Iberian Gauge

There are a lot of train games, clearly there’s something about trains that inspire board games. I can definitely see how building routes across a board appeals to many people. As you’ve probably gathered Iberian Gauge is a board game about trains, which follows in the tradition of 18XX games. Though I’ve never played them, from my understanding they’re train-themed games with quite heavy economic mechanisms. Iberian Gauge is in the Iron Rails series by Capstone Games, designed by Tom Russell with beautiful artwork by Ian O’Toole. The Iron Rails games look wonderful together. While I’m not normally drawn to train games, the artwork, interesting economic mechanisms and the freedom to make routes across the Iberian peninsula was something I was interested to try out.

All Aboard!

The game is easy to set up, with a few different components:

• There’s five colours of trains and train companies (that I separated into crochet trays, we referred to them by London Tube lines cause that was our easiest reference point)
• There are stock cubes (not that kind) that each player puts on their little disk
• Everyone gets p40 (standing for passatas)
• The round tokens are used to indicate the share price on one track and the dividend pay out on the other
• There’s the large red round marker that indicates whether you’re in a stock buying or building round
• There’s also a priority train token which is used to indicate who can buy stock first

By the end of the game you want to be the one with the most money, the key way you do that is by investing stock in rail companies, increasing their share value and reaping the reward through dividends.

During the stock phase, you can invest in stock which place in the coloured trains at the side of the board. Some companies have more stock available than others and they have different dividends per stock. If you’re the first person to buy a stock, you set the price. This is important as instead of paying the bank, it goes back into the company. And since you need money to build things you want to set a good price, but not too much that other people won’t want to invest in that company too. You can set the price between p12-p36, and given that you start with p40 there isn’t much investing in the first round. But you have incentive to maintain and increase the share price as you get this back at the end of the game. The only other rule is that you can’t invest in the same company twice in a stock round (you can in later rounds).

Then there’s the build phase, where starting from the top of the stock cubes, people build one track with the aim of connecting either to a city or an urban area. You’re only permitted to build one train per stock cube you have so your initial city placement is important. It’s also more expensive to build over difficult terrain (p8 rather than p4). If you make it to a city or urban area, yay! Your share price goes up and the dividend pay out increases, and this is a very satisfying feeling. If you don’t, oh noes your share price is gonna go down. Thankfully you don’t lose any personal wealth, the company takes the hit. Your share price goes down as many steps as spaces from the next area you didn’t reach (i.e. if we were four spaces away from the next place, the share price would go down four levels). Another great mechanism is leasing, if you don’t think your train is going to make it to the next city or urban area, you can lease another company’s line to make it, paying the money into the other company. Whilst you’re helping another company it’s cheaper than buying and more importantly maintains your shares and dividends. We unfortunately tanked the share price of the Victoria line to p4 per share and we couldn’t do anything to save it.

So there’s a lot of player interaction in this game, you’re the company shareholders! You have to make decisions together. Or do you? This was something I really like about the game, while it can be very friendly and the shareholders can work together to reach their destinations. But if you realise you’re not going to get the payout the other shareholders are, you can sabotage your company. I took great joy in building expensive rails that led nowhere as a minor shareholder. Not that I could fully sabotage the company (which is probably a good thing), but I love games that let you do that.

As the dividend payout passes certain thresholds, your share value goes up. I’m not sure how you would make your share value go to p80 per share, but I’d like to try. You can also get a bonus payout if you connect five cities, but that also seemed hard to me. But it’s another fun dynamic that can be part of a company’s strategy.

At the end of the game, each player gets the share price back for their investments. This is a nice little boost at the end and rewards people for playing the long game to keep their companies afloat.

You’ve Arrived At Your Destination

All in all, Iberian Gauge is an excellent game. It’s simple in theory but complex in practice (in a really good way). I love the shared board and lines and openness of information, you can see everyone’s tracks, stocks, shares and their potential dividends. If you’re the thinking type (so not me), you can really calculate how the dividends and shares are going to play out and inform your decisions. I really like how you can see who’s going to do well from the stocks and then you can plot against them. Placing your railways is also fun and exploring different possibilities. It’s really nice to have flexibility with your routes, which only increases replayability. I think spending the company’s money is something great about this game, cause you have to think about your investments with other people and if the company doesn’t have any money, well you can’t do anything. Once all the stock has been bought, you can’t put anymore money in, so you have to make the most of what you’ve got. This goes back to the initial share price you set and how many early investors there were. There are lots of interesting investment decisions to think about with Iberian Gauge.

Another thing that’s really nice about the game is how compact it is, it’s a thin box with one page of (double-sided) rules! The game is really intuitive as the round marker in the bottom right of the board helps you keep track of the game. The components are really nice, the little train tokens are so cute and wooden pieces are generally nice. The only gripe would be the card money, which is a bit fiddly and difficult to separate. Getting money right is tough in a game, so if that’s something that annoys you it may be worth swapping them with a substitute. Iberian Gauge is a fantastic game for player interaction, both working with and against your competitors.