Alternative Game Material for 18EU

Some time ago my friend brought to our gaming session a borrowed game from the 18XX series. I liked it a lot and wanted to print out my own copy. Reading BoardGameGeek Wiki I decided for the 18EU which is free to download and covers central Europe where we live. Unfortunately the game has really uninspiring game material. I decided to redesign the material to improve the feeling of 19th century capitalism and entrepreneurship.

Here is my new game material which mix the old style stock certificates and vintage postcards of the train stations:

18EU-Certificates-v1-Masac.pdf

18EU-Charters-v1-Masac.pdf

18EU-Minors-v1-Masac.pdf

18EU-Tokens-v1-Masac.pdf

Inspiration

Most cities in the Europe connected to the railroad in the 19. century have impressive train stations. The stations were usually build outside the city as the railway infrastructure needs lot of space. But in the era of the rapid city growth they were quickly embraced by the buildings. When you see these stations you know that the railroad connection in those times was the most prominent feature of the "new" city and the stations display the pride on the technical and commercial progress.

The other thing I have connected with the time of true capitalism are nice stock certificates. You can find many examples of fine art of the 19th century stock certificate on the Internet. Usually the certificates come from USA. I believe this is because in the Europe the railroad were started with closed capital of few individuals or banks or were financed by state governments and didn't seek money from small anonymous investors. Certificates were thus not the self advertising item.

This brings me to the point where rules of the 18EU collide with the historical reality. While in the game the Public Companies are made from merges of the Minor Companies, in reality the present National Companies were formed by nationalizing the Private Companies or merging companies already owned by the state. The European railroads are usually owned by national states rather then private investors. So the Stocks of the k.k. österreichische Staatsbahnen sounds to me dubious. But the 18EU game is a game of building&investing and not a textbook of the European railroad history.