18xx Banks

Of the games I own, the total bank plus starting player cash is listed. Where noted, the number before the slash is the total player count. All currencies are listed in dollars for the sake of consistency.

General Bank

The largest bank I’ll ever need is 1830’s $12,000. The smallest is 1846’s three-player $6,500. The following bank covers that entire range and merely requires an adjustment to the number of $500 chips in use (all of them for 1830 and none of them for 1846 with three players, with a weird exception for 1849). That makes banking both flexible and a cinch to customize. I keep extra chips on hand from my set of 300 to cover overages, but honestly we usually handle overages on paper in the final tally.

If you’d like to play around with custom banks on a per game basis, I also wrote up a small web app to help with the math. I find it works well for most small to medium games, but the distribution may get a bit wonky around the edge cases (e.g., games with huge banks and/or lots of companies). Still, even in those cases, it’s pretty good as a starting point.

Initial Capital Example

There isn’t much point in listing the chip distribution for a player’s starting cash in each game. However, as an example of the type of distribution I usually opt for, here’s the breakdown I hand out in a 2–4 player game of 1889. For higher totals, I would add additional $100 chips to make up the difference and let players customize as they see fit.