The original content of this article was posted on here on BoardGameGeek and in the resulting thread.

After 5 plays and observing about a half-dozen more games we’re now mostly convinced that the game in Wealth of Nations is mostly absent. More simply it is grossly under-developed. The thought process runs something as follows.

Players will either take loans or not in the first round. If they don’t and another player does, the loan taking players benefit significantly from the lower market prices and extra operational time for their buildings. Ergo, players should automatically take loans to maximise their building. There’s simply no choice here.

If all players take loans, then the question becomes how many loans? In yesterday’s game but for a small artifact of placement the game could have ended in the fourth round. In that case I would have come second by a few points due to my unpaid loans. As the game ran longer my banks were able to pay for themselves and more. Thus taking quite as many loans as I did had some risk. I took 11 loans. 8 or so loans however would have been completely risk-free (and has been risk-free in prior games). I’m not about to define what that number should be, but clearly a reasonable number could be picked.

Why not then just start all players with 8 loans or their equivalent? Why bother having each player go through the rigamarole of taking loans and calculating prices and sequencing etc? There’s really no actual point to the loan taking process in the first Round in Wealth of Nations. It is automatic – they can’t afford to NOT take loans. Just start every player off with 10 or so loans and their equivalent in cash.

Similarly the cube-buying process in the first round is also almost perfectly scripted. There are only a few cube-based directions to head in and several of them are near identical. Why not simply gut the first trading round, start the players with say 8 loans, no cash and increase the money/cube draught pools correspondingly? That would easily cut almost an hour from the game and lose almost nothing in the way of interesting game decisions.

The markets almost work. Yeah there are efficiencies of scale and there is a modestly interesting under-/over-served-market pattern but it is shallow. Trading is again near automatic. Each player will have cubes they want, cubes they don’t want and a cube set they want to enter the Development phase with. Turning unwanted cubes plus cash plus loans into wanted cubes is purely mechanical and near decision-free. Almost any trade which moves them toward their desired cube-set should be rotely accepted. The only significant decision point is time ordering the trades based on opportunity cost against other desired trades. Very rarely there’s a decision about giving a specific player N-colour cubes at a cheaper trade cost or forcing them to buy at market cost, but those decisions are marginal as the penalty for them buying from the market is also marginal and they’re just going to get those cubes anyway.

In short the economic game seems like it is there, but the more I look at it the less and less there is actually there. Yeah, it seems muscular and aggressive and difficult and so forth and I have no doubt that non-analytical players can have a great time there. However once you catch on to the efficiencies that the game is built on, all the economy questions/decisions fall out to the simple: I want to build XYZ tiles, buy/trade for those cubes efficiently. Worse, the penalties for inefficiency (loans) are minor at worst – the odd dollar here and there really doesn’t matter that much. The value-differential of electively trading with players versus the bank/market is simply too small. Yeah, trading with player is more efficient, but the penalty of not-trading is marginal as versus say Settler of Catan’s or Bohnanza’s much steeper cliff providing both an interesting incentive and safety catch.

What’s left that is actually interesting is the board play: the tesselation patterns of the tiles, the control of area, the fight for space, the control of placement cost, etc. There’s actually a modestly interesting game there. I have a particular fondness for such games and am possibly rather good at them and that skill combined with my aggressive play-style has aided my success. However that interesting geometrical game is surrounded by a huge umbra of economy management which pretty much boils down to busy work.

Another problem, and I’ll discuss this more elsewhere/elsewhen, is the lack of butterfly effect in the game. The only significant source of variance is the draught and the initial tile placement locations. Outside of the geometry I really don’t see much interesting here. Oh, it is certainly possible during the initial tile placement phase to elect a player to lose the game, and I’ve done that and it can be modestly interesting for you if not for them, but that’s about it.

My other suspicion is that the game is mostly decided by the end of the first Development phase, outside of teleporting tile effects. In my last three games I’ve managed to secure the area and resources on the first turn to effectively guarantee my eventual success. 4 player games and teleporting tiles. Both those caveats are large. I see no reason to think that the game is nearly so deterministic with 5 players and see considerable reason to think that the spatial aspects in 5 player games will be much more interesting. The question is then whether that geometry game is sufficiently interesting to support the needless economic burden.

Update: After further thought this game-determination is bound fairly tightly to turn order. There is a severe advantage to placing later in the turn order in a 4 player game with 3rd probably being the sweetspot, as they (largely) get to control where the 4th player places. This, combined with the already present double-tile-set for the 3rd and 4th players in a 4 player game, is an impressive turn-order advantage.

I’m going to give up on 4 player games of Wealth of Nations except as teaching exercises. I’m not sure the game can be rescued with that player count without gross surgery. If I were to house rule the 4 player game I’d probably consider removing the black tile set from the draught and replacing it with another money/cube permutation set. I might also remove the second yellow tile set and sweeten the remaining yellow tileset with cubes/money. The first of or both of those changes should resolve a bit of the gross predictability of the 4 player game.

I will be pursuing 5 player games over the next weeks (we’ve played 4 four player games of WoN in a couple weeks, getting a few more 5 player games in shouldn’t be too hard). I’ll report back on my conclusions with that player count after that.

ObNote: The above comments are mostly specific to the 4 player game. I have yet to play with 5. Many of the points visibly remain with 5 players (loans, money, markets, cubes etc) but the decisions around board/area control and the choice and placement of each player’s second industry are clearly more subtle than they are in 4 player games.

I’ve updated the income/action/etc sheets I posted a while back to version 1.3 to correct the mis-labelling of the action tracks and a few other typoes. Thanks go to James Ludlow (jdludlow) and Mark Hamzy (hamzy) for catching the errors – predictably I’ve yet to be able to play with my own aid! I also posted the files to BoardGameGeek in the Pampas Railroads area as version 1.3, but they are pending approval. Meanwhile the PDF and PNG versions may be found in the normal place.

Dutch Intercity by Han Heidema is a likely early design progenitor of The Riding Series and was published by Winsome Games in 1999.

Minimalist, austere, spartan: dinosaurs in natural history museums have more fat than this little mechanical mousetrap. There is a watchmaker’s delight in the tightly whirring little flensing blades of the game. Dutch Intercity is a game of iterative predatory auctions of shares with highly unstable values interspersed with quick activities to generate those unstable values. And really, that’s pretty much the game as everything else is just a cog or whirring flywheel thrown in to provide predation, (interesting) auctions or shares with unstable values. If you thought Wabash Cannonball was about as stark as you can get for a share speculation game, Dutch Intercity goes several large steps further towards skeletal.

Dutch Intercity consists of 5 companies, each with 10 shares, and a board showing a simplified map of the Netherlands with a pre-drawn graph of ¹(http://boardgamegeek.com/image/154037). Players iteratively auction shares of companies², the directors³ blind bid to claim railway network routes on the pre-drawn graph and dividends are paid for each player’s shares⁴ until the network is full. As the graph is small only 4-6 full rounds will be played depending on route competition levels.

The hinge point is in the intersection of two patterns: turn order for the auction⁵ and auction duration⁶. Those two in combination, a pattern also used in Han’s The Riding Series. are responsible for most of the subtlety and tension in the game. Controlling and predicting how many rounds the auction will last and thus how many shares will be issued (and which shares) is key. One obvious result of this set of intersections is that it is frequently worthwhile to bid well over the estimated value of a share in order to run yourself out of cash and thus stop any further shares from being sold⁷. Being left with only a few gulden, unable to compete and also unable to end the auction campaign while the other players rip more shares out is a salutary lesson hopefully learned only once.

I’ve played only once and only with three players. The ideal player count is clearly more. I suspect that 4 or 5 is the sweet spot but the game officially extends up to 6. Playtime should run around 45-60 minutes for groups that don’t get caught up in predicting and explicitly manipulating turn order or 90-105 minutes for those that do.

An alternate ruleset is mentioned in the game rules as available by request from Winsome Games. I’ve requested a copy but have not yet received or played it. I’ll try remember to comment on it when I do get a copy.

Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters by Han Heidema is a likely design progenitor of Wabash Cannonball and is the latest member of The Riding Series of games from Winsome Games. Hopefully there’s more to come in the Riding Series as it is a neat (if fiddly¹) system and there’s definitely room left to play in it. The Riding Series appears an unusually coherent family of games:

1. Share dilution – Shares are won at auction and pay an N’th of the company income where N is the number of shares issued for that company.

2. Share-based capitalisation – The operating treasury for a company comes from the auction price for its shares. In general there is no other significant source of treasury funds for the companies.

3. Activity-based income – The current turns income for a company is a compound of the actual cash income of the company, plus a measurement of the growth-activity of the company this turn. Thus active/growing companies pay much better than moribund companies as they have the extra (potentially HUGE) boost of activity-based income.

4. Deflating income – Company income is a function of the number of empty exits on the cities their track is connected to. As more track is connected to those cities they become worth less and company incomes fall precipitously. This causes a rather fiddly constant recalculation of company incomes, but there are procedural habits which may be used in play to greatly reduce this.

5. Grouping shares – Shares that pay out as a function of the interconnectedness of the current track patterns. Thus as multiple companies connect to a city that city contributes significant income toward the grouping shares. There usually seem to be multiple different grouping share companies that reward different and competing aspects of the track development. Grouping shares are acquired by trading in basic shares 2:1.

6. National shares – (Later in the series only?) Shares that pay X% of all the grouping shares’ dividends, reducing the grouping share dividends by that percentage in the process.

7. End-game share valuation – Shares trade in for money in the end-game.

Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters sits comfortably in that middle ground of solid not-so-little and not-so-long games and most of the game matches that character: a comfortable game of middling length and fine pedigree that has built a nice home in middle age and knows well enough about the world to occasionally dazzle. Like middle age this isn’t a particularly vicious or aggressive game, but it has its moments and some of them are real doozies. Cunning and guile are rewarded more than blatant aggression, most of the time, and conservative and modestly delicate play is the name of the game, most of the time. Those caveating weasel words are deliberate: that guile and cunning comes with its own share of subtlety and excess and moderation. Again, like middle age, there are occasional splurges, vast sprawls of violent aggression and exploited advantage, and the game frequently turns on these crises, but they are the anticipated exuberant exceptions and not the mature foundations of the game.

Structurally Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters consists of six Basic Companies which are grouped into two sets of three, two Grouping Companies each of which maps to a set of three Basic Companies, and the odd little parasitic top of the pyramid: the NS. Each Basic Company has a number of shares (count varies by company) which pay a diluted fractional dividend ala Wabash Cannonball. The dividend paid by a company is a small function of prior track builds plus a hefty bonus for any track built this turn². During the course of the game the base dividend from prior track builds grows rapidly and then as rapidly decreases at about the same time that the growth opportunities begin to peter out. However, shares of Basic Companies may be traded for shares of Grouping Companies, and those shares pay out as a function of the connection density of their constituent Basic Companies, that same connection density driving the Basic Company share dividends down. Shares in Basic Companies can also be traded in for shares of the NS, which pays a fraction of the dividends of both Grouping Company dividends and parasitically reduces their dividends by a matching amount.

That pattern of leveraged parasitism, of the Grouping Companies building atop the petering out of the Basic Companies and the NS preying on the Grouping Companies is a core theme and pivot of the game. Higher companies build and prey on the success and growth of their smaller and more active younger generations. Correctly timing the transition of investments from the teenagers to the next generation (and which next generation) is a a key inflexion point in the game.

On the gripping hand Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters is an auction game where what is auctioned is a pairing of a share of a company and the opportunity to increase the dividend of that company, and it is in this auction and the immediately following track build where the subtlety of the system and the opportunity for mature cunning and guile reveals. Players in turn order³ offer a share of a company for auction. The highest bidder takes the share and then immediately builds a single track connection for the company using the money they won the share with. Left over money goes to the company treasury. If the player is also the director of the company⁴ they may use the treasury money to pay for the track link. Some key elements here are:

• companies may only build track when they sell their own shares

• selling shares dilutes the dividends of those shares

• building track adds a significant (potentially huge) bonus to the dividend paid for those shares

In the balance of those three patterns is where some of the opportunity for cunning and guile comes in. The rest of the cunning and guile comes in with the intersection of the above three patterns, track building, turn order, and the layered/predatory pattern previously discussed. There is ample opportunity for players to manipulate turn order, cash holdings, aggressive and friendly (both) track builds, share dilution and upper-company implications in notably clever ways:

• In the early game there’s a very strong incentive for players to dilute and monopolise shares in the companies they already hold. This gives them the largest payout as they get both the base dividend from the track builds in prior turns plus the bonus from this turn’s activity

• In the mid-game this inverts suddenly as company opportunities begin to vanish and preying on other company’s shares or building the Grouping Companies becomes more profitable

• There’s a strong advantage for directors who win shares early in the turn order to build links that cost considerably less than their bid, which results in excess bid funds going into the company treasury and being available for later builds by the director

  • Note: Company treasuries are doled out to their share-holders in end-game scoring, which allows cash to be fractionally “hidden” in companies by shareholders without affecting their turn order in the game. This also allows players to grab cheap shares in order to snag a fraction of such hidden cash

• A big track build with a related large dividend bonus early in the turn order is easily preyed on by other players grabbing shares in the same company cheaply and diluting the bonus for minimal expense

• Likewise a well-built company with a large base income will be predated-on by other players jumping in for a cheap share of the rich dividends

• Because directors can use the company treasury in addition to their bid money for their track builds, directors who win shares late (preferably last) in the turn order can potentially do massive builds using those funds and thus generate huge dividend bonuses for their shares without fear of other players nipping in later for a cheap share of the bonus

• In the mid- and late-game, non-director players early in the turn order are incented to win shares in companies which are significantly owned by directors late in the turn order and to then construct a modestly sized link for them (possibly stashing yet more money in the treasury), thus encouraging the late turn-order director to also buy a share in that company so as to construct a massive track segment which pays them even more handsomely

• Big track builds can cut off and doom other companies, leaving them nowhere to go. Timed well against the right players this can turn the game on its ear.

• etc.

I own a copy of Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters, have West Riding and Länderbahnen and Länderbahnen Expansion Set arriving Real Soon Now (tm), and am being offered a copy of Riding Through England. I hope to report on the other games soon. So far I’ve played a solo game, two 3 player games and one 4 player game of Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters. It will be played more. I suspect that 4 players is the sweet spot though 5 could also be good. 3 players works but is not ideal. Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters plays in around 120-150 minutes once you have the basics down. With experience it could probably get down to 100 minutes but that might also be pushing it. It is a curious and not so little game, which isn’t to say it is very big or very strange, but that like a muscular and oddly intense older uncle back from the wars is a little different, a little ungainly and with room for surprising elements of flair and brutality. There’s a little softening around the middle, but all the muscles of youth are still there under the jowls and worldly eyes. It also, every so often, pops up to do the lambada or pound out Honky Tonk on the old piano or just takes over Asia in a land war and smugly holds it.

This review was also posted to BoardGameGeek.

qLokomotive Werks by Dieter Danziger is, to use Michael Webb’s term (CortexBomb), very much a meat grinder of a game. While there is subtlety a-plenty it doesn’t hold its punches with the opportunities for calculation or the surrounding machinery to grind the players. It is also oddly charming in a sort of plangently intense fashion: the beat of the trains just keeps on going, and going, and…

In short this is the train rust/rush mechanism of the 18xx abstracted fairly cleanly out into a standalone game. As an 18XX derivative it is cleaner, more accurate and more direct than Greentown is the 18XX track planning exercise. Thematically, Lokomotive Werks explains HOW and WHY trains rust and disappear in the 18XX. Players buy factories and capacity for those factories and then produce trains using them to meet demand and make money. Demand is a function of dice with a (roughly) one turn look-ahead. There are four parallel tracks of factory-types and as newer and more profitable factories enter the game the demand for the trains from older factories progressively dries up. The result is similar to the 18XX train rush and has similar levels of aggression, but is not as fast or as deliberately controlled (dice).

As might be expected this is a game of heavy elbows and a relentless player-driven pace. It is also a treadmill-game: players get on and proceed to run, scramble, fall, duck and pull themselves over the heaving bodies of the other players as they lunge for the end of the game. It is not subtle, not gentle, not genteel; elbows to throats and knees to the groin the whole way. Unlike other related titles, there’s a healthy and even heavy dose of randomness in the dice. The randomness can be largely mitigated but it is a bit larger than I’m comfortable with and it can simply be impossible to mitigate effectively if the dice or cash don’t come your way in time. The dice can and will throw the game. It won’t happen often, there is room for considerable skill, but it will happen. The dice also seem to make the game more tactical then I’d prefer, but I suspect that with more long term information early advantages may be be impossible to overcome. The current random factors force a level of defensive play which acts as its own leveling stick.

While not really a calculator game as the sums are not that hard, I could easily see paper and pencil being popular. There’s a lot of nickel and onesy/twosy calculations to do each turn in planning the exact dollar counts each player will have for the next turn and thus the resulting player order for the next turn. (Turn order is in order of increasing cash holdings) This is more than a bit fiddly. I’m tempted to roll capacity purchases and Locomotive Production together into a single seamless round: Player-1 buys capacity and does his first pass Production, Player-2 likewise etc, then iterate on Production until done. This would not change the actual game but would make the painful counting process just before Locomotive Production simpler and hopefully faster.

There is a catch-up mechanism turn order, and it is very good to be early in the turn order, but it isn’t a gift. Turn order only works for you if you make it work, and that requires care and more than a modicum of exacting planning and having the cash to execute on that advantage. Fall too far behind and you are simply toast. Fall a bit behind however and your weapons can be fearsome!

I’ve played 2.5 times now (one was a solo-play). I could see Lokomotive Werks getting down under an hour with frequent play but I’m not sure if any group near me has the tolerance to play it that frequently. I’d like to try. While not a brain burner, it is an intensely focussed exercise that would be hard to play casually. On a similar note: There is a lot of money shuffling, so use poker chips.

This article was posted to the BoardGameGeek Lokomotive Werks’ fora.

On Crayon Rails

I recently upgraded my rating for the crayon rails games from 3 to 5. I’d thought them quite poor games, almost the epitome of multiplayer solitaire, over-long, and soporific. Yet, I’ve raised my raiting and it may yet rise further. I’m still not fond of them as games; I almost dislike them but yet I find myself frequently calling to get them to the table…with my kids.

For the kids they are great games. I have two typically testosteronal boys that are close enough in age that the elder still takes a delight in squelching the younger, and the crayon rails games fit them perfectly. They are non-confrontational, skill-gap insensitive, have a nice micro positive-feedback loop as deliveries are made and as the track network they’ve built grows, and as an added bonus, there’s a constant exercise of minor arithmetic, geography, forward planning and cost/reward balancing skills. As such I’ve found them ideal Friday-night or lazy Sunday afternoon games: the click of poker chips, haltering queries as to where the unbelievable Wollongong is?, the drowsy buzzing of train movements being stepped out, occasional exclamations of joy as a big delivery is made and finally the gentle sigh and congratulations as a victor is announced. It great many positive ways they remind me of Sunday afternoon cricket in England: the quiet padding of the bowler, the hush of hushed yet smug anticipation after the release and as the batsman faces the approaching bullet, the sotto THWACK of the bat, the calls of the fielders and umpire drifting over the sward and the bees droning among the clover, and the ever-present smell of grass and indelible grass stains. Ahh glorious Sundays!

Thusly I’ve raised my rating for the Crayon Rails games to a healthy 5 and may in fact be rising them further. I currently own Australian Rails and already planning out which additional games in the series to acquire to help spread and speed the rewards. British rails? Euro-Rails? Nippon Rails? Perhaps after the visualisation/planning skills are a little more settled, Lunar Rails?

On Carrom¹

Meanwhile through means underhanded and skullduggerous I’ve recently acquired a low-grade Synco Carrom board at work. It has proven a staggering success, especially with the Indians and most especially with the Indian women that work near me. I’ve perched the board on the endcap between two cubicles in my aisle and an average day will see somewhere between a dozen and a score of games played. I’ve racked up a little under 30 games in but a few weeks and the play rate isn’t falling. For me Carrom is what that Crokinole promises and nearly delivers: approachable but with a lengthy learning curve, rewarding of skill, unconfrontational (Carrom is oddly less confrontational than Crokinole) and with delightfully subtle tactics and strategy that stretch far beyond Crokinole’s. In contrast Crokinole feels like a slightly gawky one-dimensional teenager of a party game that needs a few more years of development. Now it is a fun teenager to be sure, but the adult around the corner who knows a thing ot two is a lot more interesting and far more tempting.

Today’s comment should amuse the punters. From Games with strong theme:

Ra is dripping with theme. Look at your role in the game as the steering patriarch of a family dynasty that invests in the Egyptian civilisation over generations. What balance of investments will best carry your people forward? Feeding them with floods? Monuments to their glory? The favours and wealth of the gods? More pharoahs to carry the torch? Perhaps the technologies of civilisation: mathematics, weights and measures, granaries etc. Which family line will hold the first rank in creating Egypt’s status in the world and history?

And yet is is merely a set collection game. The depth of theme, like any game, is merely in how one chooses to look at it. It is a pure elective. All games are abstract. The rest are the trappings of self-deception that we distract and amuse ourselves with.

Seth Jaffee commented approvingly on the BGDF chat on my making actions in Muck & Brass mandatory, unlike the optional actions in Wabash Cannonball. I replied that while I’d have a hard time phrasing a strong argument for making them mandatory, I was convinced that it was necessary.

Later in the resulting (brief) conversation it struck me: A significant portion of good play in Wabash Cannonball centres around controlling the game length in terms of General Dividends. For instance in a 3 player game selecting Capitalisation once without auctioning a share will often add an additional General Dividend to the game, doing it twice makes that near guaranteed, thrice and you’ll sometimes get a second additional General Dividend. As a result Wabash Cannonball has control of game length as a central challenge in the game. But control of game-length is not central to Muck & Brass so supporting a strong mechanism to affect game length would distract from the actual core foci of the game (network potentials, financial leverage, emergent alliances etc) and should thus be avoided.

ObAside: The sway point in Wabash Cannonball appears to be at 3 passed Capitalisations for 3 players as past that and games start ending more frequently from track cubes than they do from shares, thus requiring passing on Expand to gain further General Dividends.

This evening I got to talking with a local I rarely play with about various games and his preferences as we tried to determine a game we were both willing to play. He continually described games as good because they were fun or he had fun while playing them. At the back of my head I kept wanting ask him why that mattered compared to whether or not they were good games? However what I really noticed and what got me to thinking was that when I got to recommending games that I wanted to play, all my comments were all about how interesting they were, the challenges they posed, the things that could be learned from them and I never mentioned or considered fun. My focus was on what the players could change in themselves by investing themselves in the game and not what subjective experience the game offered the players. They could change their understanding. They were all good games because they offered a system which would both change its players and allow its players to change themselves in interesting ways in order to play it well.

I have a hard time thinking of games in terms of fun. I played Wabash Cannonball tonight. If you asked me if Wabash Cannonball was “fun”, I’d probably say “No!” and go on to say that it is an outstandingly neat game, that the challenge of balancing and manipulating the alliances in the game (which is the heart of Wabash Cannonball) is very clever, and how aggressive and yet subtle it is. But fun? No, I wouldn’t (easily) say it is fun. It might be, it might not be – I’ve only played it 30-something times as of this writing – and I’ve little idea whether it not it is fun. But I sure enjoy and like playing it. It is clever and neat and twisted and opaque and … But fun? Shrug. Look how neat it is!

This morning a friend pointed me to a DWTripp comment in which he quipped:

I agree. But what we need is Clearclaw here to explain to us… in Vulcan… why fun does not make a game logically a better game. Like Spock, Clearclaw believes that one need not have fun more frequently than every seven years.

During my GoTW thread I commented when asked, “Why do you play games?”:

For the understanding.

Games challenge the ways I think and the types of thoughts I have. At their best they force me to become something I wasn’t previously in both the way I view the world and how I think about that world from that viewpoint. I’m a patterns person. They provide me with new patterns and force me to invent new patterns just to survive – and that’s worth a lot.

I had thought I understood this bit of myself. Now I’m less sure.

The most valuable thing about a share is not how much money it will make, but how it will change the incentive pattern among the remaining players.

The second most valuable thing about a share is the degree to which it makes a company viable (early game).

The third most valuable thing about a share is the revenue it may/will generate.

If you own shares in the company that the player to your right holds, you want that company to reach Chicago more than the player who holds shares in a company that the player to their left also holds shares of.

The mine and forest fields are excellent ways to devalue companies you are not invested in: just cut them off and make it impossible for them to reach Chicago.

Don’t forget Detroit.

No company has to reach Chicago. Sometimes none of them will.

Choosing actions and then doing nothing can be a useful way of controlling the game length.

Time the Wabash and control incentives carefully. It can be a very profitable company. Or not.

It is up to you to ensure that the incentive structures of each other player aligns with your personal pursuit of victory. Partnerships are a wonderful thing. A 2/2 split of the B&O is a beautiful thing. Or not. A 2/2 split of the NYC can be even better. Or not. A 1/1 split of the Pennsylvania is highly unstable.

Use stock dilution to find and break partnerships.

Wabash games are won not through accurate bidding or careful ROI control but by establishing positions such that the other players, through their own greedy self-interest help you win using their actions on their turn.

Track individual earning rates versus cash holdings. Typically one player will have a much higher income than the others, but lower cash holdings. Whether the game ends with this general dividend or the next will dictate who wins.

A typical game length is between 3 and 5 general dividends (inclusive).

Also posted to BGG.