Iron Dividend

How to begin

Open the books from the title screen. Choose how many houses sit at the table (two to six), how many of those seats you are playing yourself, and how sharp the machine houses should be. Choosing more than one seat gives you a hotseat game: the screen simply passes from house to house.

Six lines are chartered for the game, drawn from a pool of 10 with their share counts shuffled, so the opening position is different every time. Each house is dealt its starting capital, and the houses sitting earlier in the opening order are paid an allowance for having to commit first.

Controls

Everything is done with a click or a tap. The four buttons under Your turn are the only actions in the game. Choosing a line means clicking its row in the table of lines; choosing ground means clicking a hex. Hovering a hex reports its terrain, its building cost and who has track there. Esc cancels whatever you have half-chosen. The keys C, T, D and S reach the four actions directly.

Turn order

Houses act in the order shown along the top of the screen. On your turn you take one action or stand down for the year; you may take at most 4 actions in a year. When every house has stood down the year ends, dividends are drawn, and the next year begins — in the order the houses stood down. Standing down first is how you buy first place next year; staying in for a fourth action is how you lose it.

Movement: laying track

A line is chartered at its home city the moment its first share is sold. After that any shareholder may spend its treasury to extend it, up to 3 hexes in one action, each hex adjoining track the line already holds. Cost depends on the ground, and a river hexside adds $3, or $5 for the Mississippi and the Ohio. The last column is how many lines the ground will hold; a city holds 3.

Because the mountains hold only one line, a gap in the Appalachians is worth taking early even when there is nothing on the far side yet.

Scoring: the dividend

At the end of each year every chartered line totals its income: from each city it serves, that city's value divided by the number of lines serving it, never less than 1. That total is divided by the shares authorised, and each issued share pays its holder that much. Whatever is left over — the part belonging to shares nobody has bought, plus the remainder — stays in the treasury and buys more track.

The largest cities on the board are worth the most, but they are also where every line is heading:

Development raises a city permanently: pay $2 of your own money to add 3 to a city your lines already reach, twice at most.

Winning

When the dividend for 1855 has been drawn the books close. The house holding the most cash wins. Shares are worth nothing at the end; a share is only ever worth the dividends it drew, which is why a share bought in the last year or two rarely pays for itself.

Losing

There is no elimination and no bankruptcy: you cannot bid or spend money you do not have, so no house is ever put out of the game. You lose by finishing with less money than somebody else — usually because you paid over the odds for stock early, or let a rival into a city you had to yourself.

Saving and restarting

The game saves itself to this browser after every action. Closing the tab and coming back offers Resume on the title screen, which picks the game up exactly where it stopped. Only one game is held at a time, and finishing a game clears it. Menu saves and returns to the title screen; opening the books there starts a fresh game and discards the saved one. If the browser refuses storage — a private window, or the page opened straight off disk — the game still plays, but Resume stays unavailable.