Iron Dividend

How to begin

Open the books from the title screen. Choose how many houses sit at the table (two to six), how many of those seats you are playing yourself, and how sharp the machine houses should be. Choosing more than one seat gives you a hotseat game: the screen simply passes from house to house. Choose Watch all to let the machines play every seat.

Enter a game seed to reproduce a setup exactly, including the same six lines, share counts, boom towns, opening order and deterministic machine decisions. Leave the seed blank, or choose New random seed, for a fresh game.

Choose Standard campaign for the original cash game, or one of the challenge scenarios described below. Scenario choice is saved with the game; older saves open as Standard campaigns.

Machine skill controls how far an opponent can calculate. Machine table style controls what it wants. Balanced uses neutral Brokers. Mixed Personalities seats a deterministic mixture of Trustees, Builders, Raiders and Speculators. Cautious uses Trustees throughout; Aggressive uses Speculators. The same seed and choices always reproduce the same table.

Play today starts the Daily Challenge: four houses, one human seat, Ace machines and Mixed Personalities. The UTC date fixes the seed and rotates between Standard Campaign, Trunk Line Race and Panic of 1852. Attempts, completions, wins, best score and best rank are recorded locally; there is no online leaderboard. Replaying the day gives the identical setup.

Start league begins a three-round Railway League for four houses. You face the same Trustee, Builder and Raider at Ace skill in Standard Campaign, Trunk Line Race and Panic of 1852. Places earn 5, 3, 2 and 1 points; wins and cumulative scenario score break a points tie. One base seed deterministically derives all three boards. The setup sheet preserves the standings between rounds, and the final-screen button advances to the next fixture.

The Hall of Records stores up to 40 completed games and shows total games, human victories, average human rank and five recent results. Each record retains the exact seed, scenario, table configuration and opponent personalities. Choose Replay to open that setup as an ordinary match, or Export CSV to download the complete record. Archived replay does not add a Daily attempt or change Railway League standings.

For an ordinary game, choose an optional Investor Contract. Income Trust asks for $150 in dividends; Diversified House asks for shares in five railways; Network Patron asks for 32 distinct cities reached by portfolio lines; and Controlling Interests asks for a unique leading stake in two railways. The left sidebar shows live progress for every human seat. Contract success is a personal objective and never changes the table’s final score. Daily and League play always use No Contract to preserve standardized results.

Ordinary games also choose Cash only for the original financing rules or the optional Bond market. A shareholder may spend one action to issue a $15 bond for a chartered railway they hold. Each bond permanently removes $2 from that railway’s annual distributable income. A railway may issue only one bond per year and carry at most two; principal is not repaid before the 1855 close. Daily Challenges and Railway League fixtures always use Cash only so their standardized results remain comparable.

The left sidebar’s Market Outlook compares every house using only visible accounts. Next dividend adds one payment at the current per-share rates. Full runway holds those rates constant for every remaining year. The table shows current cash, dividend, projected scenario score, rank movement and gap to the leader; current Trunk Line bonuses are included. It is a planning baseline, not a prophecy: the printed assumption excludes future auctions, route construction, development and dilution.

Six lines are chartered for the game, drawn from a pool of 10 with their share counts shuffled, so the opening position is different every time. Each house is dealt its starting capital, and the houses sitting earlier in the opening order are paid an allowance for having to commit first.

Controls

Everything is done with a click or a tap. The original actions under Your turn call a share, lay track, develop or stand down; Bond Market games add Issue bond. Choosing a line means clicking its row in the table of lines; choosing ground means clicking a hex. Hovering a hex reports its terrain, its building cost and who has track there. Esc cancels whatever you have half-chosen. The keys C, T, D and S reach the original actions directly; F begins a bond issue when that market is enabled.

Drag the map to pan. Pinch on a touch screen, use the mouse wheel, or use the map’s minus, Fit and plus buttons to zoom. The arrow keys pan, + and − zoom, and 0 or Home fits the whole board. The information sidebar is on the left; turn controls, save slots and the minutes are on the right. The masthead buttons can collapse either sidebar when you want more map, and Full Screen uses the entire display.

The Strategic overlay control turns the map into a live planning sheet. City Yield prints current dollars per serving line, exposing dilution. Network Capacity prints occupied/physical capacity on used hexes and identifies saturated ground. After selecting a chartered railway, Expansion Costs prints its exact legal frontier prices and distinguishes entries its treasury can afford. The labels and legend repeat every color cue. Press M to cycle Board, Yield, Capacity and Expansion views.

Select a chartered line and choose Survey selected line, or press R, to rank its least-cost legal routes to unserved cities. Every card shows total cost, route length, required track actions, current annual income, rival dilution and the projected margin through 1855. Preview route draws the complete numbered path without spending anything. When the active human owns the line, Queue next prepares the first affordable one to three lengths in the normal track action for review and confirmation. Surveys respect current terrain, crossings, capacity and reserved home-city slots; later construction can, with characteristic rudeness, change the result.

The left sidebar’s Network Rivalry panel updates whenever a chartered line is selected. Its summary counts contested cities, yearly income lost to dilution, shared track and overlapping legal frontiers. The matrix attributes those conflicts to individual railways; its Loss column shows how much income the selected line would recover if that one rival were absent. Pressure points rank rival-served cities by new income plus damage to current rivals through 1855, less the surveyed route cost. Preview draws the numbered pressure route without spending or changing state. The analysis uses only public board information and does not predict future construction.

Financial inspector and undo

Select a railway in the left sidebar to inspect its charter, treasury, current income, dividend per share, cities served, track and shareholders. Clear the selection to see the active human portfolio and its current dividend. The History section can undo the most recently completed human action. Undo history belongs to the current session and clears when another saved game is loaded.

Decision desk

During an uncommitted human turn, choose Analyze position or press A. The Decision Desk ranks up to three legal moves using the public ledger: remaining dividends, ownership, treasury, route cost, city dilution, auction value and next year’s turn order. An auction option reports its prudent bid ceiling; a route or development reports a comparative value index.

Preview marks the proposed choice without changing the game. Play commits it through the ordinary action and undo system. The ranking is advice rather than an extra rule; rivals remain annoyingly entitled to bid.

Challenge scenarios

Trunk Line Race. Each house begins with one share in a different sponsored railway. The house pays $8 at setup and the line opens at its home city with a $12 treasury, including a public grant. At final reckoning every city served by that sponsored line adds $5 to the house’s score. Reaching five cities passes the contract, but the highest combined cash and bonus still wins. This replaces the shared opening auction scramble with immediate route competition and makes mountain passes valuable from the first turn.

Panic of 1852. Setup and cash scoring remain standard. When 1852 opens, credit freezes and no house may call a share to auction for that entire year. Existing treasuries may still lay track, and houses may develop cities or stand down. Winning requires funding lines before the freeze and deciding whether 1852 is a building year, a development year, or an early bid for 1853 priority.

The machine houses and Decision Desk value sponsored-city bonuses and obey the Panic’s auction restriction using only public information.

Machine control and full history

Machine speed can be Slow, Normal or Fast. Pause machines stops before the next machine decision; while paused, Step advances exactly one machine decision. This is especially useful in Watch All mode. View full history opens the complete available minutes and pauses machine play while the record is open. Search the record by year, house, railway, city or action phrase.

Machine personalities

Broker is the original neutral policy. Trustee protects cash, prefers dependable development and stands earlier. Builder gives greater weight to route expansion and remains active longer. Raider values entry into rival cities and capacity denial. Speculator bids more aggressively, calls auctions more often and delays standing down.

Personality changes valuation rather than legality or information. Every machine still uses only the public board and ledger, obeys scenario restrictions, and remains deterministic under a reproduced seed. The personality is printed beside each machine house and during its turn.

Dividend ledger

Choose Dividend ledger beside the minutes, or press L, to open the financial record. The railway table preserves each closed year’s income, dividend per authorised share and retained earnings. Red forecast rows show what the current board would pay if the year ended now. Filter the record to one railway when comparing its growth over time.

The closing-cash table records every house after each annual dividend. Export CSV downloads the visible railway account and the complete cash record for outside analysis. Opening the ledger pauses machine play and closing it restores the prior running state.

Turn order

Houses act in the order shown along the top of the screen. On your turn you take one action or stand down for the year; you may take at most 4 actions in a year. When every house has stood down the year ends, dividends are drawn, and the next year begins — in the order the houses stood down. Standing down first is how you buy first place next year; staying in for a fourth action is how you lose it.

Movement: laying track

Stock Exchange Tape. Every completed auction is public record. The left sidebar lists recent sales by year, railway, certificate, buyer and price, then quotes the last and average price alongside the current per-share dividend and simple dividend yield. Export Trades downloads the full tape as CSV. A yield is a comparison, not a promise: routes, dilution, bonds and the calendar can all change the next dividend. Machine houses now use each railway's own sales when estimating later share proceeds.

A line is chartered at its home city the moment its first share is sold. After that any shareholder may spend its treasury to extend it, up to 3 hexes in one action, each hex adjoining track the line already holds. Cost depends on the ground, and a river hexside adds $3, or $5 for the Mississippi and the Ohio. The last column is how many lines the ground will hold; a city holds 3.

Because the mountains hold only one line, a gap in the Appalachians is worth taking early even when there is nothing on the far side yet.

Scoring: the dividend

At the end of each year every chartered line totals its income: from each city it serves, that city's value divided by the number of lines serving it, never less than 1. That total is divided by the shares authorised, and each issued share pays its holder that much. Whatever is left over — the part belonging to shares nobody has bought, plus the remainder — stays in the treasury and buys more track.

The public economic calendar

Ordinary games may keep the original Stable Market or reveal a Public Calendar before play. Every one of its seven conditions appears once: Cheap Steel changes track costs by −$1, Construction Inflation by +$1, the River Works Act reduces crossing surcharges by $2, Municipal Grants make development cost $1, and Traffic Boom or Revenue Slump changes every city by $1 for that year. The current year is marked NOW, but the full schedule is always visible. Route surveys, map overlays, machine houses, forecasts and dividends all use the active condition. Daily and League games use the Stable Market.

In a Bond Market game, annual interest is deducted after gross city income is counted and before the dividend per authorised share is calculated. The Dividend Ledger shows gross income, interest, net income, per-share payment and retained earnings separately. A $15 issue that opens a valuable route can be excellent finance; issuing one merely because the button exists is traditional.

The largest cities on the board are worth the most, but they are also where every line is heading:

Development raises a city permanently: pay $2 of your own money to add 3 to a city your lines already reach, twice at most.

Winning

When the dividend for 1855 has been drawn the books close. The house holding the most cash wins. Shares are worth nothing at the end; a share is only ever worth the dividends it drew, which is why a share bought in the last year or two rarely pays for itself.

The final reckoning includes an after-action review. Its chart compares each house’s closing cash after every annual dividend; turning points mark a change in the cash leader. Ledger-derived distinctions identify dividend income, closing shares, route exposure, the strongest single-year gain and the largest rise from the first cash ranking. Trunk Line bonuses remain visible in final score rather than being retroactively added to the cash chart. Choose Export review for a CSV copy or Replay setup to restart the same seed and opponents.

Losing

There is no elimination and no bankruptcy: you cannot bid or spend money you do not have, so no house is ever put out of the game. You lose by finishing with less money than somebody else — usually because you paid over the odds for stock early, or let a rival into a city you had to yourself.

Saving and restarting

The game saves itself to this browser after every action. Closing the tab and coming back offers Resume on the title screen, which picks the game up exactly where it stopped. The right sidebar also provides three numbered manual slots with Save, Load and Delete controls. Autosaves and manual slots retain the current map position and zoom. Export downloads the current game as a JSON file, and Import restores a compatible Iron Dividend JSON file. Version 1.0 through version 2.6 saves remain usable; older saves resume as Standard campaigns with the original Balanced machine table. Finishing a game clears only its autosave; manual slots remain until deleted. Daily identity is included in saves, while the personal daily record is kept separately and is not erased with a save slot. Railway League state is also embedded in new saves and retained separately between rounds, so finishing a fixture cannot erase the championship table. Hall of Records entries use another isolated record and are not erased when an autosave or numbered slot is cleared. Investor Contract selection is included in new saves and archived setups. Older saves safely resume with No Contract. The selected Market Outlook horizon is saved; older saves default to the one-dividend view. The selected strategic overlay is saved; older saves default to Board view. Finance mode and outstanding railway bonds are saved and included in archived replay. Older saves default to Cash only. Daily and League games retain their standardized Cash-only rules. Menu saves and returns to the title screen. If the browser refuses storage — a private window, or the page opened straight off disk — the game still plays, but Resume and the save slots stay unavailable.