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. Choose Watch all to let the machines play every seat.

Enter a game seed to reproduce a setup exactly, including the same six lines, share counts, boom towns, opening order and deterministic machine decisions. Leave the seed blank, or choose New random seed, for a fresh game.

Choose Standard campaign for the original cash game, or one of the challenge scenarios described below. Scenario choice is saved with the game; older saves open as Standard campaigns.

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.

Drag the map to pan. Pinch on a touch screen, use the mouse wheel, or use the map’s minus, Fit and plus buttons to zoom. The arrow keys pan, + and − zoom, and 0 or Home fits the whole board. The information sidebar is on the left; turn controls, save slots and the minutes are on the right. The masthead buttons can collapse either sidebar when you want more map, and Full Screen uses the entire display.

Financial inspector and undo

Select a railway in the left sidebar to inspect its charter, treasury, current income, dividend per share, cities served, track and shareholders. Clear the selection to see the active human portfolio and its current dividend. The History section can undo the most recently completed human action. Undo history belongs to the current session and clears when another saved game is loaded.

Decision desk

During an uncommitted human turn, choose Analyze position or press A. The Decision Desk ranks up to three legal moves using the public ledger: remaining dividends, ownership, treasury, route cost, city dilution, auction value and next year’s turn order. An auction option reports its prudent bid ceiling; a route or development reports a comparative value index.

Preview marks the proposed choice without changing the game. Play commits it through the ordinary action and undo system. The ranking is advice rather than an extra rule; rivals remain annoyingly entitled to bid.

Challenge scenarios

Trunk Line Race. Each house begins with one share in a different sponsored railway. The house pays $8 at setup and the line opens at its home city with a $12 treasury, including a public grant. At final reckoning every city served by that sponsored line adds $5 to the house’s score. Reaching five cities passes the contract, but the highest combined cash and bonus still wins. This replaces the shared opening auction scramble with immediate route competition and makes mountain passes valuable from the first turn.

Panic of 1852. Setup and cash scoring remain standard. When 1852 opens, credit freezes and no house may call a share to auction for that entire year. Existing treasuries may still lay track, and houses may develop cities or stand down. Winning requires funding lines before the freeze and deciding whether 1852 is a building year, a development year, or an early bid for 1853 priority.

The machine houses and Decision Desk value sponsored-city bonuses and obey the Panic’s auction restriction using only public information.

Machine control and full history

Machine speed can be Slow, Normal or Fast. Pause machines stops before the next machine decision; while paused, Step advances exactly one machine decision. This is especially useful in Watch All mode. View full history opens the complete available minutes and pauses machine play while the record is open. Search the record by year, house, railway, city or action phrase.

Dividend ledger

Choose Dividend ledger beside the minutes, or press L, to open the financial record. The railway table preserves each closed year’s income, dividend per authorised share and retained earnings. Red forecast rows show what the current board would pay if the year ended now. Filter the record to one railway when comparing its growth over time.

The closing-cash table records every house after each annual dividend. Export CSV downloads the visible railway account and the complete cash record for outside analysis. Opening the ledger pauses machine play and closing it restores the prior running state.

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. The right sidebar also provides three numbered manual slots with Save, Load and Delete controls. Autosaves and manual slots retain the current map position and zoom. Export downloads the current game as a JSON file, and Import restores a compatible Iron Dividend JSON file. Version 1.0 through version 1.5 saves remain usable; older saves resume as Standard campaigns. Finishing a game clears only its autosave; manual slots remain until deleted. Menu saves and returns to the title screen. If the browser refuses storage — a private window, or the page opened straight off disk — the game still plays, but Resume and the save slots stay unavailable.