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dmazeI spent most of the day Saturday playing 1835 with a group of people. This is the sort of game that takes all day to play (we started at 1:30 having decomposed the game from sheets of cardboard and reviewing the rules, and finished around 11:30). It's the same family of game as 1856 and 1830, but the rule differences actually made it interesting to play, since people hadn't figured out all of the strategy beforehand.
I got off to a fairly good start, and was actively laying down smack-down, until the owner of the SX came and placed a token in an inconvenient place. Then nobody wanted to buy my company's stock, and I was kind of stuck. This eventually got turned around and I was certainly in competition for the end game, until same owner dumped one of his other (mostly worthless) companies on me. I think hosage got passed around the table to the left, mostly. :-) I came in a fairly close third ($100 behind second, $400 behind first, out of about $7000 per player).
There are two big differences between the other 18xx games and 1835, aside from just the board and companies being different. The first is that there's a third class of companies -- in addition to public companies (can sell stock, build rails, and run trains) and private companies (just pay out money every turn), 1835 has minor companies which build rails and run trains but only have a single owner, who gets half the company's income. This results in a lot of track getting built early on which doesn't necessarily further the goals of the public companies, which is actually sort of interesting.
The other big thing is that the stock trading rules are a little different. There's no limit on stock holdings (the other games I've played limit you to 60% of a company); in fact, if you own more than 50% of the stock in a company, you can buy shares directly from other players at a 50% premium over market prices. It may be a translation error, but the rules also stated that any stock sale is legal provided there remains a director of the company and less than half of the stock is on the market at the time of the sale. Thus, if A has 40% of the stock (and sells it all), B has 40% of the stock, and C has 20%, B can sell all of their stock (since there was only 40% sold when they started) leaving 80% on the market and poor C with their 20% share with the worthless company.
The game is quite scripted, much more so than the other games. There's an initial stock round when you can only buy private and minor companies in a mostly-fixed order. The public companies are also sold in a fixed order, such that you can't start the next company before half of the IPO shares of the first company are sold. This is different, but not necessarily worse than the other games; veteran 1830 players know exactly which companies to start at the beginning of the game, and which ones will survive. (I've only figured out the starting strategy for 1856 so far, though.)
And since it hasn't been said yet: 1835 is set in Germany through its first century of railbuilding. 1830 is in the northeastern United States (between Boston and Chicago, and south through Pennsylvania); 1856 is in lower Canada between Niagara Falls and Buffalo.
I got off to a fairly good start, and was actively laying down smack-down, until the owner of the SX came and placed a token in an inconvenient place. Then nobody wanted to buy my company's stock, and I was kind of stuck. This eventually got turned around and I was certainly in competition for the end game, until same owner dumped one of his other (mostly worthless) companies on me. I think hosage got passed around the table to the left, mostly. :-) I came in a fairly close third ($100 behind second, $400 behind first, out of about $7000 per player).
There are two big differences between the other 18xx games and 1835, aside from just the board and companies being different. The first is that there's a third class of companies -- in addition to public companies (can sell stock, build rails, and run trains) and private companies (just pay out money every turn), 1835 has minor companies which build rails and run trains but only have a single owner, who gets half the company's income. This results in a lot of track getting built early on which doesn't necessarily further the goals of the public companies, which is actually sort of interesting.
The other big thing is that the stock trading rules are a little different. There's no limit on stock holdings (the other games I've played limit you to 60% of a company); in fact, if you own more than 50% of the stock in a company, you can buy shares directly from other players at a 50% premium over market prices. It may be a translation error, but the rules also stated that any stock sale is legal provided there remains a director of the company and less than half of the stock is on the market at the time of the sale. Thus, if A has 40% of the stock (and sells it all), B has 40% of the stock, and C has 20%, B can sell all of their stock (since there was only 40% sold when they started) leaving 80% on the market and poor C with their 20% share with the worthless company.
The game is quite scripted, much more so than the other games. There's an initial stock round when you can only buy private and minor companies in a mostly-fixed order. The public companies are also sold in a fixed order, such that you can't start the next company before half of the IPO shares of the first company are sold. This is different, but not necessarily worse than the other games; veteran 1830 players know exactly which companies to start at the beginning of the game, and which ones will survive. (I've only figured out the starting strategy for 1856 so far, though.)
And since it hasn't been said yet: 1835 is set in Germany through its first century of railbuilding. 1830 is in the northeastern United States (between Boston and Chicago, and south through Pennsylvania); 1856 is in lower Canada between Niagara Falls and Buffalo.
