I will need to give Viscounts a go now!
I played Ezra and Nehemiah again this weekend and still came away wanting to play again and again. Crushed the AI this time, so I’m ready to bump up the difficulty.
Garphill just makes such a consistently good product for solo gamers.
1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties is, I believe, one of the few 18XX games with a dedicated solo mode, and I’ve been coming to grips with it over the last few days. I haven’t played any other 18XXs, and only the solo version of this one, so these are just some initial impressions for the 18XX-curious.
In 1862, you’re an investor in the railway bubble in England’s East Anglia in the 1800s. You invest in the plethora of tiny railway companies which sprouted like weeds in every town. You buy shares, float the company on the stock exchange when you own a minimum of three shares, and then lay track from your headquarters outwards in a crazy spiderweb, trying to synergise with other companies doing the same (which you also control in the solo game, making it more of a contemplative puzzle than a competitive endeavour). Train technology acts as a timer - you progress through more sophisticated (higher scoring) trains until you hit an end game trigger whereupon you add up your score (cash on hand plus share certificate worth) and see how you’ve done. The lowest win threshold is 9,000 British Pounds. So far, I’ve reached 5,500, and I’m pretty sure I was overly generous in my scoring in that one.
Against other people, you start off bidding for shares to start your company. In the solo mode, the designer has come up with a really neat substitute for that process. You start off with a Patience-style tableau of cards (above, though depleted), consisting of a random selection of company shares. You can only buy a share from the top of each pile, but you can move a share to another pile if you can match that share. You can also remove shares from the top, accessing the shares below, but that removes that company from the game. And remember, you need three shares to start a company, so straight off, you’ve got an agreeable puzzle to solve.
(In the pic above, I have three ECR shares revealed in the top row and waiting for me to start a company. However, in order to buy a fourth ECR share, I’d have to reveal the one on the row directly beneath it, which is blocked by a group of E&H shares, plus one other)
There is also a strategic element to this, in that each company has a starting location on the board, so you want to select shares that give you the chance to build good long term train routes. And if you remove companies from the game, their HQ hexes on the map get blocked off (with white tiles below), constraining your options:
So to begin with you’ve got some nice long term strategic planning happening, plus an agreeable immediate puzzle in how to acquire your shares. The subsequent elements of the game run through: buying more stock, trying to float the companies you’ve acquired shares in, attempting to play the timer so that you’re not left with the dud trains at a critical moment (no information is hidden), using various mechanisms to increase the value of your companies (more of which later), laying track, subsequently upgrading it to more valuable track tiles for scoring purposes, running your trains and scoring the routes (three different train types and therefore three different scoring methods, more wrinkles), deciding whether to pay dividends (which also drives up the share price) while also needing to keep money on hand to buy new trains (the earlier ones rust), and then repeating the cycle until the end game is reached.
In my initial time with the game, the big conundrum so far is how to achieve the goal of making all the numbers go up. The central conflict is this - if you run your trains and generate income, you can choose whether to pay or withhold a dividend. Paying one makes everyone richer, and the stock price goes up. However, then you have no money to buy new trains and grow the company. If you withhold the dividend to buy stock, the share price goes down. But it turns out that there are other mechanisms around refinancing and mergers and acquisitions which allow you to manage this, albeit by adding slightly more complexity. After three games, I’m just becoming aware of these - the designer has posted many times on BGG that the game is all about finding the levers which allow you to do better, hinting that there are many methods, and it seems a good part of the game’s appeal in solo mode is puzzling out the best way forward.
I can feel the heat of @TomChick’s basilisk gaze, so it would be remiss not to mention the rulebook. This is fine; all the rules are there and are clearly and logically laid out, with no repetition or obfuscation. The ‘problem’, if it is one, is that the rules tell you how to play the game, but not how to succeed at the game - there are no strategy-related hints. For example, almost the first thing you do is set up a company, and you have a choice to set it up as Chartered Company, or Unchartered. Which is fine, the differences between the two are briefly detailed. But there is absolutely no context at the beginning of the game for why you would choose one over the other, which meant a hard stop for me. It sent me to Youtube, where after watching two hours of video, I was none the wiser (the guy said, “we’ll get to that later.” The video was five hours long).
Similarly, the more advanced mechanisms of the game, like refinancing, are presented well from a technical point of view, but with zero context as to how they could be used.
So in that sense, you need to consult external sources in order to find out, not how to play, but how to get to where you need to go. This ties in with the designer’s talk of discovering the levers you need to succeed, I guess. So just a friendly warning in that regard, if you haven’t played 18XX games before.
If anyone ever circles back to this post having got the game, here are a few resources:
This player aid on BGG is invaluable. I dispensed with the rulebook and use this to walk through each step (there are 3 variously-printer friendly versions included, the walkthrough with everything you need to know is 6 pages):
A teach by Heavy Cardboard. It is a full teach so is rather slow. I have made it two hours so far. Probably worth looking at to check out the share selection process at the start of game, if curious. It really is quite neat.
The one below is good though he makes some mistakes. It’s quicker than the Heavy Cardboard one, though less detail. The reason I link it is that he shows an example of a Merger starting at 1:03:30 and this is a really useful mechanism (along with Refinancing).
And here’s a playlist which is a little ropy, but he explains each concept in about 7 minutes each, which is really invaluable when all the other vids are several hours long :)
Phew, apologies for the wall of text! I’m having fun discovering the game, though I got frustrated yesterday at not knowing how to get better. The minute to minute gameplay is not as complex as people make out - there’s a mixture of short and long term planning that depends on you mentally tracking several game states (routes, budget, share acquisition, solvency, imminent destruction of your rolling stock) but it’s all good. Worth checking out if any of that sounds appealing.
1862 is one of the favorite 18XX-games in my group; it has a lot of twists that are pretty non-standard, and is better for it. Thank you for the write-up!
Yeah thanks for that, I confess at times being 18xx curious, but need titles that can be solo’d. 1862 seems to be one of very few that even claim to hit that mark.
My Tainted Grail campaign came to a premature end in chapter 7. It hit me like a ton of bricks where I went from enjoying the game to wanting to stop. The main factors are that I got tired of story events where either I didn’t know where to go, or I couldn’t anticipate the outcome. I was OK with some of the ambiguity in the beginning, but some more punishing random outcomes wore me down.
For instance, there was a place I needed to go to complete a quest, so when I got the chance I did. The location info in the book said the location was closed and I had to lose 1 point of health for each of my aggressiveness (4). I was already injured a little so that really took me down. Apparently my characters belligerence meant he didn’t take the news of not getting entrance to the location kindly. I see the logic in that, but I just don’t find that type of outcome enjoyable.
So I packed everything up and I’m done. I feel that these narrative heavy, obscured outcome games aren’t for me. I think Tainted Grail had the best shot and it won me over for a while.
The exception is Arkham Horror (at least through the first couple of campaigns). As punishing as those games can be, I don’t feel like they lean into outcomes punishing you that you had no idea could. From what I can recall, you have an idea that doing something may end badly and you knowingly take the risk instead of "your character just had a temper tantrum, got into a fight and lost almost half his health.
Exactly why I stopped playing, but much earlier than you. As I’ve said before, I’m intrigued by the wacky card-chaining combat and diplomacy. But it’s my opinion the narrative is trash, and poorly suited to its own format, which is the worst kind of trash.
Hey, don’t say that! Maybe you’re just not playing the right narrative-heavy obscured-outcome games! : ) I like that descriptor, by the way. That does a lot of lifting. Is it yours, or is that just how people describe games like this?
See? Narrative heavy, and obscured outcomes, and you know you love it. : ) There’s plenty of games as good as Arkham Horror! Don’t hold Tainted Grail against all of them!
Mine, unless I subliminally absorbed them from somebody else 
.
Yeah, I guess the difference is that games like Tainted Grail just try to do so much with their multipart chained quests, branching paths, and sprawling maps. They just want to be so epic in the scale. Arkham Horror is just much more focused.
I ordered Earthborne Rangers during its campaign since some of those are Arkham Horror designers. I hope it falls closer to the Arkham horror design, and not other big sprawling adventures
Cheers guys! I’m having a great time with it - going into my sixth game now (including learning game) and I’m basically breaking it down and setting it up again straight away to try again. Failing miserably of course - two games have been abandoned as unwinnable - but learning all the time.
The solo (and I assume the full) game is fiendishly clever; I’d definitely recommend it as a solo experience. [Edit] You do need to be able to leave it set up for multiple sessions though - my games so far are 4-6 hours. Probably be able to get it down to 3 hours eventually.
Are you using the paper money that came with the game or poker chips? Because I found that poker chips, as with most 18xx titles, are a game changer.
Definitely speeds up play.
Regardless, 1862 is a fantastic solo experience. One of my favorites.
Also true of non-18XX games! Ask any Chip Theory fan. In fact, I suspect a lot of us (?) keep a set of poker chips around to substitute into other games? I do it a fair bit.
Yeah, using the paper money unfortunately. It’s a pain as you can’t easily tell how much is in each stack, and I have to pick them all up over and over, which is even more fiddly as I’m playing on plexi and scraping them off the surface and into my mitts every time is annoying. The money also takes up a huge amount of space.
Chips would be great but I’ve been mostly playing wargames so far (this is actually my yearly ‘non wargame’ lol) and the issue hasn’t come up. I’ll try a table covering for my next game. That should help with the multitude of mini cards as well :)
Oh, I own my fair share of tweezers and tile spacers as well. 
To Tom’s point, poker chips come in handy in all sorts of games. Not just for currency, but to track XP, and the like.
Don’t think I’ve used them for a wargame yet, however.
