The same day I got to try out Dominion, I got a chance after a long, long hiatus to play 1830 once again. 1830 became quite popular for a while in my circle back at U of I, and I miss it. The game is complex—not quite SPI wargame standard, but a step above the typical German family game and a half-step above even the more complicated of those—and all the information has to come up front, since there’s no luck and victory or ruin typically hinges on navigating a series of delicately timed decisions. With a learning curve more appropriately called a learning cliff and a play time around three or four hours even after you know what you’re doing, it’s hard to talk any but hardened veteran gamers into giving it a whirl. But the results are worth it.
Or so I remembered. This opportunity to give it another whirl wasn’t nearly so satisfying as it had been in college, and I’m not entirely sure why.
The pace has a lot to do with it. 1830 involves a lot of finicky fencing punctuated by dramatic seismic shifts, and this run at least was dominated by small play. Although we very nearly saw a bankruptcy and/or the effective ruination of three players at a stroke when diesels appeared which would have made the most dramatic conclusion I’d ever seen, Nik opted to buy up to a diesel rather than take the last remaining 6 train and left the door open for everyone to survive with minor costs. Thus there was only one notable but hardly seismic turn of fortune. As a result, the last turn where little happens but players slogging to drain the bank and end the game seemed more painful than usual.
Nevertheless, this session wasn’t all that different from what I remember from college. The two new players were enough on the ball to grasp what they should be doing before getting into hopeless difficulty, which is a minor accomplishment in itself and compares with some of my college buddies’ experienced play. The grinding last turn had always been a problem, and a new set of players meant a break from stereotyped play. (1830 has a peculiar quality of rewarding a certain amount of mimicry. This leads to a small, predictable set of openings which set, oddly, is different for different local groups, and players are often shocked to encounter a new set of stereotyped openings.) For that matter, all the features I remember were still there.
I suspect instead that the session wasn’t as fun as I recall because we’ve been spoiled in the meantime by the German revolution. In the early ’90s, games for the German market offered quality and, because they were a family institution, had to be accessible as well as offering strategic depth. Turns out you can have both, at least up to a fairly tolerable compromise point, and once the German games penetrated other (i.e., US) markets, creators around the world started imitating the philosophy while exploring elements of their own design, and games just got better overall. Settlers of Catan has all the good parts of Monopoly without the arguments and without the game-killing option of obstructing everything. Small World is like Risk with more variety and less vulnerability to runs of bad luck.
I haven’t seen anything yet to replace 1830 in the same way, with all the play and half the hassle, but it will come. (No, Ticket to Ride is not the same. Trains alone do not make a substitute.) When it does, I’m getting a copy.
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