18C2C: Continental Empires

Offsetting Smjj's crap rating

Initial impressions, two playtests:

This is a marked improvement over the already quite good 18C2C:Manifest Destiny.

The city development tension is an interesting mechanic. The new flat destination rules eliminate the problem of picking up countless tiles, trying to find the right place. The M city possibilities are easily remembered after a play. The D counting mechanic speeds up the end game.

There are a few places which still need some changes (governments and a few other small things), but all-in-all I find the changes to be improvements over the original.

Never again ...

Offsetting Smjj's crap rating

Did start to play this 4p at rr18xx but about half way the game broak down.

This is a HUGH 18xx, which more or less combines 1830 with 1870, 1856 and some more. With some extensions from 1870 the map is not as large as it seems, but it still takes a lot of building to connect the map. The game also have two "nationalization" companies that do eat up companies without trains.

Anyway, the enormous size of the map did not make this game feel crowded, so it never really got to feel any tension. And the gaps between players' wealth did feel hard to overcome.

I think it can be a bad idea to have too large games, and the playing time is unlikely to keep the interest of the players, so although I did like some of the rules of this game I think I'll pass on replaying this one.