Abe's Rails · Manual

The game

You run a railroad on a map that is made new for every game. Lay track, build stations, buy trains, give each train a route, and get paid for what it delivers. Everyone plays on the same map at the same time, and the built-in player Anthropic Claude plays too.

A game runs from its first year to the end of its last year. The date is at the top of the screen. The clock runs only while at least one person has the game open; when the last person leaves it stops, and it shows Paused. An admin can also pause a game.

The numbers in this manual are the ones the game is using now. They can be changed between games.

You and your company

You and your company are two different things, each with its own money.

• When you first open a game you are given $50,000 of your own.
• You found a company by selling its shares: 1000 shares at $100 each. You choose how many to buy with your own money. The public (the people of the towns) is offered the rest and buys what it can afford. Everything paid for the shares becomes the company's cash.
• When you found it you pick its colour and its symbol. No two companies in a game have the same colour and symbol together, so a pair already in use cannot be picked. The company is named after them, for example Crimson Anchor Railroad. Its colour marks its track and trains; its colour and symbol mark its stations and its name everywhere in the game.
• The company pays for track, stations and trains and receives what the trains earn. None of that is your own money.
• Your own net worth is your cash plus your shares at today's price. That is the figure after You at the top of the screen, and it is what you are scored on.

You may play without a company and only buy shares. A person can found one company.

The screen

• Map. Drag to move. Scroll, or press 1 to 4, to change between the four views: 1 the whole map, 2 the area, 3 local, 4 close up. A click on the whole-map view opens that place.
• Build holds the tools. Look is the tool for reading the map: click a town, an industry, a station or a train and its report appears in the Report box.
• Report shows what you clicked, or your trains, or the route you are setting.
• Railroad shows your company. Trains lists your trains. Books shows the company's income and spending. Market is for shares. Players lists everyone in the game.
• The line at the bottom is the latest news. Click it for earlier news.
• The right mouse button, or Esc, drops what you are doing.

Building

Track

Choose Track, click where the line starts, move the pointer and click where it should go. The line that will be laid is drawn before you click, with its price under the tools. After each piece the end becomes the start of the next, so you can keep clicking. Right-click to stop.

• Track runs from tile to tile in eight directions.
• The price depends on the ground: grassland is cheapest, then desert, wasteland, forest and tundra, foothills, swamp, hills, and mountains cost the most. A river needs a bridge ($5,000 more). Land inside a town costs $600 more a tile.
• Track cannot be laid on water, on an industry, or on a tile that holds another company's track. Lines of different companies do not cross.
• Double lays double track, or doubles a single line you already have for the difference. Double track costs 1.6 times single.
• Track costs $30 a tile each year to keep (half as much again for double).

Stations

Choose Depot, Station or Terminal and click a tile of your own track. The dashed square shows what the station will reach.

A station serves every town and industry that has a tile inside its reach. Building a bigger kind on a station you already have costs only the difference.

Signals

Only one train may be on a stretch of single track at a time. A stretch runs from one station or signal to the next. A Signal ($500) on a tile of your track splits the stretch in two, and trains can wait there for each other.

Removing

Remove takes away what you click: a station, a signal, or the track on a tile. You get back part of the price as scrap. A station cannot be removed while a train stops there, and track cannot be removed from under a train.

Trains

Buying

With Look, click one of your stations and press Buy train. The list shows the engines for sale that year, with speed, the most cars each can pull, and price. Faster engines cost more to buy and to run. An engine goes off sale when its real-life class was withdrawn.

The route

A train does exactly what its route says. After buying, or with Route on a train's report:

• Click your stations on the map in the order the train should call at them. The train goes round and round: after the last stop it returns to the first.
• The track it will use is drawn on the map. It is the shortest way along your own track. To send it another way, click a tile of track between two stops and it will pass through that tile.
• For each stop, add the cars to load there, one car for each carload. Here shows what is waiting at that station and Wants shows what is bought there and for how much.
• Wait until full keeps the train at that stop until every car is loaded, for up to 60 days.
• Save starts the train at its first stop. Changing a route sets down anything on board unsold.

At each stop

• The train first delivers every load that something inside the station's reach will buy, to whoever pays most.
• Then it loads the cars listed for that stop, as far as there is cargo waiting.
• It does not take on a load unless some other stop on its route will pay more for it than it costs. The report then says No buyer.
• A load nobody bought stays on board. If it comes all the way round to where it was loaded, it is set down unsold, and you still pay for it.

On the road

• A train runs at its engine's speed, slower for each loaded car, and slower in foothills, swamp, hills and mountains.
• Waiting for track: another train is on the stretch ahead. Add a signal, or double the track. On a stretch that is double all the way, one train may run in each direction at once.
• Track missing: part of its route has been removed. It does not find another way by itself. Relay the track or give it a new route.
• Hold stops a train where it is; Go starts it again. Sell sells it for scrap.

Getting paid

A railroad is paid on delivery.

Freight

• When a load is picked up, the producer's price that day is noted. Producers ask less when their yard is full.
• When it is delivered, the buyer pays its own price that day: more when it has little in stock, less as it fills up, nothing once it has far more than it needs.
• Out of what the buyer paid, your company pays the producer the price noted at pick-up. What is left is yours. It can be a loss.
• Food, meat and livestock lose value the longer they travel. Everything does, a little.
• Nobody pays more than a small part of the money they have. A town or a plant that is short of money pays little.

People and mail

• They are carried from one town to another and pay by distance: the farther, the more. Speed matters most for mail.
• The fare comes out of the money of the town they left. A town takes only so many arrivals a month before the fare falls.

Running costs

Each month the company pays to keep its track and stations and to run its trains. The money goes as wages to the towns the railroad serves.

The world

Industries

• A plant makes nothing without what it needs. A mine, farm or logging camp stops when its yard is full.
• An industry pays wages to the nearest town out of what it sells, and grows a size when it has been kept busy and has earned enough. Each size adds as much output again.
• A mine holds only so much and closes when it is worked out. Which resources a map has, and how plentiful they are, is rolled for each game.
• A port buys freight for shipping abroad, and sells whatever the map itself does not produce.

Towns

• Every town's people have their own money. They earn wages, and spend on fares and on what is delivered.
• Towns send out passengers and mail and buy: Coal, Food, Goods, Lumber, Meat, Spirits.
• A town grows faster the more of what it wants is delivered. A town whose people run out of money loses people.
• People who move in bring savings with them; people who leave take theirs.

Wagons

Without a railroad, goods still move by wagon between producers and buyers that are close, but slowly, in small amounts, and only where the price covers the haul. A railroad carries more, farther, for less.

Money

Money is never made or lost by a sale. Every payment leaves one holder and reaches another: players, companies, each town's people, each industry. What a company spends on building goes to the people of the nearest town; an engine's price is spread over every town.

Shares

• A share's price follows what the company owns (its cash, most of what its track and stations cost, and its trains as they age) and, when it is earning well, what it earns.
• Market lists every company. You can buy shares the public holds, and sell yours back to the public, at the price shown, 1, 10, 50 or 100 at a time (pick which at the top). The public can only buy what its towns can afford.
• In Books, the person running a company can pay a dividend of 10¢, 25¢, 50¢, $1, $2 or $5 a share. It goes to every shareholder, the public included.

Score and ranking

• At the end of every game year, the net worth of each player who had the game open during that year is noted. That counts as a year played.
• Your score is your net worth at the end of the last year you played, divided by the number of years you played.
• When the game ends, players with at least 10 years played are put in order of score and the ranking for Abe's Rails is updated from that order.
• Anthropic Claude is ranked like any other player.

Anthropic Claude

Claude founds a company, builds lines and runs trains by the same rules and at the same prices as everyone else. It plays only while the clock is running.