Ironway

Tutorial · Continental Freight Concession

Ironway is a game of laying rail and running freight across Europe. You are a railway company with a treasury, a blank map and three waybills telling you what the continent wants moved. Track costs money; freight earns it back. This tutorial takes you from the setup screen to your first delivery.

Starting a game

Choose the companies. Six seats are offered. Set each one to Player, Computer or Empty seat, and rename any of them. The standard game is one player against three computer companies.
Note the map deal number. The same number always deals the same demand deck, so a game can be replayed exactly. Change it for a fresh deal.
Press Start game. The map opens fitted to the screen. Drag to pan, use the wheel or the + and − buttons to zoom, and press 0 to fit the map again.

Controls

Action	Control
Pan the map	Drag with the mouse or one finger
Zoom	Wheel, pinch, the + and − buttons, or the + and − keys
Fit the whole map	The square button, or the 0 key
Price a route	Hover a milepost during the building phase
Lay that route	Click the milepost
Bring the train into service	Click one of your cities during movement
Run the train	Click any highlighted milepost
Load or set down goods	Click a goods chip under Your company
Deliver	Click the highlighted line on a waybill
End the phase or turn	The gold button, or Enter
Rules reference	The Rules button in the panel

Reading the map

The map is a lattice of mileposts. Track runs from milepost to milepost, and what a link costs depends on the ground it crosses.

On the map	Means	Cost to build across
Small dot	Plain	1
Ringed dot	Hill	2
Triangle	Mountain	3
Capped triangle	Alpine	5
Small red circle	Town	3
Red square	City	4
Red hexagon	Great city	6

A link costs the average of the two mileposts it joins, rounded up. Crossing one of the great rivers adds 2. A sea crossing between two ferry ports costs 12 and is drawn as a dashed line.

Turn order

The first two turns are survey turns: building only, with a budget of 40. Every turn after that has two phases, always in this order:

Movement — run your train, load and deliver.
Building — lay track up to a budget of 20, or spend 20 on a train upgrade instead.

The gold button in the panel ends the current phase or turn; Enter does the same.

Your first line

During a building phase, move the pointer over any milepost. The game draws the cheapest route to it from your network as a dashed line and shows the price in a chip beside the pointer. Click to lay that whole route.

Your first line must start at a city, so hover near one to see a route appear.
Everything you lay afterwards must join a milepost your network already touches.
The chip turns red when the route is over budget or beyond your treasury. Zoom in and click a nearer milepost to lay part of it now and the rest next turn.

Where to start. Read your three waybills first. Look for a good produced near a city that another waybill wants supplied, and put your survey between the two. Plain country is cheap; mountains are permanent but expensive.

Movement

Your train starts off the map. On your first movement phase, click a city on your own network to bring it into service there. From then on the mileposts you can reach this turn are circled in white; click one to run there. Hovering shows the distance and any rent.

A freight train runs 11 mileposts a turn and carries 2 loads.
Running over another company's track costs 4 to that company, once per turn however much of their line you use.
A sea crossing consumes the rest of the turn's movement.

Freight and payment

Cities produce the goods their region really ships: wine at Bordeaux, steel in the Ruhr, timber at Bergen, olives at Athens. When your train is in a city, the goods it produces appear as chips under Your company. Click one to load it if a wagon is free.

Each waybill in hand lists three demands: a good, the city that wants it, and the fee. When you are in the right city carrying the right good, that line turns green — click it to deliver. The fee is banked at once, the waybill is discarded, and a new one is dealt.

Payment follows distance. Long hauls pay far more than short ones, and goods that only one or two cities ship carry a premium. The expensive part is usually the track, not the journey.

Events

Some cards in the deck are events, drawn when a waybill is replaced. A blizzard or fuel shortage slows every train for a round, a flood doubles river crossings, a dock strike closes the ferries, the revenue office taxes companies holding 150 or more, and a derailment empties your wagons where you stand. They appear in the traffic log in amber.

Upgrades

Instead of building, you may spend 20 on a works order: a faster train (14 mileposts), a larger one (3 loads), and then both. Buy capacity when you keep passing goods you cannot carry, and speed when the train spends whole turns in transit.

Winning

A company wins at the end of its turn when both conditions are true at once:

The treasury holds at least 220, and
all seven great cities — London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Berlin, Vienna and Athens — lie on one connected stretch of your own track. Rented track does not count.

The panel shows every company's cash and great-city count, so you can always see how close a rival is.

Losing

There is no elimination and no bankruptcy. A company that overspends simply cannot build until freight income recovers, which in a tight race is loss enough. The game ends the moment someone completes both conditions.

Saving and restarting

The game saves itself in this browser after every action. Reopen it and the setup screen offers Resume saved game. Starting a new game replaces the save, and finishing a game clears it. Nothing is stored anywhere but your own browser.