Even the Canadian government has limits

We played 1856 yesterday, extremely quickly as these things go -- we started play at noon and finished around 5:15 PM. This is also the first time I've seen the game end by player bankruptcy, but it was a forced diesel train buy and so fairly close to the end of the game.

Let's review the basic sequence of events: government nationalizes major business; stock market crashes; large investors lose their shorts; game over.

This time we failed to pick up that there's a limit of one $100 government loan per company per turn. This doesn't really get in the way of the "use government loans to buy out your private company on the second turn" strategy, but it does make it a lot harder to use loans to do things like buy trains, and it certainly means you can't take out six loans you know you can't repay all at once to force the nationalization issue. My guess is that this means that the jump from "4" trains to diesels (destroying every train that existed before this point) happened a full stock round earlier than it should have, and the dividends that would have gotten paid out there would have helped to save the game.

( More thoughts on initial strategy and nationalization )