OT: AAR - business is war on the exchange floor!

[MarkShot]

While being unable to sleep and being that the real markets are closed, I decided to opt for an after hours trading session. This quicky AAR is from 1830 (DOS 1995 published by Simtex). This was a PC port of the 1989 Avalon Hill game, 1830; a game of stock trading and robber barons of the early American rail road years. Both the board game and the PC port saw much involvement from Bruce Shelly well known for the original railroad tycoon and civilization games. The game is one of the best deep strategy games I have every played with a very competent AI. The game offers a tremendous amount of variety and techniques and yet a complete game can be played in 90 minutes more or less.

End of market wrap up:

v1: Mid-game net worth graph, this is the turn around point. At this point, my rail company leaps ahead of the competition in terms of technology. This forces the other companies to withold paying dividends and in many cases their Presidents (the other competing investors) are forced to chip in their personal funds (and sell off stock) to buy rolling stock to keep their companies solvent.

v2: This is what the final net worth graph looks like. The maneuver from v1 is less noticeable over the larger span of trading, but it was the key factor.

v3: Victory screen with my final portfolio of stock certificates. The (-8) shows that I picked up a company whose stock was in distress. The president (competing investor) lost his personal fortune and equity in the company in order to modernize it and keep it afloat. Once he did that I scooped up his company in the next trading session.

v4: The closing stock market share prices. If you match up my certificates from v3, you'll see that most of my portfolio is trading at the top of the market (top/right share tokens). These are B&O, Can, C&O, and the PRR.

v5: This is the final net worth breakdown. You'll see that the game ended with me both leading in cash (mainly the result of dividend payments) and the highest priced portfolio of shares.

All in all, a very memorable trading session which made the Hall of Fame.

[MarkShot]

v1

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v2

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v3

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v4

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v5

[MarkShot]

Yes, there is more to life (and me) than just para drops and blowing bridges.

However, I soon expect to have a new hot PC and am looking forward to trying some of the large (300+ unit) COTA scenarios and start taking BFTB out for a test drive. I, of course, want to make sure that you folks get slapped around pretty good and get your money's worth ... so, I have to be first in line to get knocked on my butt in the interests of the public good, of course.

[HansBolter]

I remember Stock Market. The guy I met in highschool who turned me on to baord wargames had a copy and we played it a few times. I believe it was originally published by another company, like 3M Games, before AH bought the rights to it.

There were a few other games like it in the AH line that they acquired from another company. One was a game a lot like Stratego with little plastic miniatures, the name escapes me at the moment, but unlike Stratego, each side moved all of their units on a given turn instead of one unit at a time.