1820

A pretty/web form of this document can be found at:

https://github.com/clearclaw/18xx_1820/blob/master/README.md

Overview

An 18xx game set in England. Novel properties include:

• Future trains: Currently unavailable trains are sold at auction to players (not companies) in the early stock rounds.

• Cousins: Cousins are a sort of player-controled private company that can both buy and sell shares and which grants a special power to the companies they invest in.

• Free track system: Cities & towns appear anywhere on the map, subject to simple spacing rules.

• Share counts: Companies can be private, 5-share, 10-share, 20-share or 50-share, and may move up and down on that scale during the game.

• Takeovers & liquidations: Companies may buy other companies, and companies fail or are liquidated and taken over by the will-be British Rail.

• Trains: Trains never rust, they just get more and more and very much more expensive to own.

Game files can be found under:

http://kanga.nu/~claw/1820/

Not-very-fast players experienced with 1820 have completed games in about 7 hours. Inexperienced players will likely take a lot longer. Because of the number of changes from 18xx canon, and the resulting steep learning curve, I recommended that new players only play up to the third stock round in their first game.

Game components

While you can certainly make and cut out all the shares and trains yourself, there are rather a lot of them. To save effort (if not money) those components are also available from The Game Crafter at:

https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/1820-shares-trains

The rest you'll have to make by hand.

Most components are available formatted for either A4 or US letter sized paper. A few, like the rules, track tiles, tile sheet, etc are only available formatted for US letter but will print just fine on A4.

Ensure that you print without scaling. Do not select "scale to fit" or "fit to page". Print everything with "no scale" or "100% scale".

Note: In many cases the provided art will produce more components than needed (e.g. trains). Discard the extras.

Outline versus nooutline

Most files (e.g. shares trains and player cards) are formatted for cutting with an Ellison Prestige Pro test die. Use the "nooutline" files for those components if you are using such a die. For everything else use the "outline" files which have thin lines outlining each component as a cutting guide.

Map

There are four possible files for making the map. Choose the one that best fits your printing capacity:

• 1820-Map-A1.pdf - A single A1 page -- use with a large format printer.
• 1820-Map-A4.pdf - 8 A4 pages.
• 1820-Map-legal.pdf - 6 US legal sized pages.
• 1820-Map-letter.pdf - 9 US letter sized pages.

The multi-page formats have small overlaps between the sections, which allows them to be more easily laminated or mounted and then taped together into an accurate gapless map which also folds up neatly for storage.

Shares

There are 30 companies in 1820. I've seen as many as 27 in simultaneous use in a single game. If you ever see a game of 1820 which required more than 30 companies I'd love to hear about it!

Nominally, all the companies are identical. They all have a charter, 50 public shares, a private certificate, 18 station markers, a stock marker, and a revenue marker. Because in practice the number of 20-share and 50-share companies in simultaneous play is limited, it is not necessary to produce every component for all companies. For my own use, I produce components for the following 10 companies for all 50 shares and 20 tokens and then all the rest to only 10 shares and 14 tokens, This greatly reduces component count, storage pace, cost and manufacturing effort.

• B&DJR
• B&GR
• CNR
• L&BR
• L&GR
• LO&PR
• LSR
• OW&WR
• S&DR
• SRBWH&G

For a 10-share company you need:

• Private certificate/share (black background).
• 10 public certificates/shares (white background)
• 12 station markers
• 1 stock marker
• 1 revenue marker

For a 50 share company the differences are:

• 50 public certificates/shares (white background)
• 18 station markers

This gives enough for each player to be pre-allocated two 50-share companies. You can also pre-allocate 4 additional companies to each player -- I do -- but you may find players "borrowing" each other's companies now and then as the company rush gets really going.

If you follow that pattern you'll need a total of 520 token bits:

• 280 for 20 10-share public companies.
• 200 for 10 50-share companies.
• 40 for British Rail.

For a 10-share company you'll need to print two copies of the public certificates file for that company (as there are 9 certificates per page). For a 50-share company you'll need to print 6 copies of that file (and thus be left with 4 "extra" certificates).

Station Markers & Similar Tokens

Print the tokens on full page label paper, cut into strips and punch using a 1/2" punch such as the following from Paper Shapers:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000XAKWPK

I then stick them to wood plugs from a Home Depot/Lowes/DIY/similar store. You can also use coloured wood discs from a game bits store, but they tend to be a bit too large for the city circles and thus don't fit well in crowded areas.

http://www.homedepot.com/p/General-Tools-1-2-in-Flat-Head-Plugs-315012/202252112

Note: There are no stickers for the British Rail tokens. You'll need about 40 for British Rail. In order to differentiate them from normal company tokens, I dyed mine a dark blue using cheap clothing dye:

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/335295

Trains

Train prices are marked on the train cards with $-signs. The software tools I'm currently using to generate the components can't handle £ (pound) symbols. Treat the $-signs as if they were £-signs.

Loans

I do not provide component art for loans. You'll have to use something of your own devising. I use blank wooden scrabble tiles dyed a bright red (see the URL for loans above for notes on how to easily and cheaply colour/dye wood). Wood cubes or plastic square tiles from educational supply stores would also work well.

https://www.amazon.com/ETA-hand2mind-Plastic-Color-Square/dp/B01J6FPZU4

You'll likely find your loan usage varying wildly across your initial games. Wisdom aside, 37 is the highest loan count I've ever seen in a game.

Lobby Markers

I do not provide component art for lobby markers. You'll have to use something of your own devising. I use 1" coloured wood cubes:

https://www.amazon.com/ETA-hand2mind-Color-Cubes-Storage/dp/B016C3H9IY

Really, you can use anything that convenient and which you have 10 of in 5 colours. Small cards would work, wood cubes from other games, whatever. Just dry-run how the lobby process would work with your choice of currency and lobby markers to ensure they work well.

Revenue Charts

While I don't find revenue tracks useful, most especially not in 1820, two forms of revenue charts are provided for those that like them: one that snakes back and forth across multiple pages and one that snakes across and fills a single page before moving to the next page. Use the one (or neither) that you prefer.

Note that while the total revenue of a final company with a FLOOD train can be up into the multiple thousands, neither of the revenue charts go that high.

Track Tile Storage

I like and use these trays to store the track tiles:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001B0S2H6

There are enough compartments with two trays to almost have have tile-type on its own. Doubling up on a few closely related tile-types (e.g. all the OO tiles of a colour together with the Machester tile of that colour) has everything fitting easily. Just cut the kids off with a sharp knife and then secure afterward with a rubber band.

Bank

There is no set bank size in 1820. A bank of 40,000 should suffice. If you do the final rounds of the game on paper as we do, then a bank of 20,000 is enough.

Note: 1820 is particularly demanding on small & middle-value denominations. If using poker chips, value-20 chips are strongly recommended as many values and costs in the game are multiples of 20.

The poker chip bank distribution I use:

       Count    Value   Total    Total
White     75        1      75       75
Red       77        5     385      460
Gray     117       20   2,340    2,800
Black     62      100   6,200    9,000
Purple    40      500  20,000   29,000
Orange    20     2000  40,000   69,000
         391

Further Discussion

A mailing list for the game can be found at:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/1820-dev

Please join the discussion!

-- JCL