First Impressions of 1830

There is a certain group of games whose band of regular players are seen as geeky even by the standards of other board game players. These are the 18XX games, so called because each of them is named for a different year in the 19^th Century. There’s so many of them now that they are in very real danger of running out of years. Oh, and every single one of them is about trains.

How can there be so many games about trains!? You ask, shocked. Well, turns out people like trains… and particularly very aggressive games about trains. To experience this phenomenon for myself, I played one of the more “accessible” games in the series, 1830.

Oh my God. 1830 has the most ridiculously steep learning curve to any game I’ve seen. You are given a sum of money to start the game, with which you need to set up your train companies. Yet you can set your initial share price so high that you can’t afford to start your company, so you’re just sat there, stuffed until someone takes pity on you and buys the last share you need to actually start playing the game.

Be warned: this is not a nice game of laying track, running trains, and investing in companies. No. This is a brutal war for your very survival. Friends will become bitter enemies and screw you at every turn. And the punch in the face that starts the game follows through with a kick in the gaming balls when technology advances and everyone needs newer trains (because your old trains get scrapped whether you like it or not), all of which are cripplingly expensive and there’s not enough to go around.

How does this game end? Either when someone crumbles under the pressure and goes bankrupt, or better yet it goes on interminably if everyone survives the drive to diesel engines. Everyone repeating the same routes until all the money runs out. Some players have spread sheets that will calculate the end game score under these circumstances. What a shout out for good design!

And yet. And yet! Despite all this punishment. Despite the feeling of being beaten up by a board game. I am drawn back. I know I have barely scratched the surface of the stock market, of running shell corporations, of stealing rivals companies from under my opponent’s noses or crashing their value with sudden sales. There is a reason that most of the things you can do in 1830 are illegal in the modern world… but it makes for a terrifyingly compelling game system. And I do, hesitantly, want to master these systems! 1830 has some horrible flaws, and yet I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. I just hope it’s not about to run me over…