Main strategies

I think Rivers + Fish is the main strategy here. Birds are also strong.

I can see how Paws might work, but I haven’t seen that so far, and when I’ve tried it, it has failed. So far I don’t like that strategy.

Plants are not a strategy, they’re terrible. Amphibians aren’t great. Insects can be ok side strategy in right circumstances (four copies of Greenside Darter, for example).

30-point cards

The big 10/30 point cards are of course the main attraction here. For starters, I don’t think they’re a problem. Yes, they can cause big swings and if you’re lucky to draw many copies of ones that you have already completed, that’s great. However, you rarely go without any, and I’ve managed to win with just one. I’m sure there will be games that come down to good or bad luck with these, but right now I don’t think these are any worse than, say, Exmoor Ponies – those will crush you much worse if your opponent gets three or four.

Here are the big guns, in order of the ones I like the best.

Bald Eagle – I think this is the best one. Getting five fish isn’t hard, and when you have five fish, getting more Eagles is simply good.

Elk – You almost always want more trees. Sometimes you collect the same trees and the Elk won’t be convenient, but most of the time this is great.

Bobcat – Birds are good, this scores from birds and lets you play an expensive bird for free. Five cards in hand, pay three to play a Bobcat AND a Bald Eagle, for 60 points? Well why not!

Black Bear – Getting two fish in one tree is not tricky, so the Bear scores easy – but here scoring one Bear doesn’t necessarily help you score another Bear. That makes the Bear slightly harder to use. But in general you always want to keep a tree with two fish open, just in case.

Coyote – I’ve only played this once, and most of the time get rid of these quick. I don’t even worry about discarding these to the clearing, as I’ve yet to see a Paw strategy really crush.

Cards I like

I’m not going to go through all the cards, but here are some cards I think are solid, in alphabetical order.

Brook Trout – I had a game with a great fish engine and tons of rivers, but couldn’t find any fish apart from the Bullhead I started with. Then I got one, and fortunately it was a Brook Trout, as it was worth 38 points from the fish bonuses and all the fishless rivers I had.

Caddisfly – Playing expensive fish (like Brook Trouts) for free, no problems with that.

Creek – Useful tool in fish strategy, play with the bonus.

Eastern Hellbender – The amphibians aren’t great in general, but if you’re heavy on rivers, this can be worth 20+ points and a draw for one card. Ridiculous value at best!

Great Blue Heron – An excellent bird for the bird + fish + rivers combo. Use the bonus or play for free.

Greenside Darter – This looks like a simple 0-cost fish, but the three points per insect can really pile up, especially if you have several Darters.

Peregrine Falcon – Good for playing Bald Eagles, Tufted Titmouses or Wood Thrushes for free.

Pileated Woodpecker – A solid B-level player in the bird strategy.

Raccoon – I haven’t used this a ton, but just wanted to say that’s it’s great the Raccoon now costs 0.

River Bend – Smoky Mountains isn’t a game of draw engines like Dartmoor is, but getting free draws for cards you want to play is always good.

Thermometer Cricket – The insects aren’t great, but if you have good support from Greenside Darters, having a bunch of Crickets (with some Caddisflies, Weevils and maybe a Firefly or two) can be very profitable.

Tufted Titmouse – Free card draws. One of my favourite birds to play for free.

Virgin’s Bower – A bit expensive, but if you have the space, are going for the birds, this will score you a bunch of points and gives you a free bird play, so why not. But it’s not great without the bonus (unless you get it for free).

Water-Starwort – When you have the river + fish thing going, this can be worth 10–15 points.

Waterfall – A good combo with Brook Trouts, you get more fishless rivers when you can stuff all your fish in Waterfalls. But don’t forget that you can’t play birds here!

Wood Thrush – Same as Tufted Titmouse, nice support player and a great candidate for free bird plays.

Yellow Bullhead – Did I mention I like free draws? This is my favourite fish opening.

Discuss

I also posted this on BoardGameGeek, so while comments are welcome here, you’re likely to find some actual discussion in the BoardGameGeek thread.

I took a look at the data for 18xx games. Over 40 titles have received votes during the years. To spot some trends, I put the years in four buckets: 2021–2025, 2016–2020, 2011–2015 and 2003–2010.

2003–2010

This bucket is actually 2007–2010 because there are no votes for 18xx games during 2003–2006. I played my first 18xx game in November 2006 and while there must’ve been people playing 1830 and other games in Finland before that, I know I was in the forefront of the Finnish 18xx hobby in the circles my vote covers and this proves that.

By far the most popular title is 1856: Railroading in Upper Canada from 1856 with 16 votes: that’s more than the other games combined. This game was still available and was the first experience for many Finnish 18xx players.

In total we have seven titles and just 26 votes.

1. 1856: Railroading in Upper Canada from 1856 (16)
2. 1830: Railways & Robber Barons (3)
3. 1860: Railways on the Isle of Wight
   1870: Railroading Across the Trans Mississippi from 1870 (2)
4. 18AL
   1825 Unit 2
   18EU: Railroading in Europe from the 1830s to the 1930s (1)

2011–2015

In this bucket we see a wider variety of titles, as we go from seven titles to 19. The number of votes also multiplies to 83 votes.

1862 is the biggest darling of the Finnish hobby and as a 2013 release scores the third place from just two years. 1817, a 2010 release, gets votes from all five years, so probably has half of its votes from just one person who voted it every year.

1. 1830 (13)
2. 1856 (12)
3. 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties
   1817 (11)
4. 1844: Schweiz
   1848: Australia (5)
5. 1860
   1841: Railways in Northern Italy
   1880: China (4)
6. 1846: The Race for the Midwest
   1889: History of Shikoku Railways
   1849: The Game of Sicilian Railways
   1861: The Railways of the Russian Empire (2)
7. 18AL
   1825 Unit 2
   1835
   1865: Sardinia
   18MEX
   18Ruhr (1)

2016–2020

The number of titles drops down a bit from 19 to 17 and the total of votes is 85, so this was something of a steady phase before the 2020s explosion of new titles.

1846 emerges as the most popular game, thanks to the 2016 release of the GMT Games edition. The 1822 family also shows up.

1. 1846 (17)
2. 1862
   1822: The Railways of Great Britain (15)
3. 18USA (7)
4. 1817 (6)
5. 1844
   18OE: On the Rails of the Orient Express (5)
6. 1822CA (4)
7. 1856
   1889
   1849 (2)
8. 1830
   18AL
   18Chesapeake
   1800: Colorado
   1829 (1)

2021–2025

Now we see a big expansion. 27 games get votes and the number of votes is 124. The number of voters went up during the period overall, but it’s also clear that the 18xx audience is now bigger than ever and there are more games available.

1862 finally takes the top spot as the most popular game after high rankings in three different buckets.

1. 1862 (21)
2. 1822 (13)
3. 1846 (10)
4. 18 India
   18Korea (8)
5. 1889 (6)
6. 18USA
   1830
   1822MX (5)
7. 1822CA
   1841
   18 BosWash
   18GB: The Railways of Great Britain
   1882: Assiniboia (4)
8. 1817
   1849
   18Chesapeake
   1860
   1894 (3)
9. 1856
   1848
   1817WO
   1822: Rust Belt Railroads
   1829 Mainline
   18MS: The Railroads Come to Mississippi
   18SJ: Railways in the Frozen North
   18Scan (1)

Overall top 10

1. 1862 (47)
2. 1856 (31)
3. 1846 (29)
4. 1822 (28)
5. 1830 (22)
6. 1817 (20)
7. 18USA (12)
8. 1889 (10)
   1844 (10)
9. 1860 (9)

This is a 2–4 player game that plays in 2–3 hours. The estimate is reasonable: our games so far have been under three hours. I’ve played this with two and three players.

The game is set in Colorado and as the exhausting full title says, is about the Royal Gorge Wars (or the Colorado Railroad War), in which Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Company and Denver & Rio Grande Railroad competed about access to passes in Colorado. First, Santa Fe won the access to Raton Pass and then the companies fought over the Royal Gorge canyon. This included gunfighting, though it seems nobody was actually killed. Eventually, the companies agreed that D&RG would get the railroad, but had to pay a lot of money to Santa Fe.

The history of the Royal Gorge is depicted in the game. In the yellow phase, the Royal Gorge railroad is under construction. In the green phase, the Treaty of Boston happens, the Gorge route is finished and Rio Grande gets tokens blocking the Gorge. However, Rio Grande is also indebted to Santa Fe. If the debt is not paid by the end of the game, the Rio Grande share value will plummet. Santa Fe, on the other hand, has a debt to the famous gunslinger Doc Holliday, who may be represented by a player-owned private company (if not, the money goes to bank).

McGuffins

There are a bunch of interesting features in the game.

You can build or upgrade up to six tiles per OR. That’s a lot, but it’s also quite expensive. To lay tiles, you need steel, and that is bought from the Colorado Fuel & Iron company. The more steel you use per turn, the more expensive it is. Building four yellow tracks is reasonable (just $60), but it’s $40 per tile after that.

Steel and gold companies are player-owned. You can buy shares from the CF&I and the Victor Gold Company. There’s gold on the board and it can be shipped to gain $50 revenue. The more gold is shipped, the better dividends the gold company pays. The CF&I distributes all steel payments to shareholders, which means it can be very lucrative – we’ve seen payments of up to $60 per share, and $25 per share is common in the early game when railroads are not paying that kind of money.

The tile mix is very limited. It’s been a while since I’ve played a game with a tile mix this limited. The heavy building and long distances mean that you’re going to run out of basic tiles quite often. That’s a bit weird, but on the other hand, if you have the money, you can probably upgrade a tile somewhere else to get the tile you want, but it’s not always possible.

The certificate limit is tight. It’s 20 for two players, 14 for three and 10 for four. Maybe I’m just used to games with higher certificate limits, but this felt very tight, I was pushing against the limit much sooner than I expected. There are only two companies starting on the first SR, but the steel and gold company shares are cheap at the beginning and pay well (especially the steel), so that gets you lots of shares quickly. The 10 certificate limit seems very low!

The train/event deck is nice. They’ve numbered the train deck and before the game, you just sort it by numbers. Then you get train cards that show how many trains of the type there are left and all rusting events and so on in the right spot. That’s clever.

Lots of setup variability. There are many companies, but only five are in play each time. There’s a deck of private companies and five of those are auctioned every game. The games won’t always run the same way.

Verdict

My initial impression is good: 18RoyalGorge does interesting things and is unusual enough. It’s a solid shorter game, not A-tier but certainly interesting enough for now. We’ll see if it’s a keeper.

18RoyalGorge mostly looks good, but the graphic design is a bit messy and heavy – there are many things that could be improved in the design to make it look more professional and pleasant. It’s a niche Kickstarter game from hobbyists, though, so professional level cannot be expected.

The closest comparison for me is 18Korea, and while 18Korea is clearly the better game of the two – my initial rating for 18RoyalGorge is 7/10 and I just changed my 18Korea rating to 9/10 – I don’t mind seeing similar ideas floating around in other games in new ways. 18RoyalGorge is clearly heavily influenced by 18Korea, and is also easier to get and 100 € cheaper, which is something.

This is my favourite type of con: a fairly small number of people but enough to play a variety of games, piles of games on table to look at and play, and nobody needs to do any administration during the day.

I played a mixture of new games and old favourites. Let’s start with the new:

Flip 7 is a simple push-your-luck card game, easy enough for just about anybody who can count the scores. This was a fun opener for seven people, which made it feel more like an event. I don’t see much need for this otherwise.

Rayroads is a very nihilistic space train game from Amabel Holland. The game always ends badly: either you exhaust the resources of your home planet, the local star collapses or a capitalist fascist eugenics doomsday cult takes over. We ended up exhausting the resources, which I felt very concretely: in the end, I needed the cheapest, most common resource, and couldn’t get any.

I’m not sure how much fun Rayroads is, but it’s an interesting experience. Fortunately, it didn’t take the two hours the box claims; I’m not sure it would be fun for two hours. I’m looking forward to further experiments with the system to see how fun a game it is. There is something delightfully weird about it, that’s for sure.

Feed the Kraken is a well-liked social deduction game. This isn’t really my genre, but with ten players, this seemed like a fun event. It was, but it would’ve been more fun if I had been able to actually do something in the game. Now I didn’t do much more than the guy who just watched us play. The experience was entertaining, though. I was a good sailor (always the most boring thing in social deduction games) and in the end could’ve decided the game as our win, but the captain didn’t choose me as the final navigator (after the two previous navigator candidates had jumped to the sea instead of making bad decisions), so the pirates won.

Challengers! Beach Cup doesn’t have a lot more agency in it, but felt much better. We had eight players for a proper tournament. My deck started a bit slow, I then got some wins, but it wasn’t enough: I had 27 fans and 29 was enough to reach the final. Experience won: the only player who had played the game before won the final. It was a close call, though. It’d be fun to see how this plays with just four players, and as an eight-player (or even more!) con game this is great.

Fresh Fish is something I’ve enjoyed, but haven’t played in ages – since 2012, to be exact. I’m not sure what I think of it. It’s fun, but it also feels a bit clunky. I suppose more experience with the game would make it flow better. I don’t feel terrible about selling my copy, but wouldn’t mind playing this more.

1846: The Race for Midwest is notable for being the game I’ve played the most without winning it. I’m now at 12 plays and zero wins. I need to print an A4 with huge text “DO NOT PAR FIRST COMPANY TOO HIGH” because otherwise I forget that, par the first company too high and lose the game. Guess what happened this time? But it was still a good game; with 18xx.games, we sped through the game in about 90 minutes.

Crokinole was requested and got played a lot. Coconuts wasn’t requested, but turned out to be a bit of a surprise hit.

I was tempted by another Amabel Holland title, Rayroads, and while buying that, noticed there’s For-Ex II: She Made Another One. It’s from 2024, but I had missed it completely. A friend of mine wanted a copy, so I added that to my order, and yesterday, we gave it a go.

It’s still very weird.

Everything’s streamlined a bit, though, and the new dry-erase components are a major improvement. Handling things is now much easier than it used to be. Understanding what to do is another thing; I’ve rarely seen so much head-scratching from a group of four experienced players.

I know I didn’t play well, as proven by my last place. I had a pile of Chinese yuan and managed to convert those to other currencies before the end of the game with a reasonable rate (trading 5 yuan to 5 euros, when the correct rate would’be been 12.5 yuan to 5 euros). That did unfortunately little good for me. I was a bit too broke in other currencies throughout the game.

There are clever things in this game. I quite liked the way you have five action tokens you can use to do the different actions in the game: four regular actions and one wild card. The spent tokens go to a queue, and whenever you do a Resolve action, you fill your tokens to five from the back end of the queue. Also if you end spend your last token, you get five from the queue. Those five can be anything, so you may end up severely limited in what you can do.

I’m looking forward to future plays. I’m pretty sure this is more of an interesting experience than a solid game, but right now it’s an experience I want to explore.

It’s a fixed partnership game like Tichu, and instead of counting points, it’s about going out first and uses a Sheng Ji scoring system based on promotions. Each team starts on level 2 and as they win rounds, they get promoted. Eventually they reach the levels 10, J, Q, K and A, and if they win on level A, they win the game. You don’t need to count points, the main thing that matters is that one of the team members goes out first. When the second team member goes out then affects how many promotion steps the team gets, so that’s important too.

The game is played with a double deck, which is dealt out completely. That means you start the game with a 27-card hand. Yes, that is bonkers. It takes a while to sort your cards, and it’s difficult to take in everything in your hand.

The combinations are small. You can play single cards, pairs, triplets, full hands, five-card straights (but not longer!) or six-card tubes (three consecutive pairs) and plates (two consecutive triplets). The only bigger combinations are bombs, which are at least four cards of the same number, but can be up to ten cards. The other bombs are a five-card straight flush and all four jokers.

One team is always the declarers. Their current score is the level of the hand. The cards that match the level are the highest single cards after the jokers, and the hearts of that number are wild cards, which can be used as any card except the jokers. If we’re on level 7 and declarers, the card rank is red joker, black joker, 7, A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and the 7s of hearts are wild.

If you like bombs in Tichu, here you get to bomb a lot more. You don’t always get a bomb in your hand, but often you have, perhaps more than one, and having a low bomb isn’t all that great. I’m not surprised this game is called “throwing eggs”, where “egg” and “bomb” both sound like “dàn” in Chinese.

This is a longer game. Our game took nine rounds and two hours, so almost 15 minutes per round. It was the first play for everyone and there was a pub quiz going on at the same time, so I assume it’s going be a bit faster in the future. But shuffling, dealing and sorting your hand will always be a bit slow. The game also has rules where you can fall from level A to level 2, which is brutal, and I’m not at all surprised there are variant rules to change that total reset to a smaller fall. The game is already long enough!

I quite liked this. More than Tichu? I’m not sure. Tichu feels like a really lean game compared to Guàn Dàn. The very large hands are clumsy and a little annoying, but on the other hand, navigating that initial 27-card mess is an interesting challenge. I’m looking forward to playing this more.

Also posted on Mastodon. Guàn Dàn rules in Finnish.

Turns out it’s good. The three-player game is different, and my favourite is either four or five – don’t know yet – but I would definitely not say no to a three-player game. The game runs longer, which changes the dynamics of it. It’s also very interesting to see how differently things can develop. This time, no spice companies were started on the first round, leading to quick initial city growth. The Halmahera shipping company was never started, which changed the shipping layout.

I was happily ahead in the early game. A friend complained they had lost the game, badly, and guess who won? They didn’t realize they were running away with the game until I told them.

I’ve been wondering how useful the 100× turn order bid multiplier is. Now, I would’ve needed that. I was badly hurt by the turn order on what turned out to be the last turn. I bid 10,000 for the turn order on the last turn – and I only had the 25× multiplier! – and the second player bid 10,025 and ran away with the Siap Saji market. With the 100× multiplier I could’ve bid 40,000 and that would’ve secured me a much better position.

I think it’s a brilliant idea that the money spent on bidding for turn order counts for your final score.

Tuesday was the casual group, and we continued with Bomb Busters. It’s a lovely co-op game, and the challenge is delightful now that we have the correct rules and it’s not too easy. We still managed to pass all seven missions. Next week, we’ll get into new territory and hopefully somewhat harder missions.

Wednesday was the main game group day, and we played 18Korea with five players, including one total 18xx newbie. We gave him a very quick rules explanation (ten minutes or so), and off we went. What’s better than throwing new players right at the deep end? I was sure he could swim, and swim he did.

Everybody knows it’s possible to buy trains from all companies, and not just your own. But have you ever seen that happen? I’ve played 18xx games a lot and have never seen that, but in this game it did! I managed to sell one of my 5E trains to a company looking for a permanent train. The buyer was the new guy so I suppose the ethical side of it is slightly dubious, but I’m ready to defend my actions – I thought it was a real win-win scenario, I was already winning by a lot, and we were cross-invested. Mostly I was just happy to see a train purchase across players.

We had Rason among the initial Northern Korea companies. We have a meta where Rason is considered the best early company. The player who started it would’ve been a bit poor without help and we could’ve just not invest in it, but I’ve been in a situation where Rason makes a ton of money – 300–400 on OR 1.2 – and I don’t have any shares, so I didn’t want to repeat that. So, we funded Rason. The shares were split 4-3-2-1 or so, and I got three, so I was happy. In the end, Rason wasn’t a great company. After the initial burst, it defected to South and got good tokens, but it had to withdraw a lot. I sold my shares at the right time and even thought it ran for 1170 at the end, it was a very low value share.

I started Sinuju on the first SR and even though it had a slow start, it had the Long Distance Specialist asset (pays 20 won extra per tile for the longest run on each OR), and that made me a ton of money during the game, making funding trains easier.

We’ve played seven games of 18Korea so far. The first one was a bit of a bust and ended before the war, so it doesn’t really count. Of the other six, I’ve won five. For some reason, I’m better in 18Korea than in most other 18xx games (or the other players make more mistakes in 18Korea). This game was mostly close – I won clearly with 8,188 won, but the other four players were all within 572 won (6,280 to 6,852 won). The difference between the fourth and the fifth place was just 4 won, which is practically a tie.

Originally posted on Mastodon.

Two-player 18GB is a fine 18xx experience for two. We played the E-W setup this time, cutting the board north of York. This is a curious setup, as the generally congested area between Manchester and York now only has one company, Midland, while the rest of the companies are more on the south edge of the map. The game feels different. I was in a strong lead, but for some reason, my lead evaporated and in the end, I lost slightly. That was good, as we noticed we had missed the rusting of the 4+2 trains – I was the only one to have them, so had I won, it would’ve been with a strong asterisk.

I want to play more 18GB, and playing the two-player game more would be welcome. Our game took under three hours, which was nice, considering my opponent was playing his first game and isn’t the fastest player in our group (with my son, we’ve played a two-player game in under two hours).

Indonesia was awesome. It was our first play with the third edition. It’s a good improvement over the first edition and looks very nice. I would prefer the player bank sheets had the turn structure instead of the screens because we play with open money and don’t use the screens. I think I’ll do some smaller turn structure cards – those won’t be needed for long, but for now are helpful. I also have ordered replacement tokens for the glass bead cities, I’m not a huge fan of those. Having ships in player colours is a nice improvement.

I did pretty well. My business skills were questioned when I merged rubber plantations in a situation where I couldn’t win the bidding. However, I got most of the money and opened up space for new stuff. I ended up owning the only spice plantations in the game and in the end got a personal shipping line. Thanks to that, I was safely second with 857 rupias. The winner was the only new player, who managed to get a monopoly on Siap Saji and made a ton of money with that and some shipping lines, even though he lost the shipping company. Creating one of those Siap Saji companies was a big hit for the shippers – Halmahera was a home for a large spice plantation, which was completely removed in the Siap Saji merger.

On the final round, Tuukka shipped a lot of stuff and had the option of choosing between me and Ville. He saw that I had more money and gave all shipping to Ville. In the final scores, I was ahead of both and Tuukka lost to Ville by 33 rupias – definitely less than he gave to Ville in shipping on the last round. Had he picked me instead, he’d have been third instead of last. But I suppose you either win or lose, and it doesn’t matter that much how much you lose…

(As a side note, I think for competitive play, Indonesia scoring should be based on the ratio of your score and the winner’s score, with no value given to position. That way your incentives are to a) get as much money as you can and b) ensure the winning player gets as little as possible. This makes it unimportant who you give the shipping money at the end of the game, as long as it’s not the player who’s winning the game. That’s just not an interesting part of the game.)

In any case, Indonesia is one of the most attractive games at the moment, and easily ranks as my favourite Splotter game.

(This post originally appeared on Mastodon.)

Let’s start with the original version. It’s usable, doesn’t get in the way of playing the game, but it’s not pretty.

Since the important part of the board is a graph, I started by creating the board in Gephi (a graph editor). I was ready to ditch the geographical accuracy (the geography isn’t really a strong part of the original board) and even though about doing a board where Chicago would be right in the middle!

Laying out the graph nicely by hand would’ve been a lot of unpleasant work, so I used the automatic tools available in Gephi. A method called “Fruchterman Rheingold” created a vaguely circular shape of the graph, so that’s what I used. It needed some manual work, as some of the edges crossed each other and you can’t have that. I added some colours to the nodes and ended up with this:

This is pretty good! The east-west direction is correct here, but the north-south direction is mirrored – that’s just how the layout method organized this. While geographical accuracy wasn’t a goal, I flipped the image vertically when I moved this to Pixelmator for editing.

I was going for a minimalist look. The main usability improvement I mentioned was to colour the railroad destination cities so that it’s immediately obvious where each company is headed to. I think it’s weird the Rio Grande edition didn’t fix that, as the problem is obvious the minute you play this game with someone new. “Where Milwaukee Road is going, again?”

The cities got smaller or larger circles, with colour coding to tie the different types together. The tracks are just plain black lines with centimeter squares in them to facilitate the 8mm cubes used in the game. The original map has all the squares lined the same way; I had the cubes aligned with the line (I simply rotated the square the same amount the line was rotated).

Creating the tracks was easy, just time-consuming. Copy a line-and-square combo, move the line ends to the centers of the cities, move the square near the center of the line and rotate. Then repeat that almost hundred times!

The background has a light grey “old paper” effect, and as a finishing touch I added a transparent photo of an old locomotive there. One corner got the Chicago & NorthWestern railroad logo and one has a nice old image of a cow – the Gone West companies can be marked there. The same cow appears in the western city circles, by the way. (The destination cities have a small picture of a depot, and St. Louis and Chicago have photos of places in those cities.)

I thought about adding railroad company logos on the board to mark the spots for company cubes and money. I decided that would look ugly, and instead opted for charter cards. These are poker card sized cards with bright company logos (which would’ve looked awful on the board) and spots for cubes and money. The cards can also be flipped to show the “Gone West” status. Too bad I can’t create three-sided cards for “Special available” / “Special used” / “Gone West”.

The board also doesn’t have an action reference. I put that on cards, too. The action reference cards list all the actions and show if the dividend action is available. When a player takes the dividend action, they can flip the card to show that, and the action is no longer listed in the action reference.

Here’s my final version.

The one thing that annoys me is the destination city labels and the way they point to different directions. That was the easy solution, to avoid them overlapping with the tracks. It would look nicer if they all pointed the same way, but that would require reorganizing the tracks a bit.

This map is a lot more compact than the original. The original is almost A2 size. This fits on single A3. It’s not too cramped; it could be larger, but I like the compactness. Reading the routes is easy. The action reference cards turned out pretty good, too.

I noticed an interesting side effect. You see how the red line has built from Chicago via Dubuque and La Crosse to Minneapolis. That happened both times I’ve played with this new map. Why not – it’s the straight line to Minneapolis, the destination for red. However, this makes the green line less attractive, as Dubuque – Mason City – Sioux City would be the most direct line for green, while for red, reaching Minneapolis through Madison and Eau Claire would be the same distance, even though it looks longer. As a result, the green line didn’t start at all in either of those games.

…And now that I look at this more closely, I spotted an error in my map. There should be a connection between Cedar Rapids and Mason City that is missing. That would give green an alternate three-link route to Sioux City. Oops! Looks like I was missing a couple of other connections as well, but those weren’t as critical. The image above is updated to reflect the correct map.

We had full five players. The game was wild, with mergers shaking things up a lot. As far as rules go, Indonesia is a straightforward game, but the system is so delightfully chaotic, especially when everybody is still learning the ropes.

At one point of the game, I had a nice shipping line. Competing shipping lines were merged, and I thought I want to be the shipping master, so I bid a hefty 120% premium, paying 22 Rp‎ per ship for that line. Right after that, my original shipping line was also merged. I was out of money at that point, so I couldn’t keep it, but the buyer paid an even bigger premium for that, paying 28 Rp‎ per ship. I owned most of the ships in that merger, so I made a lot of money – and I still had a solid shipping line, just a different one than I started with.

With lots of goods production on the map and long shipping lines, the shipping companies stole the game. I won, and Hannu who got the other shipping company (and who was ready to flip the table at point as he was doing very badly) was second. The final scores were 1247–1023–634–614–441, so it’s safe to say shipping can be lucrative in Indonesia.

The game took us about three hours, excluding the rules explanations. The five-player game is fast, in rounds. I think the five-player game should be a three-hour affair once everybody knows the rules, which makes it fairly easy to play on weeknights.

We then wrapped up the evening with a quick (and a weird) game of Chicago & NorthWestern on my new map redraw (a post about that is coming up soon), which worked well.

It’s good to get back to Indonesia. It’s a top-notch game and as expected worked great in our group. Everybody loved it, and I’m sure other people in the group will also enjoy it. I originally bought the game in 2005 (directly from Splotter at Essen), but I sold it later as it didn’t fit my needs then. Now it was a good time to get back to it.

It was also a lot of fun to meet someone new. Tuukka, who writes for Lautapeliopas, lives in Tampere and occasionally plays with his game group on Wednesday nights in Taverna, joined us for this game. We’ve been talking about playing games together for a while now, and this was a great opportunity: he’s been wanting to try Splotter games. He’s also keen to try 18xx, and I’m sure we can accommodate that. Tuukka was a great match for our group, and everybody was ready to welcome him again.

While we were playing, a delivery was made at home: I now also have a brand new third edition Indonesia. It sure looks pretty, and the board has been improved a lot. I was also surprised to find my name listed in the rulebook credits. I’m not sure what I’ve done for Indonesia, but I accept the credit!

This post was originally posted on Mastodon.