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Chris Shaffer edited this page Feb 13, 2021 · 22 revisions

Table of Contents


Rules Highlights

1817 is a very different game to 1889/18Chesapeake/1830. It has:

  • Variable company sizes (2/5/10 shares)
  • Auctions for private companies; these will be merged into the public corporations you set up
  • Auctions for corporations:
    • Players have free choice of where on the map to start corporations
    • They then bid on the starting price for the corporation/initial stock price
    • When started, corporations gain subsidiaries in lieu of cash
  • Loans and interest. As more loans are taken the interest gets progressively more expensive:
    • 0-5 loans = $5, 6-10 = $10, 11-15 = $15, 16-20 = $20, 21-25 = $25, 26-30 = $30...
    • Players must cover loans if corporations cannot afford them.
  • Shorts (negative shares) available on 5 and 10 share corporations. Be careful, you'll need to pay dividends and may not be able to get rid of the short.
  • Conversion to bigger corporations and mergers between two corporations
  • Liquidation, acquisition and offering corporations for sale
  • Infinite tile supply
  • Corporations must own a train or go into liquidation, no president contributions
  • An infinite number of 2 trains that get exported at the end of OR1; on all other ORs one train is exported
  • Cash Crisis if a player cannot afford their debts (via loans, shorts or paying of corporation debts in liquidation)
  • The game ends or one set of ORs after the purchase of the first 8 train, or if only one player remains.

Default variant

  • We are using the 10 short share variant rather than the 5.
  • We are implementing the no-cap auction variant. This allows you to pay more than the list price for a private company.
  • Players must buy tokens for 5 & 10 share corporations
    • This is correct behavior as there are potential reasons not to buy the tokens. The UI warns on the pass button to remind players.

Clarifications to ambiguities in rules:

  • In the case of multiple concurrent cash crises, we work clockwise from the president who just acted.
  • In the case that the initiator of a merger is not the player with the most shares, the president will be the one nearest to the initiator of the merger.
  • We disallow cross-shorted mergers where no player would have 20% of shares.

1817 is a slow game when played async. We recommend doing at least the initial auction synchronously if possible; this will reduce the time needed for the initial auction from up to 7 days to about half an hour.

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