Inflationary Spending

A fundamental question is how to deploy capital into already extant companies and the friction and costs thereto. Possible methods include:

– Half-pays: intercepting part of the flow of capital from train-runs into the treasury. 18India and Rolling Stock perhaps take that particular pattern furthest in allowing the president to freely declare any between $0 and the full value of the the treasury plus run. Partially along this line, 18EA allows the company to “pad” the dividend with capital from treasury – often used to edge into a higher multi-jump stock increase.

– Revenue-generating assets sold/held by companies instead of players. This can be anything from cross-invested shares in 1841 to private companies with revenues, to bonds and other derivatives, to inter-corporate loans/securities and so forth.

– Horizontal transfers from other companies or other financial instruments, possibly newly floated or created for the purpose, can be interesting. Mergers, acquisitions, take-overs of objects with assets…can all fit in here.

– Direct access to the president’s personal cash. While 1832 has the London Bank private (company and personal cash are no longer separated), emergency train buys are the classic form of accessing presidential cash, but there are other ways from 1831 allowing presidents to freely contribute to train buys (and in some games, also other purchases), to even billing all shareholders for such elected purchases (pro-rated by the percentage held – yes, just being a minor share-holder is an ongoing risk in such games).

– Then there are loans. The most common form have the companies take the loans (eg, 1817, 1856, etc), but in some cases players can be the ones taking loans (1824, 1844, etc), sometimes solely by force (had to buy a train for a company and couldn’t afford it), and sometimes electively. Typically loans exert some sort of pressure, be it a constraint on future choices (eg most Double-O games), or interest payments (eg 1817, 1856, etc), or a long-term penalty on final score (various Vellani games).

– Company-issued derivative assets, be they 1817’s shorts or 18NE’s bonds or 1849 Electric Dream’s bonds or the Bill Dixon games with re-issuing treasury shares (also seen in 18C2C), or other ways of dynamically increasing the share issuance (ie the company dilutes its extant shares by issuing more shares that might be bought – ala 1820¹)…etc. (This is an area in which I expect to see considerably more innovation)

More broadly, the costs of redeploying capital are a largely untapped and rich field to be explored in 18xx games.