1817 · companion sheet · the private companies
1817's privates aren't income cards you hold. They're company-formation currency with a power stapled on — inert in your hand, worth nothing at scoring, and bought out of a shared subsidy pool that the whole table is racing to drain.
Four facts that reset the instinct
Every one of these cuts against how privates behave in Royal Gorge. Read them before you value anything.
Every ability on every card is written "the owning company." Mail contracts pay the company. Coal mines, bridges, the Steel Mill — all company powers. A private sitting in your play area produces nothing, ever, until you put it inside a railroad.
In 18RoyalGorgePrivates pay you every OR from the moment you win them, and selling one to a company is how you take profit. Here there's no income phase and no resale — only deployment.
At a company IPO auction, privates count as cash at full face toward your winning bid. The contribution must total the bid exactly: a $400 bid can be $280 cash plus the $120 Major Mail Contract. That is the entire reason to own one.
In 18RoyalGorgeYou sell privates to a company for ½–2× face and pocket the cash. Here the flow reverses — the private becomes the company's capital, and you never see it again.
Final wealth is cash plus shares minus shorts. Company assets and private companies count for nothing. An unspent private is a dead $60 sitting in front of you at the end of the game.
In 18RoyalGorgePrivates count against your certificate limit and hold value. Here they cost you no certificate slot at all — but they're worthless unless converted.
Privates stay open the whole game — no 5-train guillotine. But the company holding them can be liquidated, acquired, or merged away, and the privates go with it. Put your Major Mail Contract in a railroad that dies and a rival collects it in the M&A auction.
In 18RoyalGorgeMost privates close on the first 5-train; the risk is the clock. Here the risk is your own solvency.
The auction is a commons problem
The privates are laid out with $200 of seed money from the bank. Your bid plus the seed still available must cover the card's face value; the seed pays the gap. Bids may never exceed face, and may never go below zero.
Seed money · $200 · shared, finite, first-come
Priority opens the Major Mail Contract. Face is $120; seed available is $200. The legal minimum opening bid is therefore $0.
seed −$120Someone raises to $40. Now the seed only has to cover $80. Every dollar bid puts a dollar back in the commons — for whoever's next.
seed −$80It sells at $40. The winner hands the bank $40; the bank tops it up with $80 of seed. $120 left in the pool.
$120 leftThe Union Bridge Co ($80 face) goes up next. Minimum bid is still $0 — the pool covers it. Two cards in, the pool is nearly gone.
seed −$80Everything after this is bid at or near full face. The last privates on the table are the most expensive ones, on the worst terms.
$40 leftThe trap: restraint is punished. Bidding low is how you capture the subsidy, but it's also how you burn it — and there's no way to opt out, because the players who go first take it regardless. Meanwhile opening an auction costs you tempo: play resumes to your left, and priority for the first stock round goes to the left of whoever last put a card up. In 18RG priority just goes to whoever kept the most cash. Here it's a positional trap.
Unsold privates are removed from the game and leftover seed goes back to the bank. It is entirely possible — and sometimes correct — to let a card die rather than pay face for it.
Face price · my bid ceiling
Targets are opinion, not rules. They sit inside the designers' own guidance — 50–75% of face — with exceptions called out where a card is worth more than that to the right buyer. Scale them down hard at 5+ players, where starting cash drops to $252 or less and $120 is most of your stack.
Paid to the owning company at the start of every operating round, provided it owns at least one train. No map dependency, no upgrade risk, nothing to place. All three price at exactly the same rate — 16.7% of face per OR — so the choice is purely how much cash you want to commit.
$20 to the owning company at the start of every OR, as long as it has a train.
Payback is six ORs at face, four at $80. Games run long enough that both clear — but the company has to survive, and 1817 companies don't reliably survive.
VerdictThe safest card in the set and the best voucher, because $120 of IPO equity is a real chunk of a $400 bid. Wants a 2-share company you own outright, where you keep 100% of the $20.
$15/OR and $10/OR respectively, same terms.
Identical rate to the Major — these are just smaller positions. The Minor at $30–40 is the single most affordable thing on the table for a short-stacked player in a 5–7 player game.
VerdictTake the biggest one your cash tolerates. There's no rate advantage to buying small — only a liquidity one.
Where the money actually is, and where the two best cards in the game live. Coal mines are laid onto the map as permanent +$10 revenue hexes that don't consume a train stop — but they lock the hex at yellow forever, which is both their cost and, if you aim them right, a weapon.
$20 to the owning company every time it lays a yellow tile in a mountain hex. Pay the terrain fee first, then collect.
The only card the designers explicitly say is worth full face — to a player who already holds the Major Coal Mine. With the $20 second-tile-lay, two yellow mountain tiles in one turn is $40 in, $20 out, every operating round you have mountains left to build.
VerdictCheapest genuine engine in the set. Pay face if you're taking coal; pay $25 if you aren't. Don't let a coal-mine buyer have both for free.
Three coal tokens. Lay yellow in a mountain hex adjacent to a city or red off-board, place a token, and the $15 mountain fee is waived. The hex now adds $10 to any route through it, forever — and coal mines don't count against the train number.
Two catches. Any company may use it — you're building public infrastructure, so aim it where only your track goes. And the tile beneath can never be upgraded.
VerdictStrong, and the natural partner to Mountain Engineers. Together: no fee, +$20 cash, +$10 permanent hex — three benefits from one tile lay.
Two tokens and one token. Same rules, smaller ambition.
The Minor at $30 is a fine cheap add-on — one token, one waived fee, one Mountain Engineers trigger. The designers' showcase line uses it to open a second company in Pittsburgh alongside the Steel Mill.
VerdictBuy the Minor as a $20 rounding-out card. The middle Coal Mine is the weakest of the three — it's the one to let die if the pool is drained.
Place the special Pittsburgh yellow tile during your tile-laying step. Counts as your yellow lay, but has no connectivity requirement — you can place it before you've reached the hex.
The catch: Pittsburgh isn't reserved. Any company with a route there can drop an ordinary yellow city tile and your card becomes waste paper. It's a race, not a right.
VerdictOnly buy it if you intend to open a company in or near Pittsburgh in the first stock round. Otherwise it's $40 for a tile someone else will pre-empt.
Bridge tokens go on Louisville, Cincinnati, or Charleston — one per city — and raise that city by $10 for every company's trains, not just yours. Placement is free, optional, and needs no connection. The waived $10 river-tile fee is a rounding error; the token is the card.
Two bridge tokens, plus free yellow tiles on river hexes.
This is the card behind the designers' signature opening: bridge Louisville and Cincinnati, start a 2-share company in each, and run a pair of 2-trains back and forth between two inflated cities. Two companies, four trains, one route.
VerdictThe best plan-in-a-box on the table — but it telegraphs itself, and once green tiles arrive anyone can open in Louisville and leech the same run with a 3-train. Buy it to use it now, not to hold it.
One bridge token, same terms.
Half the Union Bridge for half the price — and better value per token if you only have one city you actually intend to camp on. It's also the spoiler: take Charleston's bridge before the Union Bridge owner gets there.
VerdictFine at $30. Its best use is often denial — a bridged city can't be bridged twice.
One extra station marker for the owning company.
Do the arithmetic: a company buys extra markers for $50 each when it converts, and the designers' own book-value worksheet values a marker at $50. Paying $80 face for a $50 asset is a bad trade in a game that hands you an explicit valuation formula.
VerdictThe clearest overpay in the set at face. It earns its price only when the extra token buys a blocking position you couldn't otherwise reach in time. Let someone else drain the seed on it.
Two from the designers, one from the math
Mountain Engineers + Major Coal Mine
$130 face · target ~$100
Lay yellow into a mountain next to a city: the coal token waives the $15 fee, Mountain Engineers pays $20, and the hex is worth +$10 to your routes permanently. Repeat with the second tile lay. The designers flag this pairing by name as the reason ME can be worth full face.
Union Bridge Co
$80 face · target ~$55
Bridge both cities, open a 2-share company in each, run two 2-trains apiece between them. You own 100% of both, so every dollar of the inflated route comes to you. Expect it to be copied the moment green tiles land — plan the exit, not just the entry.
Steel Mill + Minor Coal + Ohio Bridge
+ Mountain Engineers + Major Coal
$240 face · 3–4 players only
The designers' showcase: open in Pittsburgh with the Steel Mill and Minor Coal, open in Charleston with the rest, chain coal mines from Atlanta up through Charleston to Pittsburgh, then run ordinary track on to Cleveland. Two 2-trains in each company. They call it extraordinarily profitable and difficult to execute — believe both halves.
Six rules of thumb
A private's worth is the profit of the railroad it enables, minus what that railroad would have earned without it. If you can't name the company and the hex on the way to the auction, the card is worth zero to you and you should bid accordingly.
A 2-share company has exactly one shareholder: you. Its shares can't even be sold. Every dollar the private earns comes back at 100% — the mail contract, the coal hex, the bridged city, all of it. Put the same card in a 10-share company and you keep 60% at the absolute cap.
The designers' most useful valuation note: estimate what the private earns you before 3-trains arrive. Once green tiles exist, rivals open companies alongside your route and leech the very cities you inflated. Most of these cards have a shelf life of about two sets of operating rounds — price them on that window, not the whole game.
Your IPO contribution must total the winning bid exactly, and privates count at face. Don't build a bid that leaves the treasury dry: the designers are blunt that an opening 2-share company should start with at least $10 cash to cover first-round loan interest. That $10 is often the difference between running one 2-train and two.
Starting cash is $420 / $315 / $252 / $210 / $180 at 3–7 players. At three players a $120 private is a comfortable position. At seven it's two-thirds of everything you own, and you still need $100+ to win a president's certificate. Cut every target on this page by roughly a third above four players.
Put a card up and play resumes to your left — the table gets to respond before you act again. Priority deal then goes to the left of whoever opened last. Open with the card you're most willing to lose, and be aware that the person who never opens anything is quietly buying position while you buy cardboard.
Privates aren't an income phase here. They're the down payment.
The card in your hand earns nothing, blocks nothing, and scores nothing. It becomes real at exactly one moment: when you spend it at face into a railroad you're about to own outright. Buy for that moment or don't buy at all.