1830: Railroads & Robber Barons is a turn-based game, where the aim is to become the most successful railroad builder in north-east America. It's based on Avalon Hill's board game of the same name.
You start off by choosing a character to play as and setting the difficulty level. There are four difficulty levels, and you can choose to have up to five computer opponents. You then need to decide who owns what - this is done by bidding on the six private companies who own the land. Once these have been divided up, you can start buying shares in the railroad companies. Once you own six shares in a company it can start operating, so make sure you buy enough shares in one company rather than buying one share in every company.
You then move to the first operating round. Here you can lay track hexes onto the map or modify the existing ones. You can also buy trains, bid for private companies you don't own and place stations. Once you have a train the game will automatically assign it to the most profitable route so you don't have to worry about working it out. After the operating round there is a stock round when you return to the stock market to buy and sell shares. This is where you make your own money, so buy and sell carefully. These stock rounds get further apart as the game goes on.
The game ends when a baron or the bank goes bankrupt. At this point everyone counts up their assets and the winner is declared.
1830 is one of the best boardgame conversions I have ever seen. It could keep you entertained for hours. I have heard rumours of ten-hour games of this, though I lose easily within the first hour! I would recommend exploring the multiplayer option as I found it fun on my own, but due to the extremely good AI another human player will probably give you a better chance of a good game, especially when you're new to it.
Copy protection bypass:
The first time you play, you will be prompted to look up a word in the manual after the first round of stock purchasing is complete. Simply press Enter to bypass all of the protection verification prompts. The manual claims: (after verification)... you will never need to worry about copy protection again unless you copy the program to another machine or reinstall it. After initial testing, this seemed to be the case.
1830 Posted on: 2013-12-01 by Sullivanjo They broke the mold on this one. Only way to play the game with anyone who is not a "game geek". |
if youve ever played the boardgame & liked it... Posted on: 2013-02-03 by buyaka77 ...this game is then a no brainer. while the boardgame can take upwards of 8-12 hours to play (no joke!), mostly bogged down by tile selection and train routing, especially later game, this PC version, even though its aged now, its THE BEST way to play this game, whether you play solo vs the AI (which is very good) or multi-player hotseat...this will beat the boardgame and the setting of it up and everything. But its not just that, but the game mechanics are some of the best ive ever played, and like the editor said, it translates perhaps the best ive ever seen from boardgame to computer. I run my game between 4500-9000 cycles on the dosbox, seems to run very well. it may take a player thru to get the hang of ti, but its well worth it :) |