Irish Gauge

Irish Gauge is a railway game of simple rules but weighty decisions.

Players are industrialists overseeing the construction of several railway lines across Ireland in the 19th century. the board shows Ireland itself, broken into hexes and with some hexes representing cities (these each have a cube in of pink, black or white – more on these shortly), towns, or difficult-to-build-in areas. There are black railway companies (yellow, blue, red, orange, purple) in which players can take shares – in fact, at the start of the game one share from each company is auctioned off. You begin with only £20 to your name, so spend wisely!

But spend you must, because only by investing can you be competitive. On your turn, you take one of four possible actions. You can auction off a share. There’s no guarantee you’ll win it – and depending on circumstance you may not even want to! – but only if you own shares in a company can you do the next action, which is lay track. Track-laying is represented by adding trains of that company’s colour onto the map. You get three ‘build points’ to spend, and where you build on the map has a cost: empty hex, 1 build point. Occupied hex, 1.5 build points. Difficult terrain: 2 build points. And so on.

The point of all this auctioning and track-laying is, of course, to make money. And a third optional action is to call for dividends. Here you dive your hand into a bag and pull out three of the pink white and black city cubes mentioned earlier. Now every company that has track connected to those cities with a matching coloured cube in score points: 4 points for the cities and 2 points for any connected town. Your fourth and final action is to try and make these dividends more rewarding by turning a town into a city by adding a cube – when taking this action, you can look in the bag and choose the colour.

What manifests from these four actions is a highly interactive game where every player is invested – emotionally, if not otherwise – in every turn, and alliances are formed (often unhappily!) when players hold shares in the same companies. As soon as the last cube is drawn from the bag, the final dividends are taken and the game is over. The richest player wins!