Wabash Cannonball is a brilliant, fast, and satisfying rails game from the frequently (but never justifiably) maligned Winsome Games. While it is certainly doable as a 2er, the game shines more brightly with each player you add up to 4. I have not yet tried the game with 5 or 6 players, and I hope to do so soon, assuming that the gaming population where I live doubles in the near future.
Now I will publish the exact rules, verbatim, and scan the two boards (map and income/housekeeping).
Oh, wait, I won't do that, never mind.
A fine description of the game already exists as its entry in the BGG database, but I will condense it by saying that there are four railroads initially available for investment and operation at the start of the game, and as soon as (if) one of them reaches the goal city of Chicago, a fifth becomes available and gains a railhead in the ever-exciting city of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Because this is an amazingly accurate reproduction of railroading history in the USA, the four initial companies start in the East and expand to the West. (Although nothing whatsoever prevents you from making utterly inane and non-historic track configurations that would have driven the rail barons absolutely mad had they lived to see them.)
Each rail company has a different number of available shares, a different number of track tokens (little wooden cubes...who'd ever guess?) and a different initial income. Not to mention different starting cities, different colored cubes...in short, they're all different. The available actions on a turn are capitalization (auction a share in an operating railway), development (various means of increasing the income of the companies), or expansion (dropping cubes next to other cubes already dropped in order to simulate the laying of railroad track. Note that due to the tiny size of this game, actual railroad track would not have been a practical medium, although you are in no way enjoined from using actual rail ties to border some area of your home's landscaping, if you so desire--they are especially decorative right near concrete ramps and low stairs.)
The map is laid out in hexes so that, if you want to, you can convert it into an Ogre variant some day, and each hex has a dollar cost (known at my house as imminent what?) to drop an expansion cube, and possibly income for the companies that build through it. 349
Mines and cities provide a persistent income boost, which increases if a development action is later used in that hex, while timber hexes, if developed, provide a one-time cash infusion to a company's treasury. Said infusion is just enough to pay for the expansion into the next timber hex over, so while all the other players are working to win and such, you could have fun running a nearly bankrupt railroad into a forest and then alternate between chopping down trees and making tiny expansions into said forest. I may actually try this some time, just to see if it rivals the actual fun of operating a profitable railroad.
As with some other brilliant games that <PERSON> has published over the years, a round ends when two out of the three available sorts of actions are no longer available, at which point the bank pays out dividends (I don't think I will get into any trouble for publishing this rule on the internet, since as one clever <PERSON> has already noticed, there's nothing in the rules to indicate who pays out dividends--fortunately my years as a railroad executive paved the way for my innate understanding of this heady concept.) Dividends are remarkably simple to compute in this game--take a railroad's current income (as tracked with yet another little wooden cube!) and divide that number by the number of shares sold. The extremely benevolent <PERSON> even lets you round up for this calculation! The rounding can be, and frequently is, a key factor in deciding where and when to develop. At least it should be, but hey, the game is really all about the stock auctions. You louse those up, you lose. I hope I have made that clear enough for everybody.
Sure, the operation of the railroad is remarkably important in terms of profitability and opportunity for the various railroads, but as with so many other railroad/stock auction games, owning the right shares for the best price is the total formula for victory. The game will end after Detroit is fully developed (8 rounds if nobody chooses to develop it themselves, as Detroit is clever enough to develop itself at the end of every round), or whenever 3 of the railroads hit an exciting plateau (selling all their shares or using all their track), or (least likely based on my games played) there are 3 or fewer development cubes left when a round ends. In any case, having the most money means you win the game, and ties are allowed, and possibly encouraged, but who knows? 118