Irish Gauge is a game about developing the train network in Ireland. It is an open information game. It is an investment game, and almost but not really a stock-control game. Players invest in railroad companies and hope to make money as the companies they are invested in do well. You don’t own companies. You only own shares in them. It sounds a little like 18XX games, but this is much simpler and abstracted. It reminds me a little of Chicago Express / Wabash Cannonball. 

 

 

Five companies are in play, and as part of game setup, the first share of each company is auctioned off to the players. During the game, more shares may be auctioned off. Holding shares of a company means that whenever that company makes money, you’ll get some. The earnings are divided among the shareholders based on their holdings. 

 

 

One of the things you may do on your turn is to build railroads. You can only do this for a company you are invested in. You place train markers on the board to represent your company’s railroad network. You get to spend 3 action points for building railroads. The action points needed to build in a hex depends on the terrain type, whether it is urban, and whether others have built there. You want to connect your companies to towns and cities, because these help them make money. Towns are upgraded to become cities when you place a cube in them. You get to choose the cube colour when you do this. 

 

There are cubes in three different colours. They represent different goods. You already have 8 cities on the board at the start of the game. Cubes are all placed in a bag. They are drawn from the bag when you want to trigger dividends. The game ends when the bag runs out of cubes. 

 

 

When you want to trigger dividends, you blind draw three cubes from the bag. The cube colours determine which companies issue dividends. If a company is connected to at least a city with one of the colours and a town, it will make money, which means the shareholders will make money. So this is a game about setting up your companies to be able to make money, hopefully from all three colours, and then you want to trigger dividends to make lots of money. Auctioning a share means an additional player may get into the company and share its profits. This is normally an act of aggression, when you want to get inside a company to get a share of its profits. If there is only one current shareholder, they are not going to make any more money by buying this new share. They are only preventing others from also making money from this company in future. For other players who want to get it, it is about evaluating whether the money you spend to bid on the share is justifiable. Are you going to make back that money? 

 

Irish Gauge is a pretty straight-forward game. The actions are simple. However the strategies are not simplistic. In the game we played, there were four of us, and at the start of the game, I was the only player who controlled two companies. In hindsight, that might not have been a good idea. I couldn’t grow two companies equally well. 

 

The game is a tight fight. This is a perfect information game. You can think many steps ahead. You know exactly how your opponents can respond to your move, if they choose to do so. In this sense the game is almost chess-like. The only uncertainty is when dividends are being issued. You don’t know which colours will come out. The ultimate winner is the richest player. Issuing dividends is not about you making money, it is about you making more money than others. If your companies are positioned well to make money, you are in no hurry to take the dividend action, because when others do it, it will likely benefit you too, and hopefully more than them. 

 

Irish Gauge is the kind of game for smart and strategic people. It’s serious and skill-driven. I also find it a little dry, maybe because of  how serious it feels to me. There is a little variability in the game setup, but the map will stay the same every time you play. Only the cube colours of the starting cities will differ.