House rules

• For Unit 3, I use DB3 from Dave Berry kits.
• It might make sense to cap the minor company par prices at £100. Probably not necessary.
• Dave Berry’s house rule list is very useful.

Unit 2

When using Unit 2 with Phase 4 kit, we ended up in a strange case where we ran out of trains. Make sure you keep all the 6 trains in the game. It’s slightly weird there are only two 7 trains included. Usually the last trains are infinite, which is useful.

Combining units

1+2+3

Great fun, but prepare for at least six–seven hours. But it’s a good ride.

Bank size: We used £20,000, and when we had to call the game for time, the bank just ran out. There was some play in the game, so if time is not critical, using £25,000 or £30,000 might be useful, but £20,000 is fine.

Update 9/2024:

With 18xx.games as a moderator, we played a four-player game in less than five hours. It was very smooth. We used all the units, all expansions and DB2 and DB3. We used the smaller £16,000 bank, which got us a 10 SR game. That was fine. It was crazy to have a certificate limit of 37.

Now that I have everything set up for 1+2+3 games in two boxes, I don’t think I really want to play smaller unit games. For smaller games, other 18xx titles (18 India, 18 BosWash, 18GB, 1860) are better. The full set is still worth playing, it’s such a funny beast.

2+3

We played this with five, the maximum amount of players. Unfortunately we had only three hours available, so we had to stop the game before it was done. At three hours, players were pretty much full of shares, but there was still room for wrangling. With the Unit 2 minors included, I’m tempted to increase the share limit by one.

The game focuses heavily on Unit 2. In our game, there was very little action in the Scotland. I feel the northern companies open up so late that the heavy track development required in the north is just too slow to happen.

After this initial experience, I’m not terribly keen on the combo. I might give it another go at some point, preferably with just four players, but since I’d like to allocate at least five hours for it, it’s unlikely to happen.

Bank size: We had £14,000, I think, and that was nowhere near running out – we had £10,000 in the bank when we finished after round 9. Unit 2+3 combined is £9,000, but I added extra money because we also had Unit 2 minors and phase 4.

We had just ran out of 5 trains, so soon we would’ve gotten into grey tiles and 6 trains, which would’ve depleted the bank faster. The bank size probably wasn’t the problem, we just would’ve needed maybe two more hours of time.

Miscellaneous notes

Bank sizes for units:

• Unit 1: £4,000 or £5,000
• Unit 2: £5,000
• Unit 3: £4,000
• (G1 adds £10,000.)