18xoxo

It didn't take long until i heard the first time about #1817 after I had started playing 18xx. It was almost like before I actually experienced 18xx games myself, when 18xx was seen as this niche that no normal person touched because it was so complicated, long and had ugly maps. Basically the same applied to 1817 and its derivatives, just within the 18xx micro-cosmos.

From Thursday 28th November to Sunday 1st December 2024 I attended the VPS-Con in Verden (Aller) in the north of Germany. The location was beautiful. Several timber-framed guest houses with a chapel with a big fully windowed side as one of the locations to play games in. Food was also decent and the price for the whole weekend was a steal.

#18RoyalGorge surprised me. I had never heard about it and when I looked at the rulebook, the section “hire gunslingers” made me shrug and envision a wargame/western/18xx crossover, where I roll dice when I attack the trains of my competitors.

Ok, now it's getting serious. PNW is probably – SPOILER – my favorite 18xx as of now and I think I played it the most (which means still a lowly 5 times maybe?). Therefore, this is close to my heart and compared to other titles, I start to formulate strategies in my head and have a more accurate guess on values. But more on values later.

This first session was not only my first play of 1888-N (and any “Lonny” 18xx games) but also the first of our local 18xx group. As I kept stumbling into the niche of 18xx, I ended up in a German WhatsApp group and on top of that happened to find a few players in the vicinity of myself. So clearly, we all wanted to play live and after a few weeks of planning, made it finally happen. By the way, the 18xx community is amazing and probably worth a post by itself, but that's for later.

I love board gaming. One of my first “real” experiences was playing Catan during one holiday with my dad. Some of the other kids introduced me to the Cities&Knights Expansion and it added a level of complexity, I had not seen in a board game before. I was addicted.

Fast-forward several decades: Following my first big crush, Agricola, many other games followed. As with most addictions, I followed the rabbit deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole, going from mid-heavy Euros to heavier and heavier Euros.

During that time, i made first contact with 18xx. Probably as part of Heavy Cardboard Youtube Channel, I dismissed it because of its reputation of being super complex and only something for the real nerds. That lasted quite a while until somehow I became aware of the 1889 Shikoku reprint Kickstarter by Grand Trunk Games. It got to me.