18PA: The Dawn of Rail – Empire Building From The Seaboard to the Ohio

18PA is an 18xx game roughly covering the area of Pennsylvania. Designer David G. D. Hecht describes it as gentle, and fairly short game. 18PA includes 16 companies, including local companies, land grant companies, and public companies with different rules for managing them. Rules include merger of small companies to NYC, mining city with mining rights, public companies acquiring local companies, and land grant companies profiting from building of tracks. (DGDH edit, 22 January 2014) The game now has seven major companies, of which six start as 5-share companies and the seventh--the NYC--forms as a 10-share company by merger at the start of phase 4. The land grant rules have been almost entirely eliminated, except that four of the six companies available at the start have a doubling token, similar to the ones in Bill Dixon's 1850. There are also nine smaller companies which are a hybrid between privates and minors. Three of them are the predecessors of the NYC, and the remaining six can merge with any connected company, again after the start of phase 4.