Set in Italy in a time of rampant chaos, this is a very challenging game where the winner is the one who is left standing after the initial train rush, which generally happens around the third operating round. Read this for a sum up of rules differences with 1830 first.

Next, take a look at the map and note the company starting locations and the terrain costs.

In case you did not manage to read the rules, here's a quick round-up:

The game does provide some interesting escape hatches in the form of being able to close a company if its stock reaches the bottom-leftmost space and a bankruptcy not quite ejecting a player out of the game. A failure to own a required train leads to emergency financing from the president à la 1830. After selling all the stock that they legally can, if they still owe money, the company in question closes but if the player still holds stock (likely another presidency or stock that could not be sold because there were 5 shares already in the market), they continue the game. If the player does not have any stock left, they may take a L.500 loan and jump back into the game. A sum of L.750 would be subtracted from their final score in this case. While these escape hatches might let one get out of a sticky situation, a player does not generally fare well after employing these :).

In my experience, the inital private auction is rather critical and the private providing the presidency is great value for money. Getting it for under L.200 will allow one to par at L.100 and buy 3 shares and be guaranteed to get the fourth share for L.90 in the second stock round. In fact it is even better to simply get the first private and come into SR1 with $$$ depending upon the turn order and the companies available to start. The L.110 private is very useful and should ideally be bid up. Letting someone start a corporation at L.68/share issuing shares ASAP and letting them extract L.220 value to start a new corporation with better routes is very dangerous. The old corporation can then potentially use the ability of the teleport to help the new corporation build a better route and simply close.

Note that attacking opponents at the start of the game can be very beneficial as one can deny them the ability to compound their share value. Moreover, money at the start of the game companies do not necessarily require a lot of cash apart from needing to buy trains which are fairly cheap at L.100 each. Conversely, as a president of a company one is constantly on the lookout for timing the first issuing of shares so that one can:

After having played a few games, I have not been successful with a L.68 par as of yet :(. My favourite is the ATA (green) with the Port private but I will happily take whatever the presidency private offers me. I do not like RCS (orange) mostly because the tokens cost a lot and CTL (yellow) does not have a great run unless RCS is helping it reach Palermo. Getting a 10H which is the first permanent is usually a game winner. Certificate limits are very tight so if you can also somehow manage to grab a double share of your own company and put a permanent on it, you are coasting to victory!

Unless you are in the lead, most of this game is spent wallowing in misery. However, this game is also a very good teacher of the Priority Deal as it is much more beneficial to dump non-performing companies, especially at the start since the routes are closely linked together. Oddly enough, after the initial train rush, things ease up as there is a lot more $$$ to be made and after the sale of the first 16H, one can get a R6H for around L.350 so things are not so bad. There are only 2 of the cheaper permanents though, so again, operating order is critical!