you shoot at each other? These are all common activities of traingoers in the 19th century, I think. Also, there are phases of the game where players play their cards face down… because it’s in a tunnel and you can’t see (because light sources were limited in the American west during this time and installing the sun inside the tunnel would have killed everyone)
-
Rail Pass: to pass a train from one person to the next, you do so, and I quote from the rulebook:
by calling out “Toot! Toot!” and try to sound as much like an old-timey steam train as possible (this is mandatory!)
This nonsense is, actually, perfectly sensible.
I’ve said before in this thread that train themes are just pasted on; and while what I just wrote above suggests otherwise… well, I don’t care. This is the TRAINS topic, not the Internal Consistency topic.
You glue the theme over the mechanisms so that the bits of the paste-up that look like trains get glued onto the bits of the mechanisms that taste like trains, and the rest is just your normal, everyday game-designer-hand-waving.
How would I recommend someone get started with train gaming? I think the first step would be to play a train game; and the second step would be to play a second train game. At that point, if you enjoyed steps 1 and or 2, you may proceed to steps 3-through-3000 at your leisure; if you did not enjoy steps 1 or 2, you’re wrong, go back to step 1 and try again.
As far as “hey, pillbox, what’s your favorite train game?”, that’s easy: It’s probably 1862 because it’s a solo-able 18xx game that could have been about threading needles in ancient Babylon for all I care; the historic train companies and the bit of the rules named after a particular British dude, meh; couldn’t care less. I want that crunchy economic puzzle layered on top of a hex-based route optimization puzzle all tied together with a explosive, exponential route-operation-with-increasingly-bigger-but-more-expensive-and-less-numerous widgets.
“Okay, pillbox, how do you categorize your train games and just how big is it?” you ask, waggling your eyebrows.
By “it”, I imagine you’re talking about my enormous train game collection
Removing BGG items that identify as “expansions”, GeekGroup says 104. The broad strokes:
18xx (34)
1800: Colorado (print-and-play)
1817
1822: The Railways of Great Britain
1822CA
1822PNW
1824: Austrian-Hungarian Railway (Second Edition)
1830: Railways * Robber Barons
1837: Rail Building in the Austro-Hungarian Empire
1840: Vienna Tramways
1844/1854
1846: The Race for the Midwest
1848: Australia
1860: Railways on the Isle of Wight
1861/1867 Railways of Russia/Canada
1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties
1882: Assiniboia
1883: Building Railroads in Northern Italy
18Chesapeake
18CZ
18DO: Dortmund
18GB: The Railways of Great Britain
18Ireland
18Lilliput
18Mag: Hungarian Railway History
18MEX
18MS: The Railroads Come to Mississippi
18NewEngland
18NY
18OE: On the Rails of the Orient Express
18SJ: Railways in the Frozen North
18West
21Moon
Harzbahn 1873
The Hiawathas
Shikoku 1889 (databasing error… no longer have this)
Crayon Rails (19)
Empire Builder Series
Australian Rails
British Rails (3 copies; 1 box edition to keep, 1 box.ed to sell, 1 tube edition to keep)
China Rails
Empire Builder (w/Mexico; 2 versions)
Empire Builder (without Mexico)
Empire Express
Eurorails
India Rails
Iron Dragon
Lunar Rails
Martian Rails
Nippon Rails
Russian Rails
Others
Dampfross
Rails Through the Rockies
Tramway Engineer’s Workbook
Cube Rails (13)
Chicago Express (Wabash Cannonball a.k.a. Chicago Express a.k.a. Wabash Cannonball)
Empyreal: Spells & Steam
Iberian Gauge
Irish Gauge
Kansas Pacific
Luzon Rails
Mini Express
Northern Pacific
Paris Connection
Ride the Rails
Stephenson’s Rocket
Trans-Siberian Railroad
Ticket to Ride (13)
Ticket to Ride: 10th Anniversary
Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam
Ticket to Ride: Europe
Ticket to Ride: Europe – 15th Anniversary
Ticket to Ride: First Journey (Europe)
Ticket to Ride: First Journey (U.S.)
Ticket to Ride: Germany
Ticket to Ride: London
Ticket to Ride: Märklin
Ticket to Ride: New York
Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries
Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails
Ticket to Ride: San Francisco
Light-hearted Fun (6)
Colt Express
Rail Pass
Railroad Ink (Red, Green, Yellow, Blue)
The Martin Wallace and John Bohrer Things (3)
Age of Steam: Deluxe Edition
Railways of Nippon
Railways of the World
Snowdonia Series (3)
Alubari: A Nice Cup of Tea
Foothills
Snowdonia: Deluxe Master Set
Probably belongs somewhere else but I can't figure out where (1)
Silverton
EuroTrains (a.k.a. I stopped creating new categories and just lumped everything else together (11)
20th Century Limited
Brass: Birmingham (Lancashire isn’t databased with Category: Train)
Cargo Express
Coal Baron
Coal Baron: The Great Card Game
Spike
TOKYO METRO
Trains & Trains: Rising Sun
Trans Europa
Yardmaster Express
Happy to answer any questions about any of these games.
Topics I’m willing to discuss on any of them:
- Why is it a train game?
- Why is it not a train game?
(this post has been written and rewritten about 8 times. At one point, I believe it was over 300 lines… and I’m not even sure I had started talking about train board games yet)
18-ankh-ankh ↩︎
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I see that Dampfross is part of the Crayon Rails genre. I have such fond memories of it… is there any of these that is in print?
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Interestingly, someone has bought or otherwise acquired the old Mayfair Games branding and trademarks and is currently, mostly, using it as some sort of zombie puppet to foist games upon unsuspecting online shoppers:
But, more interestingly, the widow of the late Darwin Bromley has been working to get old and new games in the Empire Builder series printed under, originally, a new brand, but now working with the zombie-Mayfair entity.
Incidentally, Darwin Bromley is, likely, one of the key contributors to modern hobby boardgaming and its decades-old grip on the English-speaking portion of the hobby, but is often overlooked I think. There’s really no way of knowing what German boardgaming would have become without people and companies like Darwin and Mayfair translating those games and importing them to the US and other places; it would certainly be different – and one could argue that if Mayfair didn’t do it, someone else would have… which may or may not be true.
Back to your question: Dampfross was practically free when I picked it up from a local in-town BGG auction; I suspect copies in Germany are a dime-a-dozen… or… maybe… a ten-euro-cent-coin-per-1.2e1.
As far as the Mayfair Empire Builder series… they’re all out of stock, distribution-wise, for a few years. I know I own Dampfross, but I actually don’t remember what sets it apart from Empire Builder (or, rather, the other way around). And I know Dampross itself was a remake of Railway Rivals, which is different yet, but I couldn’t tell you why.
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Your Shikoku has been located in Virginia.
I’d prefer if everyone pictured me dressed as a ninja sneaking through metal shelving units filled with Roads and Boats, as opposed to Pillbox trying to shove a box into a blue PO drop-off bin and realizing his car is stopped too far away.
But either works.
This has tracks. Don’t think it count as cubes?
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