18 India

The year cannot end without an honest little train game, while my fellow BGGers are still speaking to me. Hida being cancelled spoiled our original plan for the beast called 1817, so 18India took its place: shorter, and theoretically friendlier to newer players. It belongs to that modern generation of 18XX games that wants to bolt new tricks onto the familiar framework—usually with questionable results. Here, though, there is at least an idea worth discussing.

Rather than freely buying whichever shares we want, we draft share “promissory notes.” A public IPO then follows, with the shares appearing in a specified order. It is a fairly kinky mechanism: at first glance, it seems to impose some order and protect beginners from the complete freedom of 18XX.

In practice, though, the draft is precisely where players can squeeze one another. If you do not choose carefully, you can be knocked out of the rhythm right from the start, unable even to get a train for your first company—cue karate-movie noises. The IPO order and the drafting choices do not forgive mistakes easily, so that “new-player-friendly” label needs a very large asterisk.

My biggest thorn is that the game suffers from modern GMT-itis: it feels as though it was released without enough testing and proofreading. There are confusing or incorrect points in the rules, and the trouble is that these are not minor details but issues central to how the game develops—the game’s forum tells its own story. The ending also often arrives as a sudden-death situation unless magical things happen, which is not something I normally expect from a non-introductory 18XX. We did not have a bad time, and I would happily play it again, but it genuinely could have been better.