What I Played Today: March 5

1830

There was a planned event tonight, as I got the opportunity to play 1830 again. I actually wasn’t looking forward to this, as I remember that the game really started to drag once you got to a certain point, and the exact same thing happened tonight. Once the threat of bankruptcy has disappeared, it’s just a matter of running down the clock.

I did have a good amount of fun tonight though, as there was a great variance of strategies on display tonight. The first time I played there was a fair amount being played close to the chest, and this time around everyone involved just wanted to try and see what would happen. As it turned out, what happened is that we lost badly, but it was the fun of trying. For example, the explainer told us that we should avoid trying to start 3 of the companies to start with, but I saw an opportunity to give it a try. As it turned out, I didn’t know the rules well enough and it turned out to be a bad idea to try to get the Canadian company off the ground. Sure, I was all alone at the top of the board, but a little competition made it easier to develop a company, and it wasn’t until late in the game that I had the right connections to really bring in the money.

I also consciously bought up a company to immediately crash it, syphoning the cash flow into my Canada company and watching it burn on the coast. It turned out to go pretty well, except that I misinterpreted the trigger that set off the mass rusting of trains, basically hoping that people would keep with the status quo. But...they didn’t, and I was stuck with selling a lot of stock to pay for a diesel train for a company that had at most 3 connections. It sucked, but I managed to make a key connection that allowed me to really boast up the company and it was soon the hot seller at the end of the game, and probably helped me get to third place.

But I found out that I like the gameplay of train games, as long as everyone is in it to play. I would prefer to play a shorter version in the future, but there’s a lot to enjoy and a lot of strategy and guessing. Also having a computer program do all the calculator work really helped, so that we didn’t have to crunch all the numbers, which really bogs down the game. That probably helped make the game a lot more fun.