What are 18xx games?

The first game in the family is 1829, by Francis Tresham, published by Hartland Trefoil in 1974. The title is the year of the Rainhill Trials, the locomotive contest that decided which engine would pull the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Tresham had started with a track-and-shares game on a generic map, and ended up setting it in southern England for historical plausibility. A second version, 1829 (North), followed in 1981 with a map of Scotland and northern England.

The game that turned that idea into a genre is 1830: The Game of Railroads and Robber Barons, also by Tresham, published by Avalon Hill in 1986. It was the first in the series to be widely distributed in the United States and it remains the reference point: to this day, the usual way to explain any 18xx is to say how it differs from 1830. Mayfair and Lookout reprinted it in 2011.

More than two hundred titles have grown from that trunk, with maps from half the world and rule changes that range from trivial to game-altering. Since each game is usually named after the year its railway history begins, the family goes by the wildcard 18xx.

However much the map changes, six pieces turn up almost every time. Understand those and you understand the genre.

• Two separate pools of money. You have a personal wallet and each company has its own treasury. They never mix: money inside a company only reaches you as dividends. The winner is whoever ends with the largest personal net worth, not whoever runs the biggest company.
• A stock market. Companies raise money by selling shares. The price rises when they pay dividends and falls when they withhold or when shareholders sell. Whoever holds the most shares in a company is its president and makes every decision for it — and is also on the hook when it runs out of money.
• A hex map and tiles. Track is not printed on the board: you build it by laying hexagonal tiles and upgrading them to higher-capacity ones. Each tile type is in limited supply, so sometimes you cannot build where you want because someone else already took the tile you needed.
• Trains that expire. Every company needs trains to earn money, and buying a large train destroys smaller ones across the whole board — what the community calls rusting. That is the game clock, and managing it (buying late, buying early, leaving a company trainless) is the core of the tension.
• Alternating rounds. Play alternates a stock round, where players buy and sell shares, with one to three operating rounds, where companies lay track, place stations, run their trains and decide whether to pay out or withhold. The later the game, the more operating rounds in a row.
• Open information. Almost everything is on the table: each company's cash, everyone's shares, the trains left to buy. Luck is minimal or absent. What you don't know is what the person next to you is about to do.

The vocabulary for these pieces is shared across the family. The glossary explains the terms one by one.

A game moves forward through phases, and what drives them is train buying: when someone buys the first train of a new type, the game changes phase, and with it the available tiles, the number of operating rounds and which trains become obsolete. Nobody controls the clock alone, but everyone can speed it up or slow it down.

The game ends when the bank runs out of money, when a player goes bankrupt, or when a round limit is reached, depending on the title. Then everyone counts their net worth: cash in hand plus the market value of the shares they hold.

Playing time is the family's cliché, and it is only half true. Some titles run two or three hours; others ask for ten or twelve. Player counts usually run from three to six, and many games play quite differently at each count. The explained catalogue covers, title by title, how each one differs from 1830, and the comparison table has the concrete figures for starting cash, flotation and certificate limits.

You don't have to start with 1830. In fact the community usually advises the opposite: come in through something shorter and more forgiving, and save the classic for when you know what you're doing. These four always come up:

• 18Chesapeake — small map, rules very close to 1830, and games of about three hours. Probably the most recommended entry point today.
• 1889 — the island of Shikoku, a compact and friendly 1830, around three hours. A classic first 18xx.
• 1846 — skips the opening auction, self-balances for player count, and forgives mistakes better. Very popular and heavily played online.
• 1830 — the genre's reference point, and also its cruellest: you can bankrupt people and gut a company on purpose. Worth playing, just not first.

If you only want to taste the mechanism before committing an afternoon, 18ZOO is the light, family-weight take.

Before buying anything, note that almost all of these can be tried for free on 18xx.games, the community's online engine. And if you would rather learn face to face, see where to play: the partner clubs run beginner games.

"You have to be good at maths." The arithmetic is small sums and multiplications, and there is always a calculator on the table. The hard part isn't calculating: it's deciding.

"They're always twelve-hour games." Only some of them. An 18Chesapeake or an 1889 fits in an afternoon, and less than that with a practised group.

"If you're not a shark, you get crushed." You'll get crushed in your first game anyway, and that's fine: this genre is learned by losing. What you shouldn't do is learn it alone — which is why a first game is best played with someone teaching it.