New Board Game Features Creation Of Wyoming Railroad

The TV show Hell On Wheels was a rather fair portrayal of life in the Old West and Wyoming.

Hell on Wheels was about the construction of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States, which aired from November 6, 2011, to July 23, 2016.

The Union Pacific Railroad and its laborers, mercenaries, prostitutes, surveyors, and others who lived, worked, and died in the mobile encampment, called "Hell on Wheels", that followed the railhead west across the Great Plains.

That was the TV show. Soon there will be a board game based on the part of the show that took place in Wyoming and moved on, Westard.

It is scheduled to be released in 2024.

The game will be called 1868 WYOMING.

The makers of the game describe it this way:

While an 18xx game at heart, this game is designed to reflect both Wyoming’s core railroad history and the effects of the coal and oil industry on its towns and cities.
The gameplay is driven by the railroads that formed the territory and later the state.
The boom-and-bust cycle directly impacts the towns and cities of the state and therefore the revenue of the railroads.
Coal and Oil Companies in this game do not necessarily represent coal or oil discoveries, but instead represent investment for development in the area – indirect drivers of revenue.
The map is reflective of the immense emptiness and its widely varied and rugged terrain.

As you can see from the picture below, a few people have had a chance to sample it.

Here are the features of the game according to an online review:

Ten major railroad companies are all vying for routes and revenues.

Coal and Oil Companies

Players manage and invest in these companies to help develop areas on the map that improve the revenue their railroad company’s trains can collect, but those developments require sustained investment to be long-lived.

Uranium

Uranium also plays a role in development, but be wary, uranium drove the biggest boom and the biggest bust of them all.

Boomtowns

Towns have the potential to grow into cities if enough development occurs near them, but they also may shrink back to towns if that development goes away. They could even become ghost towns and disappear forever.

Frontier Forts

These provide a bonus to train revenue but decline over time

Twenty-one privates

Only eleven of which are used in any one game, represent historically important people and occurrences: surveyors, explorers, financiers, politicians, oil companies, small railroads, and more.