Welcome to 18xx Mistakes
The first 18xx I played was 1830 on rr18xx in December, 2019. That game finished in a bankruptcy, and I luckily1 won that game. The second game finished similarly. Since then, my “winning streak” was over.
I cannot win an 18xx game.
There is a fantastic and welcoming online community where these games can be played. These groups are great, and I wouldn’t be able to play these games otherwise. Through various groups on Slack and Discord, I’ve been able to try a fair number of different titles (primarily asynchronously) on Board18 and 18xx.games: 1830, 1846, 1817, 1817NA, 1860, 1862, 1882, 1889, 1828, and probably some others I’ve forgotten.
I really enjoy playing these games, but keep messing them up. There is a lot to learn, and the gameplay butterflies out. The consequences of decisions made by design or by accident manifest themselves much later. I find it hard to trace back my catastrophic mistakes back to their root cause. I want to identify what I did wrong so that I (hopefully) won’t make the same mistake again.
This is where this blog comes in. I’d like to share mistakes I make in my 18xx games. I’m going to try to suggest why I think they were mistakes, and hopefully start a discussion about where I’m going wrong, and how to get everything back on track. I hope this will become useful for others trying to get better at 18xx games too.
Welcome to 18xx Mistakes by me, Tom. A bad 18xx player trying to figure out how to get better.
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These games are said to be no-luck, but the outcome was certainly not planned.