Looks like there will be a new 18xx game soon 🙂
Its author is Matt Wilson (croooooow on BGG) and he has been working on it in the past couple of months. Till now he had a chance to play it twice.
He wrote:
“In short, 1903 is a Winsome-esque 1830 variant with 5 companies, 6 privates, and is for 3-5 players. It uses the same tiles as 1830, with the exception of the NYC tiles which aren’t used. The train roster is the same as 1830, minus one of each type.
The main MacGuffin is gold. The gold cubes add additional income to train runs but each time a train runs, a gold cube is removed from the board. The value of gold increases as phases progress. One of the privates, Ruby Creek, allows the owner to decide where the gold cubes will be placed once the owning player buys their first share certificate. Another of the privates lets the owning corporation forgo the additional income to increase share price faster.
I have a couple of other ideas I’d like to try out (but haven’t yet): once the gold runs out at a city, that city no longer provides any income at all. The other idea which is quite hazy at this point is treating gold as an asset which can be purchased from a railroad company, and the gold has some sort of variable end-game value to add to your net assets.
1903 is still very much under construction. I need to make some changes to the stock market and I’m also considering changing one or two of the privates’ abilities.”
We hope to play the final version of 1903 some day, and maybe before it, there will be a possibility to test it for our readers? 😀