18RoyalGorge first impressions

The latest addition to my 18xx collection is 18RoyalGorge: The Rails of Fremont County and the Royal Gorge Wars. I bumped into this on BGG, I think, and the game sounded good enough so I bought a copy. This was on Kickstarter in 2024 and came out in 2025 with less than 500 backers, so not a big deal back then. There was a seller for this on BGG, and they turned out to be the European distributor of the Kickstarter. Very handy! This is a 2–4 player game that plays in 2–3 hours. The estimate is reasonable: our games so far have been under three hours. I’ve played this with two and three players. The game is set in Colorado and as the exhausting full title says, is about the Royal Gorge Wars (or the Colorado Railroad War), in which Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Company and Denver & Rio Grande Railroad competed about access to passes in Colorado. First, Santa Fe won the access to Raton Pass and then the companies fought over the Royal Gorge canyon. This included gunfighting, though…