1846: The Race for the Midwest: A good introduction into 18xx

This review of 1846: Race for the Midwest was featured on Episode 54 of The Five By.  Check out the rest of the episode, which also features Otys, Wingspan, Lanterns: The Harvest Festival and Gizmos.

If the world of 18xx is something you’ve been interested in but never knew where to start, check out 1846: The Race for the Midwest.

Published in 2016 by GMT Games, 1846 is a great introductory game into the world of 18xx.

The rulebook for 1846 is a little daunting to go through on your first go-around. I’d highly recommending finding someone who can teach and run the game so that your first experience is as smooth as possible. There is quite a lot to keep up with, and having a game of all inexperienced players could potentially turn you off from these types of games. And that would be unfortunate, because 18xx games are fantastic.

Well, fantastic if you love super crunchy, math-heavy, puzzly and economic games that manipulate the stock market and can be sometimes kind of mean. There’s a whole bunch of 18xxes in the wild, and if you learn one 18xx, many of the other games are built upon similar concepts with slight tweaks in gameplay, so really, you’ll be ready to jump into all the other train games soon enough.

In 1846, 3-5 railroad tycoons are competing to earn money and build the best stock portfolio by investing in and operating railroad corporations within the Midwest during 1846-1935. Players begin the game with $400 and begin first drafting private corporations that may provide some income for the first part of the game. The drafting here is important because many other 18xx games start with an auction, and if you’re not a player with any 18xx experience, a misstep at this starting auction can be brutal.

In 1846, each round consists of a stock round and two operating rounds. Game play continues until players break the bank, and the person with the most cash in their personal stock and the value of their stock shares wins the game.

A large component of 1846 is that each corporation has their own treasury, which is used to lay down tracks or upgrade tracks and purchase trains, and this treasury is completely separate the player’s personal stock portfolio and bank. The crux of the game is balancing when to infuse money into your corporation to do actions, or pay fully yourself and other stockholders out, either action affecting the stock price of the corporation.

During a stock round, players taken turns buying stock from the stock market or a share from a corporation’s treasury, paying the market price for it.

Players can also purchase the President’s certificate, which is two stocks of a corporation, and launch that corporation and put it on the map. You can get to select its initial stock value. Each corporation has exactly 10 shares. The person holding the most shares is the president of the corporation.

Then comes two Operating Rounds. Each operating round consists of issuing share to the market to raise capital, and then laying down one yellow tile onto the board. The player can also lay down a second yellow tile or upgrade one tile. All tile lays and upgrades cost money, depending on the cost printed on the empty hex or the preprinted which it replaces. Upgrades must be done in a specific color order: yellow, green, brown and gray, and the new tiles must preserve its type (city or not) and the orientation of the previous tracks laid out.

City tiles have spaces for tokens to be placed by corporations for a cost. These tokens have the potential to block other corporations from going through your city, which is bad news for running your route.

What is running your route? Depending on what type of train you have at the start of the operating round, this determines how many hexes you can reach and how much revenue you’ll be receiving for that operating round.

Next comes the payout. To pay full dividends, divide revenue by 10 and pay this amount to each shareholder for their personal bank.

To pay half dividends, divide total revenue by two. Round this amount down to the nearest $10 and retain it in the corporate treasury. Divided the remainder 10 and pay this as dividends to each shareholder.

Depending on what the corporation pays out, this will determine if the price of the corporation stock goes down one, stays the same, or jumps once, twice or three times.

After you complete a corporation payout, you may purchase trains to use for the next round, if your corporation has money, as trains get very expensive, very quickly.

And thus begins the brain-burnery dance of running your corporation so that others will invest in it so you have money to do things and increase the price of your stock, while making money for yourself so that you can purchase stock in the hopes that it’ll become valuable later in the game.

Game play continues until the bank breaks, and 1846 usually takes 4-5 hours to play. Each player cashes out their shares at the current stock value, and adds to their cash on hand, and the person with the most money wins the game. Money left over in a corporation’s treasury does not count toward anything in the end.

If you like route-building and economic stock games, and have more than a few hours to devote to a game, then 1846 could be for you. And you really, really have to not care about what the board look like as well. Because, more often than not, the board and hexes for an 18xx are really boring looking and plain, and 1846 is no exception. This game however has excellent components, all thanks to the high quality production of GMT.

And that’s 1846! Choo-choo! And this is Meeple Lady for the Five By. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as meeplelady, or on my website, boardgamemeeplelady.com. Thanks for listening. Bye!