18XX Forever: Railway Time and Fossil Play on the Tabletop

The document examines the 18XX series of board games as cultural artifacts that mediate contemporary relationships to time, capital, and ecological crisis. It proposes the concept of "fossil play" to describe recreational activities that both depend upon and reproduce the temporal and spatial logics underpinning the transition to fossil-fueled industrial capitalism. The analysis draws on game studies, material culture studies, and energy humanities, particularly Andreas Malm's "Fossil Capital," Wolfgang Schivelbusch's "The Railway Journey," and theories of game time by Jesper Juul and Christopher Hanson.

The 18XX games, originating with Francis Tresham's 1829, meticulously model 19th-century finance capital, including stock manipulation, corporate mergers, and the creation of profit-generating transportation networks. Players act as investor-capitalists, managing railroad corporations and balancing personal wealth against corporate solvency. The games are deterministic, emphasizing calculation over chance, and require players to perform complex mathematical labor for extended periods, sometimes four to eight hours per session. This reproduces the temporal logic of "fossil capital," where value depends on relentless optimization, efficient deployment, and planned obsolescence, all measured against abstract time and resource depletion.

The analysis explores two "armatures of futurity" within 18XX games: railway time and futures markets. Players experience railway time through uniform operating rounds and the transformation of landscapes into profit networks. Simultaneously, they engage in futures speculation, buying and selling shares based on anticipated revenue, internalizing the speculative temporality of financial markets. The material components of the games—tiles, money, stock certificates, and tokens—tactilely reproduce the logic of fossil capital, allowing players to enact landscape transformation and financial speculation. However, the ludic frame distances players from the ecological consequences of historical railroad development, offering a "temporal refuge" and a sense of mastery over complex economic systems without confronting the associated environmental degradation.

Future research will investigate the pleasures derived from "fossil play" through digital ethnography of online player communities (e.g., 18xx.games, Discord, BoardGameGeek) and player interviews. This aims to understand how these pleasures relate to the temporal rhythms of capitalist accumulation reproduced by the games and whether such interrogation can expose the contingency of fossil capital's logic. The scope of the analysis is primarily conceptual, focusing on the cultural and temporal implications of the 18XX game system rather than specific geographic or economic market data.