I’ve created some helpful tools you may find useful:
I’ve been playing a lot of Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor recently. On BGA, mostly, at the rate of ~40 plays per month. It’s probably needless to say I like it. I think it’s a significant improvement over base Forest Shuffle, and good variety when compared to the expanded game.
There’s a strategy that’s clearly the best (if you want spoilers, see here), but it’s more interesting to execute than hoping to draw deer and wolves in the base Forest Shuffle. It’s strong, though: when I play against people who don’t use that strategy, I win most of the time (there’s one other strategy that can compete if it does really well). When playing against someone using the same strategy, the games can be interesting or come down to one of the players getting the engine running faster. But for a 15-minute game, it’s all good.
As nobody had done a scoring app for Dartmoor, I created one based on the excellent Forest Shuffle app. Mine is slightly less complex and only does single-player scoring; on the other hand, it’s a one page of HTML and one JS file, and very easy to edit in the future.
We play 18xx games using the 18xx.games site as a moderator. However, 18 BosWash, the streamlined 18 India variant from the Traxx magazine isn’t available there, so we have to use poker chips when playing that. It’s not bad, but the end-game scoring is. As in 18 India, the value of 18 BosWash company shares at the end of the game depends on the stock market value of the share and the total value of the assets the company owns (cash, rolling stock, shares owned), and calculating all that by hand is a pain.
It’s easier with a spreadsheet and that’s what we did with 18 India before 18xx.games supported it. However, carrying the game, poker chips and a laptop is annoying. So, I created a simple HTML and JS app that makes it easy to calculate the values of the companies and the final scores of players based on their stock holdings. That should make the end game calculations faster and less prone to errors.
18 BosWash is an awesome game, by the way, one of the best 18xx games there is. It uses the best stuff from 18 India, while streamlining away some extra weight. Both have their place in my collection, but at the moment I probably have a slight preference to 18 BosWash.
Of course, the most interesting 18xx title in my collection is still 18Korea.
I’ve been playing enough 18xx games with poker chips recently that I decided to go and buy a set of Ruben’s Mini-Chips. Having a smaller, more easily portable set of quality poker chips started to feel attractive.
I went for 300 chips, with the following distribution: 70 × 1, 70 × 5, 80 × 20, 50 × 100, 20 × 500 and 1 × 2k. I went with the Hex design: I wanted denominations and this style appealed to me the most (Chains was too minimalist, Rails too decorative).
Hopefully the set works out. Last time we played with my Venerati set, we had a bit of a shortage of 1s, and that set only has 50. The Mini-Chip set weighs 1.2 kilos less than the Venerati set. The size of the Mini-Chip boxes is 1.5 dm³ while Veneratis are 2.2 dm³, so there’s also a big difference.