1825 redux

[dmaze]

We wound up playing a three-player game of 1825 again last night. There was one big problem: there are nine certificates in each company, and you probably want to take advantage of every buying turn, so whoever buys the first (spiffy, double-value) director's certificate in a round probably gets the next one too. But beyond that, the game did scale down pretty nicely. Proposed solution for next time: skip every fourth stock turn, so with three players you'd have turns 1 2 3 2 3 1 3 1 2; and then if player 1 gets the first director's certificate player 2 gets the second.

I also felt like the early companies did very well (the LBSC didn't get driven into receivership until it had made a lot of money and I had stripped it of its trains; the SECR was consistently profitable) but the later ones were hard to bootstrap. This dynamic would probably change with more game units: extending the board northwards and lengthening it gives the LNWR much more room.

Comments

[dmaze]

I will comment here, on the off chance that anybody reads several-month-old LJ posts on rail games, that you don't need to munge the game for a 3-player 1825 game to work. You have "1 2 3 1 2 3 1"; now it's player 2's turn, but they realize that (a) if both 2 and 3 buy the last two shares then 1 gets another double share, but (b) if 2 passes then 3 and 1 will buy the last two shares and so 2 can themselves buy the double share of the next company. Now, the flip side of this is that 3 can apply the same logic and also pass. But if 1 then iteratively passes as well, all three players have passed and the round ends.