It is impossible to portray the history of Wyoming railroads without acknowledging the critical role natural resource mining and refinement played in their development. Today, Wyoming’s geography and economy is defined principally by natural resources, just as it was in the late 19th century. Driving across Wyoming, you will pass any number of towns whose demise were predicated by the failure of a local mine; what large(ish) cities remain boast mines and refineries on their outskirts. These are realities I knew I had to capture.

From the start, I knew that natural resources (represented by resource cubes) would be produced by a limited number of unique map spaces, not unlike resource production in Age of Steam. However, I was not interested in developing a full-fledged pick-up-and-deliver game and the randomness essential to Age of Steam’s cube production schedule was not appropriate for an 18xx game. Resource production had to be predictable, it had to be simple enough not to overburden an already-complex game system, and it had to encourage players to compete with one another rather than specialize themselves into a peaceful coexistence.

It took many iterations to find the right way to do this. There were contracts for resource delivery to be won in auctions, there were scheduled influxes of resources that occurred roughly on historical timelines, there were piles of cubes on cities to be evaluated at the end of each operating round, there were refineries that were added and removed from the board in the blink of an eye, and there were ominous white Union Pacific cubes that would clog up deposits whenever the UP took a bite of a corporation’s business.

Ultimately what I landed on was this. Natural resource deposit spaces, once built by a railroad corporation, produce a number of resources at the end of each operating round based on the phase of the game–fewer in its early phases, more in its later phases. Building or upgrading a deposit space also adds a resource cube to the space, giving the corporation something to work with immediately. Once the resources have been produced, any corporation can deliver them to cities on their routes. Resources delivered to cities with refineries generate an additional $30 per resource cube delivered; resources delivered to cities without refineries in place begin development of a refinery that will be usable the following round. Deposits that go unused export their resources at the end of the round instead of producing more, reducing the earning potential for that part of the board.

Resources delivered to an operational refinery can radically change the financial landscape. Most cities only generate $10 of revenue in the yellow phase and $20 in the green phase–adding $30 to those cities is a dramatic increase! However, being able to deliver resources requires spending a turn to establish a refinery and sacrificing revenue to do so. The locations of these refineries is critical. Establishing a string of refineries in consecutive cities will allow you to deliver multiple resource cubes from one deposit in a single turn, yielding huge profits; this, however, makes your resources and your refineries attractive to competing corporations, who haven’t sunk as much capital into their infrastructure. Additionally, the tendency of refineries to cluster means that track tends over time to converge on one part of the board, making the fight for track orientation, resource cubes, and high-value station tokens very tense.

What the resource and refinery system creates is a dynamic and player-driven financial geography, where cities can and do change in value from round to round and where the map develops a unique character from one game to the next. This radical dependence on natural resources, and the boom-and-bust cycles that emerge as a result, is a critical part of Wyoming history that I wanted to capture. 1867 Big Wyoming allows players to drive these cycles and to play out all the different ways that Wyoming’s early years might have gone.

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