Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — train games

In my last four choo-choo games - Iberian Gauge (2017), London & Northwestern (2018), The Soo Line (2018), and Dual Gauge (2020) - the game's structure is bifurcated into stock rounds and operating rounds. In Iberian Gauge, a stock round will continue until all players pass consecutively, giving players multiple chances to buy shares before the next set of ORs. But with the other three games, a player only gets a single go during the stock round, in which they are limited to the purchase of a single share. This does a couple of things. First, and most obviously, it...

The Soo Line is my sixth train game design. In some ways, it's similar to the others - for example, it's the fourth in a row to use some variation of the "track leasing" mechanism I introduced in Trans-Siberian. But it's also the most aggressively weird of my choo-choo games, which is the primary reason why I didn't offer it  to Winsome and we decided to go the Hollandspiele route instead.  The core bit of weirdness is that there are only three railroads to invest in, and the majority shareholder makes all decisions for the railroad. The game seats three...

The 18XX has a reputation for being the heavy gamer's heavy game, to the point where there is a small but passionate number of folks who literally play nothing else. I enjoy them myself, at least to a point: I'm fairly rubbish at them, and because even the shorter ones take a while to play (with not-insignificant downtime) I haven't played any of them often enough to acquire any kind of competency. There's a learning curve for the series as a whole and for each of the better games in particular, and I'm still at the bottom of that incline,...

The most remarkable thing about Irish Gauge (originally published by Winsome in 2014, and just recently republished in a handsome new edition by Capstone) is that I designed it in about an hour while driving home from work in the autumn of 2012. Now, I'm not supposed to say that. I'm supposed to talk about ideas percolating for months, about trials and errors, about the inherently iterative process of game design, about the versions of the game that didn't work but were refined via playtesting into something that was first playable, and then, eventually, something that was good. But that's...

One thing all my shareholding train games have in common is that once you buy a share, it's yours for keeps. You can't sell off your holdings in one company for some quick cash to float a new one, as you can in the 18xx. Neither can you "buy low sell high", divesting yourself of a company when it's at its apex, deftly avoiding the inevitable fall. This is something that used to irritate one of our playtesters to no end. Every time a playtest was concluded, every time we asked for feedback, she always said that she wished there...