God rested, content with his creation.

On a fraction of a fractional scale, same thing for me this Sunday. 

Saturday I had the chance to demo and playtest Open Rails with the local Cleveland gaming group.  We pulled together a five player game with Erin, Denny, Jeff, Tim and myself.  After going over the actions, shares, and saying, "It's like game X only here you do Y" more times than I could count, we got on our way.  Tim pulled PRR together and Erin took first build, started B&O and charged across the mountains.  I funded NYC and began milling around New York State.  Jeff and Denny miscalculated share prices ($45 start money on a five player game does not allow anyone to self-start a company with a $12 Par Value) and sat a round.  Eventually, Tim took PRR to Cleveland but was fenced in because he could not build a spur track until later in the game.  Since he had nowhere to build and he was already saddled between NY/PHI/BAL, he continued to pay out dividends and settled in with a 4 and 3 train.  I pushed trains, but no one else did so the 5 trains stayed in the sheds.  Jeff took CanPac and virtually renamed it CanAtl by heading east to screw over Tim's NYNH&H.  I helped Denny with the C&O and he stayed south making it all the way to the $8 Western Exit off the board by turn #7.  In the end, Tim won by $40 or so over Erin.  I came dead last.  

I also had the honor of playing Tim Harrison's Rail Barons which is a decidedly clever and interesting game with strong ties to the railroad game genre of its own.  Since it is unpublished, I cannot betray any of the details, but needless to say, I was extremely impressed with the presentation, mechanics, timing and flow of the game.  We had four players (Mike, Erin, Jeff, Denny) with Tim playing bank and taking notes of the action.  I managed to push a lot of auctions and shares and made a psychological game of forcing players to consider increased values to maintain a monopoly of their shares.  I ended the game with only three shares, one company apiece, but came in first by about $5.  It was quite gratifying and would love to buy the game once it goes public.

Funny that the designers won at each other's games. 

Anyhow, Open Rails played about how I thought it would.  Some strategies were fun to watch. Tim's strategy of paying out and keeping relatively close to home worked and he won, although he was doing noticibly less than other players, almost staying completely under the radar for the whole game.  That's how 18XX games can go as some players can run in stealth mode for most of the game.  The lower share counts and smaller incomes made calculations much easier and several aspects of the design were discovered and met with delight as others found them out.  It was a good run.  The suggestions after the game were noted and incorporated in the final run of the rules.  I had other ideas such as changing the operating round to be uniformly two rounds per turn and considered other changes, but at this point, the design is frozen.

More details on the game later as other more important playtests are made.  For now, I rest.