12th Sept 2026 Games Day - 1860
by Robin. Mon 14 Sept (Updated at Mon 14 Sept)I've been trying to do write-ups about interesting and unusual games. So for this Saturday games day, I have to start by writing about breakfast.
The initial deal laid out a set of order forms and table numbers, shuffled and dealt out randomly to form a market track. We took turns to draft them. There was no penalty for choosing one from further down the track, but they were still shuffled. While retaining our table numbers for future use, we then embarked on a tableau-building phase with the order forms, in which the most valuable resource was a pen. When I finally got my hands on one, I made swift work of completing my tableau: all the options, no egg (weirdo that I am), brown toast. I then took a pick-up-and-deliver action to take my completed form to the kitchen, triggering the start of the cooking phase.
I never understood the point of the toast section in the order form. We spent the cooking phase acquiring bread from the supply, whose colour dictated what sort of toast we got. We then took a random draw from our choice of toaster decks to determine if the toaster worked or not. I got a hint from Dan Brownsill that the right-hand deck was the better bet, so I got my toast cooked nice and quickly. Dan and I had eked out a clear lead on the others by this point, but the catch-up mechanism kicked in and we had to wait a while for the bacon & eggs etc. to be ready.
I'd actually wandered upstairs to see what was being played at the other tables when, no sooner had I vacated my spot at the breakfast table, my table number was called. Eating phase... first, find a table with good company. I tried sitting with Dan and John, but they saw the disadvantage and found a different table. So I sat with Marko - good news for me, bad for him - and bagged some good eating points while also getting the lowdown on board games clubs in Oxford. And that was it, apart from the all-important end-of-round upkeep phase, where they remember you had breakfast and politely ask you to pay for it. Having been in the top 3 to receive my breakfast first, and 2nd-last to pay for it, I either won or lost this one. Depends on the rules, which - unless you count the above - no-one has yet written down. Anyway, great fun, great food, looking forward to the next round in November.
Meanwhile... 1860: Railways On The Isle Of Wight is also an interesting and unusual game. (Especially if you like 18xx games. If not, maybe breakfast is more your thing.) Anyway, if you were to create a board game on the theme of investing in and running railway companies during the emergence of the industry, you may not immediately think of the Isle Of Wight as the obvious location. Certainly the likes of Francis Tresham and John Bohrer didn't. But fortunately a guy called Mike Hutton stepped in during the early 2000s to show them what they'd been missing.
It was a bit more complicated than breakfast, but felt like a much more chilled game than some of the cutthroat, blink-and-you're-bankrupt 1830-style games. In this one, you can always dump a company on the bank, and you never have to dip into your personal money to buy trains. So it's more about making the right investments, less about avoiding massive losses in a train rush. It had a nice, relaxed, branchline feel.
The Isle Of Wight is just over 20 miles from east to west - hence the very small game board. But there are 8 railway companies in this game and, incredibly, almost all of them really existed at some point. I can't see that any of them actually ever made any profit, and that's where this game starts to deviate from reality a bit. In this version of history, we managed to cover almost the whole island with railway hexes, and made enormous profits. Both Marko and I ended with higher scores than I've ever known in any other 18xx game, even the ones like 1829 that carry on till the bank runs out. Vanderbilt and Stanford missed a trick staying on their side of the pond - the real money was in this little island.
I went into the game thinking: just buy low and sell high, it's just a stock trading game. And that was largely the case. I was only the president of one company for most of the game, so had less insider knowledge than Marko, who spent a large part of the game trying to co-ordinate operations between his 3 different companies. But that gave me more free brain capacity to work out what was going up, and down, and when. So I ended up with the best share portfolio, even though I only held a controlling interest in 1 of the 4 "good" companies at the end.
The game-end mechanics, whereby the companies are "nationalised" (ie. closed) in order of lowest-to-highest dividend payments, are interesting, though I don't think that had a major impact on the result. The most important things to do well in this game are judge the share values, and understand the nuance of the board and tile manifest to help you do so. So it's a good game for being an armchair investor - as I mostly was.
So that was my games day. Other interesting games this weekend included a 5-player table of Scarface 1920 with the Bloody Business expansion - I had been sorely tempted to join that one, though by the sound of it it was quite chaotic - which can be fun, unless you're on the wrong end of it. In my absence, that privilege was left to Anthony. Still a lovely thematic game either way, though (hopefully). We also had Paul B's ongoing revival of 20th-century classics, which moved on this month to Civilisation. They were in their own room with the door shut - I didn't like to disturb them...
Also World Order, Wonderous Creatures, and finally Baltic Empires - one of the new games at the club, much hyped beforehand. It looked very nice from the outside, and seems to have had good reviews from those who participated (except John N, who sounded like he got completely screwed early on by bad luck...). They were finished and gone quite early (before us) so I didn't get more detail yet. 1860 is a "quick" 18xx game, so we only took 6 hours... Breakfast, by contrast, was all done in just 1 hour: a great filler 🙂