Grand Trunk Games

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Grand Trunk Games

I'm Josh Starr. I run Grand Trunk Games. I'm making 18xx available, affordable, and approachable.

05/01/2020

1889 is in open beta on www.18xx.games! Toby Mao who built rollingstock.net has been working on this for about a year now. Best online 18xx experience I've had. The interface is snappy and does live updates for all players. Most other websites have slow loading times or do not have rules enforcement. UI is also a fresh take on how to display information since most other 18xx implementations use spreadsheets. Link is in my bio if you'd like to check it out. #1889

03/29/2020

Less gaming = fewer posts. Starting to get some online play due to the quarantine. Yesterday was another playtest of 1871. The map changes implemented earlier this year really gave each company character. Only curved track as before, but now there are double-dit tiles which have huge implications for how the board develops. Lots of tough decisions around train buying, track building, and staying companies. I can confidently say I am awful at this game.

03/09/2020

First try at 1824. Pretty interesting game. Kind of reminds me of 18Dixie in how the Minors are tied to a specific major. We had a particularly brutal train rush because none of us know how to build good dit routes and we skipped a ton of the G trains. There is value in having early liquidity, so taking the privates that just pay a fixed revenue isn't as bad as it first seems. Would really like to see how this works with the Good Times variant. #1824 @ Mission Viejo, California

03/05/2020

1830 PA. The blue player managed to snipe a black cube from the green player. Probably a 30 point swing. I don't think I've seen anyone so far back in shares and so high up on income. @ San Diego, California

02/13/2020

6p England. Not sure how much I like this map actually. The starting cities seem really spread out and there is only one place on the board to get 2 links on turn 1 without Urbanization or Engineer. This makes the opening bids go really high in a 6p game since there are fewer turns and more people trying to squeeze in. We had lots of players slipping back on the income track and shared deliveries. Probably a 4p map, but even then I think urbanization is too important. You actually don't even want first build. If you didn't get Urbanization you want to make sure you go after the player that did so you can establish connections. The player who won usually went 3rd or 4th and seemed to get the benefit of connecting to the urbanized cities without having to overspend in the auction to get it. @ San Diego, California

02/10/2020

1841 with a few updated components made by using 18xx Maker. The market in 1841 is usually tiny so he made that a bit bigger and we're doing an experiment with the borders. Chris is working on other various graphic design experiments with trains, tokens, and colors. Concessions going for higher and trains moving faster, I think we're starting to get a feel for what 1841 is about. Corsica map for AoS charges 3 bucks for every single track lay. It doesn't seem like much, but that means you're spending 9 to build 3 track tiles instead of 6... which means you probably need to issue 3 shares instead of 2. A lot of maps I seem to start making money by turn 4, but because of the heavy issuing this game, I only made money by turn 7 while the game ended on turn 8. Solid map for 3. @ Mission Viejo, California

02/02/2020

1841 with the OC crew again. This time at 5 players. I did my usual 4p opening trying to open one company at 144 and another at 68. The thought here being one company is used to buy trains, the other is used to earn you money. It was a bit too ambitious at 5p though as I could only buy 2 shares of SFTC at 144 and 4 shares of SFTG at 68. This only really works if you can get 3 shares at 144 I think because then you run early enough and have enough cash to get at least 2x 2Ts. By the time the 68 company runs, it's likely all the 2Ts will have been scooped up, so you need your lead company to grab an extra 2T to put into your tail company. I was spread too thin with this strategy in 5p though and another player stole SFTC along with its shell. Something funny happened this game where the Tuscany merge resulted in the presidency landing in the bank pool. It had owned 2 shells at the time and had control over L1500. A player was able to grab it and used that cash to push through the 5Ts which resulted in the 7Ts popping really fast. The 4Ts ran 2x when I'm used to them running 3x or sometimes 4x. The player who grabbed the Tuscan company with its shells stabilized, merged it up, and ran out to the end of the stock market for the win. Great game, y'all! #1841 @ Garden Grove, California

01/19/2020

Couple games of 1817 today. stole one of my companies that I left in acquisition then let me implode. Next game she would have ended up running as many trains as the rest of the table combined. Who is this monster?? 😱 #1817 @ Escondido Charter High School

12/02/2019

Doing the Grand Trunk proud. Look at them Pittsburg and Baltimore tokens!

11/25/2019

Guess who that is on the right

11/20/2019

Not what I'd call a winning strategy... @ San Diego, California

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San Diego, CA

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http://grandtrunkgames.com/

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