Irish Gauge Review

Irish Gauge may be as close to a perfect introduction to train games as we'll ever get. Mini Rails is a bit too abstract and out of individual control to be more than a nice filler, and Ticket to Ride is just a set collection game with train aesthetics, don't @ me. It shares a lot of the DNA with one of my other favorite light cube rails, Chicago Express/Wabash Cannonball, but eliminates the fiddlier aspects like maintaining company treasuries and action limits. Until I find something better, Irish Gauge is the one I'll be pulling from my shelves when somebody hasn't done a cardboard choo-choo.

Irish Gauge's magic is crammed into its four ridiculously simple actions, like a week's worth of clothes in a Frontier carry-on. After the initial action of every company's starting share, players take turns doing just one thing until the cube bag empties. You can build rail for the companies you're invested in, which is better done sooner than later since hexes other companies have built are harder to get into. But this is a game about making money; best to leave the labor to some chump. Once someone's spent enough time building their rail, it's time to reap the rewards of their work by calling an auction on their stock. Worst case, they pay to keep their proceeds in-house, but there's no better feeling in board gaming than calling an auction on a company someone's spent 4 turns building and only you have the money for.

Now that you've spent all your money hedging in on someone else's hard work, it's time to make that money back by calling dividends. You grab 3 cubes from the bag, and every company with a matching city pays out to its investors for all the cities and towns it's connected to. The last action is develop. Nothing crazy, it just lets you grab a cube from the bag and drop it onto a town one of your rails is connected to, upgrading it to a city. It's an effective guardrail against weird setups where one or two companies can lock everyone else out of a color, but honestly, I forget it exists.

You probably read all that thinking "I don't see anything that makes Irish Gauge special," and that's the thing: Irish Gauge is one ofthe blandest stocks-and-rails games out there, and that makes it uniquely approachable and constantly readable. I'm sure that runs the risk of enabling dominant strategies, but you know what? I don't care. I'm not putting Irish Gauge in front of my friends who play these sorts of games all the time; I'm tossing this in front of my friends and family who think Rail Baron is a train game to play something that approximates my favorite capitalist playground games. And I love it for that.