Irish Gauge is a train style game published in 2014, designed by Amabel Holland, with art by Ian O’Toole. Capstone Games is the publisher of the game. The game plays 3 to 5 players, with a community preference towards 4 player games, in about an hour.
The Iron Rail series from Capstone comes in currently has 4 titles from a couple of deisgners, and is set up to introduce people to the concept of bigger train games through bite-sized chunks.
Irish Gauge is the first, and focuses on introducing the concept of stocks, paying dividends, and route building in train games.
In Irish Gauge, players will bid in auctions at the start, when the game auctions off the first share of each of the five railways in the game. After that initial step, play goes in turns, with players choosing one of four actions each turn: building railroads, bidding for additional shares, special interest projects, or calling for dividends.
At the start of the game, each railroad is located in a single city, so playing additional railroads out and connecting that specific rail line to different towns, minor cities, and major cities will increase the value of that particular rail company. Certain cities will have cubes on them, in one of three colors. In order to benefit the most from collecting dividends, players will want to spread out across the colors.
Special interest projects will let you place a specific colored cube on a town, growing it into a city. While bidding for additional shares will allow players to be involved in more rail lines or secure ownership over a specific company.
Finally, when players call for dividends, they will pull three cubes out of the bag, those colors coordinating with which rail companies will pay out that turn. The game ends when all the cubes in the bag have been pulled or assigned to cities. At the end of the game, the player with the most combined value or shares plus their money are the winner.
Irish Gauge was added to Board Game Arena on December 7th, as part of the Winter of Games event. This game has a tutorial created by the prolific Nekonyancer. The tutorial was well laid out and provided me quickly and easily with an understanding of the core concepts and how to play the game. I had no problems jumping right into a game right after the tutorial and knowing everything I needed to be successful.
I have been tempted and interested by train games and bigger 18XX style games for a long time, but typically they play at minimum 3 players, but best at 4+ players. The bidding and auctioning of shares across players is just not viable as a mechanic at 2 players, so I haven’t had the opportunity to play many train games.
This was a fun and thinky puzzle of manipulating the rail lines, competing for shares, and knowing when to call for dividends and start driving towards the end of the game. The more shares of railroads you own, the more control you have over where to build out routes and which cities to connect, then the more railroads that you potentially profit from. I really enjoyed this one.
I will definitely be revisiting this game on Board Game Arena, as it is a good platform for me to be able to delve into these kinds of games, with a larger player base to potentially pull from.
I’m rating this an 8/10 on Board Game Geek and looking forward to getting more plays in.
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