Today's @18xx was a two-player 18 BosWash.

[msaari@mementomori.social]

Today's @18xx was a two-player 18 BosWash. I haven't tried this one before with two players, but as our afternoon group dwindled to just two, I thought we'd give it a go: it's sleeker than 18 India, and I know 18 India works well with two.

The rules suggest two variants for adding uncertainty to the shares. We used the second one, where we had a dummy hand and whenever you buy shares from your hand, you may draw a card from the dummy hand. That worked pretty well.

For some reason, this was a very high-scoring game. The final scores were 30156–29560, so very close (tied for the closest game in my records, just a 2% difference) and very high (previous high score was just over 20k). We had lots of companies at the top of the stock market and got a lot of good runs for the companies in the end. Bombay had the best runs, $1600 with 4×3 and a 4. Most companies were delivering opium at the end

I had a stronger start and thought I'd run with the game. I won, but the difference was small. One thing where I excelled was the upgrades: I got to decide all the grey cities, and having Nizam's home city remain brown hurt my opponent quite a bit.

This was a pleasure. It's fun to play these games with two players, as you get to do a lot of stuff. The game took about three hours, and half an hour of setup, teardown and score calculations on top of that.

#boardgames #18xx #18boswash