18C2C: Continental Empires

Like all members of the 18xx family, this game is played in alternating stock rounds, where players buy and sell shares in multiple corporations, and sets of operating rounds, where the corporations operate on the map and possibly pay dividends to their shareholders. In this game, there's also a development round before the operating rounds where infrastructure is built on the map. At the end of the game the player with the greatest net worth in stock value and cash holdings wins. This is 18xx on a large scale - 40 railroad companies, two oversize map sheets, 825 tiles, 480 cards (stock shares, trains, private corporations), and a play time to match. This game takes the "D" variant of 18C2C: Manifest Destiny and reimplements it on an even larger map (the US, Canada, and Mexico) with a variety of rule changes to provide high replay value and balance, most notably player-driven upgrade paths for cities (so that cities will grow to different values in different games) providing new sources of tension in the stock and development rounds. Game features taken from 18C2C: Manifest Destiny include a reservation auction for private companies (similar to 1830), partial capitalization, company destinations (somewhat similar to the destinations in 1870: Railroading Across the Trans Mississippi from 1870 but also player driven), corporate share redemption, and mergers. This game has 4 different kinds of tokens and 5 different classes of railroads. Steam trains run routes as in most 18XX games, whereas Diesel trains run abstract routes counting only cities where you have stations and without the need to trace routes - simplifying route building and calculation in the later stages of the game. Intended publication is set for 2030 as a full commercial production similar to 18OE.