1870 is a 15 year old game that takes 4+ hours to complete (perhaps as much as 8 for the group of new players), it uses fairly unattractive components and can be very unforgiving on a beginner.
Considering the above facts - why would anyone, in this day and age of elegant and fast economic games, want to commit (considerable) time and effort to learning and playing this old clunker ? As a lover of Euro games who recently discovered the immense joy that is 18xx system I will try to explain it.
I will assume no knowledge of 18xx and will approach the review much as I approached game itself some two months back - as a blank slate.
Physical Appeal:
The components of 1870 are a throwback to a different era in gaming. Everything is cardboard ranging in thickness from a very sturdy board to flimsy rail tiles. Those, some monopoly-like money and business-card like share certificates are the bulk of the physical components of the game. Map is clear and very solid but by no means decorative and certificates can at best be called spartan. All components, however, are very functional. With exception of some shuffling through tiles to find a right one game play will at no point be slowed due to components. Everything, from the size to rather stark color coding is devoted to making the game pieces facilitate game play and to this purpose they perform admirably.
Learning/Teaching the rules and game setup:
This is a bear. Rule book that comes with the game is OK but not great. It certainly beats the AH rulebooks of yore but could definitively stand to gain from more examples and clearer presentation. Even allowing for the mediocre rule book this is not an easiest game to teach. Large part of what drives the game comes from the phase succession which is itself triggered by purchase of trains by various companies. This entire mechanism is fairly unintuitive (at least until one has seen it work) and that means that until one has played a game for a bit one has only a dimmest idea as to the game's main engine. This hit us particularly hard because we approached game as 5 18xx virgins and had our entire first attempt (3+ hours of playing) canned because no one has understood the phase rules. Having a newbie learn from an experienced group would ameliorate this but is all but guaranteed that the newbie will be at significant disadvantage in their first game. 336
Same applies to a lesser extent to the subtleties of the stock market. While basic mechanics there are easy to grasp the small things such as the fact that company receives the payout due to the stocks in the Public Offering (but not in the Open Market) and that one can buy and sell on the same turn are easy to miss and influence the game play fairly significantly. It took us 3 full games and one abortive attempt (starting from absolute zero) before I am fairly confident that we have all the rules straight.
Setup on the other hand is very simple and components intuitively help with it. Fair bit of table space is required but nothing out of the ordinary.
Gameplay:
A game turn consists of a stock round and one or more operating rounds.
In stock round player (most usually) acts in their own name buying and selling shares in 10 different rail companies. There are certain limitations to stock ownership (total number of certificates owned is limited as is a maximum share one can hold in a given company) which are subject to change due to circumstances of the stock market. This trading will be one way to influence the stock price and will - crucially - determine the ownership and control over the companies themselves. Contrary to most stock-ownership games (Imperial and Acquire come to mind) the stock manipulation in 1870 feels very natural. With exception of the above mentioned restrictions players are given freedom of the market and the price responses of the shares while very simple algorithmically are expectable and logical.
In operating round(s) (of which there are between 1 and 3 per turn depending on the phase of the game) players act on behalf of the companies they control. They lay track, purchase trains and conduct runs which bring in revenue. All of the above are very simple natural operations. As a great fan of Age of Steam I expected that a great deal of strategy will be going into making most optimal tracks for the company I controlled. While there certainly is strategy involved in constructing one's rail network this part of the game feels much more forgiving then AoS (though this is not necessarily the case in other 18xx games). Money-making runs are also much simpler affairs then in AoS or even crayon rail games. There is no supply/demand simulation, one simply counts out the number and kind of cities on a run and collects the appropriate amount of money. Only complication to this is a certain bonus company gains if it manages to connect its starting point to a pre-set destination with a single train run. 629