Irish Gauge

21st December 2019

It's the last Saturday night before Christmas and we're at Matakishi's for some board games. 

This is a game about accumulating stocks in railway companies, running railway companies and paying out dividends.
Yep, this is 'Irish Gauge' and not 1830.

Irish Gauge is a game that simultaneously is the same as and also completely different to 1830.
That is, it shares the same themes as 1830, but is a quite different game.

​What's in a game?
​Irish Gauge components.

• Board: The board is a map that depicts a chunk of Ireland and is covered in hexes (All respectable railway games have hex covered maps.). The map shows cities and towns, as well as difficult terrain. Finally the map shows a 3x8 grid for dividends and info for calculating dividend payouts and managing shares and share order.
• Cubes: 30 Coloured wooden, 10 cubes in each of 3 colours (Little wooden cubes are always welcome in a eurogame.). Cubes serve 2 functions. Firstly they are used to show what goods a city produces and secondly, they are used to dictate the market demand when a player calls for a dividend.
• Bag: The cubes go into the bag.
• Shares: There are 5 companies in Irish Gauge and each company has 2-4 shares. Each share has a 'initial value'. Shares are placed into 5 company stacks, with the lowest value share on the top and the highest on the bottom.
• Train meeples: There are 19 train meeples for each company. 

That's more or less all the components. They are all made to a good standard. There is minimal artwork in the game, but it has a clean and functional look.

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The game board.

Set up & ready to play.

My finances after initial auction.

Mid way through, no dividends paid yet.

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How's it play?
​We begin with setup, which is pretty simple.

• Lay out the board and place the 5 stacks of share cards in their allotted places.
• Put 4 cubes of each colour (12 in total.) in the bag and blindly draw out 8 and place them on each of the cities. When this is done add the remaining cubes to the bag.
• Each of the 5 starting companies has a starting city, place 1 train meeple on its respective starting city.
• Give each player 20 currency.

And we're ready to go.

Initial auction
Before normal play commences, there is a 'initial auction' This is where players get to bid on and auction one share from each of the 5 companies.

• Determine a starting player. This player opens bidding on the first share up for auction. They must bid at least the initial value shown on the card or pass. The player can choose to pass.
• Play proceeds to the left. Following players must bid a higher value or pass (Or chooses to pass.). Any player who passes is out of the bidding on that card.
• Bidding continues until all players bar one have passed. That player wins the auction.
• Whoever wins the auction opens bidding on the next card up for auction.
• If every player passes on a share, then the starting player gets the share for free!
• Auctioning continues until all shares have been auctioned.

Now normal play can start. The first player is determined by whoever bought a certain share.
In their turn, the active player can perform 1 of 4 actions, these are: Place track, place a special interest, auction a share and call for a dividend.
Place track:
This is probably the most common action in the game

• The active player can only build a railway line for a company that they have at least 1 share in.
• The active player will have 3 points with which to build a railway line for one company.
• The railway line must connect either to the company's starting city, or some other part of the railway line.
• It costs 1 point to build in a empty hex or empty town/city.
• It costs 1.5 points to build in a hex or town/city that already has another railway line going through it.
• It costs 2 points to build in an empty difficult terrain hex. Only 1 railway line can go through a difficult terrain hex.

Place a special interest:

• This allows the active player to turn a town into a city.
• The active player looks in the bag and take out a cube if their choice.
• The active player places the cube in a town of their choice - provided that town is connected to the railway line of a company in which they have at least 1 share.

Auction a share:

• The active player chooses any share to auction and must bid at least the minimum value on the share.
• Play proceeds to the left. Following players must bid a higher value or pass (Or chooses to pass.). Any player who passes is out of the bidding on that card.
• Bidding continues until all players bar one have passed. That player wins the auction.

Call for a dividend:

• When the active player calls for a dividend, the blindly draw 3 cubes from the bag. The 3 cubes go into the 3x8 grid (Along the 3 axis obviously.) These 3 cubes will indicate which cities on the board a playing out.
• If one of each colour is drawn, then all cities pay out. If only 1 or 2 colours are then only those colours pay out. Doubles (Or triples!) count for nothing.
• Then in share order, calculate how much money each company makes. Each city connected to a company's railway line generates 4, each town generates 2. This is the dividend the company pays out.
• The dividend is paid out to the shareholders. If there is only one shareholder, they get all the money. Otherwise it is divided up according to the number of shares owned by players and paid out per share.

Endgame
The game ends when there are no more cubes in the bag, either because of a dividend being called or placing a cube as a special interest on the board.

All players tot up their cash plus the initial value of the shares they own. Highest cash wins.

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Board at game end.

My personal finances at game end.

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Overall
Irish Gauge is a railway building game with stocks and shares and companies.
It's actually quite a common theme in board games. But Irish Gauge plays nothing like any of these other games.

It seems like the basic strategy is that players need to build railways, to issue dividends, to buy shares.
Simple, right? Not necessarily.
Whilst players may want to maximise their railway network before calling dividends, to get as much money as possible to have more funds when bidding on shares during an auction.

Waiting a long time to buy shares is a risky move.

Why? There limited opportunities to call for dividends because when the game starts, there will only be 22 cubes in the bag and each dividend uses 3 cubes. So there's maximum of 8 times a dividend can be called - and the last dividend will be with 1 cube! This is of course, provided nobody uses cubes to upgrade towns.

So shares bought later in the game will benefit less because there will be less dividend pay outs. This isn't so bad if you get a shares at the initial value, but that's unlikely to occur. So paying an extra 20 to get a share that only pays out 5 twice is actually a loss of 10!
This means players will want to get shares as quick as possible, but at the same time, it's prudent to wait and see if other players have low funds as this is a great time to trigger an auction, since they may have to pass, giving the active player a share at the initial value.

It's like some sort of horrible balancing act.

There's more as well. If a player thinks they benefit from a dividend more than anyone else, then they might ignore buying shares or improving their network and may just call dividend after dividend and 'run out' the game. However there's a random element to dividends, so they may scupper themselves.

After playing the game a couple of times: It seems to me that how a player places their railway lines is a bit of a 'no-brainer'. But on reflection I don't think this is as much of an issue as I first thought. Perhaps when to call for dividends may seem more vital for the game than anything else - provided the right cubes are pulled from the bag of course.

There's a lot to think about here, which is good.

Finally, Irish Gauge plays as fast as a roadrunner with it's backside on fire.
If you're used to slow and meaty railway games, Irish Gauge may feel quite fresh with it's relatively short play time.

I'm not certain if Irish Gauge will stand up to extended play. But it's worth giving it a couple of plays at least.