I love 18xx, they are probably my favorite genre of board games. (Though the recent resurgence in publishing has made me scrap any ideas I might have had of having anything even approaching a complete collection.)
The Wikipedia page seems like an awful introduction to the subject though. That's just a list of features that might or might not be present in the games of the genre, I don't understand how someone who isn't already familiar with it could get any value out of the page.
The reason these games might apply to the HN demographic is that they are effectively simulations about running companies in times of rapid technological change and seemingly infinite growth. (We used to play a lot of 1841 around 1999-2000 boom and bust, and made a lot of jokes about the similarities between the game and reality.)
Effectively what you have is a very complex board game feeding valuations into a fairly simple stock market system, with market instabilities and riskiness being inserted into the game by passage of time. (Old equipement becomes obsolete by technological advances, and stops being productive.)
They're games about making money, and that money might be coming from any number of places. You might be creating value for real, effectively defrauding the taxpayer, fooling the gullible retail investors, or fooling your gullible opponents. Different games will fit differently on the engineer/investor/swindler triangle, but all will have some aspects of all.
Anyway, if anyone wants to give these games a try, http://18xx.games/ is the best place to play them online. But I'd kind of recommend finding a group of friends to try it out with, rather than playing with randoms.
Interestingly, the writing style of this article very, very strongly reminds me of the way an SCP Wiki is written. Maybe someone else can put a finger on why.
So it tends to read a bit like when you ask someone "Do you like horses?" and get back a taxonomy and discussion of various horse bloodlines, relative performance at races thereof, and historical progenitors.
Sometimes, more information isn't the answer to a simple question.
The Wikipedia page seems like an awful introduction to the subject though. That's just a list of features that might or might not be present in the games of the genre, I don't understand how someone who isn't already familiar with it could get any value out of the page.
The reason these games might apply to the HN demographic is that they are effectively simulations about running companies in times of rapid technological change and seemingly infinite growth. (We used to play a lot of 1841 around 1999-2000 boom and bust, and made a lot of jokes about the similarities between the game and reality.)
Effectively what you have is a very complex board game feeding valuations into a fairly simple stock market system, with market instabilities and riskiness being inserted into the game by passage of time. (Old equipement becomes obsolete by technological advances, and stops being productive.)
They're games about making money, and that money might be coming from any number of places. You might be creating value for real, effectively defrauding the taxpayer, fooling the gullible retail investors, or fooling your gullible opponents. Different games will fit differently on the engineer/investor/swindler triangle, but all will have some aspects of all.
Anyway, if anyone wants to give these games a try, http://18xx.games/ is the best place to play them online. But I'd kind of recommend finding a group of friends to try it out with, rather than playing with randoms.