![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
The Zen of 1830 BC
After biking on Saturday, I went over to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
desireearmfeldt's for potential gaming, which eventually attracted cmouse, purplebob, nuclearpolymer, and a post-plumber Mr. Armfeldt. We settled on 1830 BC (the 18xx game of Mesopotamian canal-building), and it finally made a little more sense to me.
A key observation that was made late in game (and not by me) was that, while ownership of land in particular states pays out dividends, ownership of land of particular types is worth more. (Unlike standard 1830, you buy units of land, which are in a state [public company] and of a particular type [desert, grassland, forest, mountain]; how much you pay is a function of the land type.) So if at the end of the game Babylon is paying $20/share in dividends, but mountain is in the $25/price unit phase and all five mountain regions get irrigated, you're better off selling Babylonian desert to buy Urartu mountains, even if Urartu has no irrigation capability.
Relatedly, it's awfully easy to steal water. Early in game you want to start the companies at the bottom of the board since they have the much more affordable desert land, but you want to irrigate the land upriver in the mountains so that it won't get stolen. As king, you also want to irrigate your own land for the financial benefits. Which leads to the desert land getting irrigated, but once people have more money, the land upstream gets acquired and the lower-river reservoirs don't get any water.
Mr. Armfeldt's strategy: "I have the magic Eridu private-company canal diggers! Irrigate my land, and your company pays out on its first turn! (And I get the $5/square owner payout.)" This worked pretty good until he failed to sell the private companies...which it turns out there's a very narrow window to do.
We even managed, somewhat by accident, to keep the game going until the first "diesels" got built.
I won the game by a substantial margin. I'm not really sure how this happened, since everyone else was doing somewhat profitable land swaps the entire game, and the state I wound up controlling only had one or two good payout rounds. The big thing really was owning a lot of valuable forest/desert city land at the end of game but I'm not quite sure how I got it, or howcmouse, who also held a little less than half of the consistently profitable upriver desert Elam, didn't wind up better off.
Oh yeah! Elam! It's all desert, and it's at the top of river #3, so you can toss up some early waterworks there and have a steady income for the entire game. The desert won't be immensely valuable, but paying out for the entire game is kind of nice.
My one other conclusion is that waterfront property in general is totally worth owning. Then as a king you can hook it up to the river and get credit for your state plus a small amount of money as the owner. Only one square of my five in Elam ever got irrigated, but four ofcmouse's did every turn for pretty much the entire game.
desireearmfeldt's for potential gaming, which eventually attracted cmouse, purplebob, nuclearpolymer, and a post-plumber Mr. Armfeldt. We settled on 1830 BC (the 18xx game of Mesopotamian canal-building), and it finally made a little more sense to me. A key observation that was made late in game (and not by me) was that, while ownership of land in particular states pays out dividends, ownership of land of particular types is worth more. (Unlike standard 1830, you buy units of land, which are in a state [public company] and of a particular type [desert, grassland, forest, mountain]; how much you pay is a function of the land type.) So if at the end of the game Babylon is paying $20/share in dividends, but mountain is in the $25/price unit phase and all five mountain regions get irrigated, you're better off selling Babylonian desert to buy Urartu mountains, even if Urartu has no irrigation capability.
Relatedly, it's awfully easy to steal water. Early in game you want to start the companies at the bottom of the board since they have the much more affordable desert land, but you want to irrigate the land upriver in the mountains so that it won't get stolen. As king, you also want to irrigate your own land for the financial benefits. Which leads to the desert land getting irrigated, but once people have more money, the land upstream gets acquired and the lower-river reservoirs don't get any water.
Mr. Armfeldt's strategy: "I have the magic Eridu private-company canal diggers! Irrigate my land, and your company pays out on its first turn! (And I get the $5/square owner payout.)" This worked pretty good until he failed to sell the private companies...which it turns out there's a very narrow window to do.
We even managed, somewhat by accident, to keep the game going until the first "diesels" got built.
I won the game by a substantial margin. I'm not really sure how this happened, since everyone else was doing somewhat profitable land swaps the entire game, and the state I wound up controlling only had one or two good payout rounds. The big thing really was owning a lot of valuable forest/desert city land at the end of game but I'm not quite sure how I got it, or how
cmouse, who also held a little less than half of the consistently profitable upriver desert Elam, didn't wind up better off.Oh yeah! Elam! It's all desert, and it's at the top of river #3, so you can toss up some early waterworks there and have a steady income for the entire game. The desert won't be immensely valuable, but paying out for the entire game is kind of nice.
My one other conclusion is that waterfront property in general is totally worth owning. Then as a king you can hook it up to the river and get credit for your state plus a small amount of money as the owner. Only one square of my five in Elam ever got irrigated, but four of
cmouse's did every turn for pretty much the entire game.
no subject
no subject
Mr Armfeldt
Post-Plumber
Um...
no subject
no subject
(I do think the length of the game is quite variable. Rounds towards the end of the game get pretty long, but whether the game ends or not depends a lot on how much the rivers get drained out and what phase the game is in; if we hadn't moved in to the 7-water phase it would have ended a round sooner, and if people are really aggressive about building out then it'll end even quicker.)