F&%@ Steam!

Martin Wallace is a pretty clever board game designer, prolific too. We've played several of his games, and Brass is among our favorites. However he's probably most famous for his family of rail games that we're not familiar with at all. The first of which was Age of Steam (2002), followed by Railroad Tycoon (2005), and finally Steam (2009). All these games look, play, and feel very similar, with Railroad Tycoon varying a bit more from the other two.

Caveat: I've played Railroad Tycoon a couple of times and Steam just once. So I'm giving my initial impression but I'm no expert.

If you've never played any of these games, here is what you need to know. It's a map of hexagons, which cities spread around. Each city has some cubes on it. Cities are several different colors. Cubes are the same several different colors. You build track and try to connect cubes with their city (by color). Each turn the players pick roles with minor abilities and then go through the process of builing track, delivering goods, paying bills and picking roles for next turn.

In Steam (as opposed to Age of Steam and Railroad Tycoon), VP and income are separate, and points earned can be applied to income or VPs. This helps. The balance of income, loan, and VP is a strength of Brass, seems natural that he split this in the final iteration of his train games. It does make it fit a typical pattern of these eurogames though, where you play for money/income early, and then transition over to VPs.

The primary mechanic here is the cubes. You have a red cube in a given city, you need to deliver it to a red city. A grey cube needs to go to a grey city. And the further you ship it, the more points it's worth. So the the competition is to deliver a cube before an opponent can, and still get the most points out of it (which as I stated are then applied to income or VPs).

To prevent cubes from drying up, and to help set up big long distance deliveries, there are 12 sets of cubes that can be added to the board with the city growth and urbanization roles. These options are awesome and super powerful. But they come with a downside, that role picks much later in the next round. Because of this, you're not going to get urbanization several turns in a row or even more than a couple times the whole game. You have to set yourself up to get it and make sure you are going to earn big big points when you do.

This type of game is challenging for me, it's like chess. You have to think of all your options, all your opponents possible reactions (a couple turns ahead) and somehow lock cubes up so you can deliver them later for big points. Or force them to deliver a cube for small points before a bigger better option appears down the road. I'm not super good at this sort of thing :) so I think I'm going to struggle against my friends as they gain experience. I have good initial feel for it though, so hopefully I can rack up some wins before they start crushing me.

The game has TONS of expansions, not only by Wallace, but by fans (seems Wallace encourages this). He supplies pieces for a six player game even though the original game only places 3-5. This adds a lot of variety because building the same routes around New England or Germany could get stale.

A couple weaknesses. As I said, there is a lot to puzzle over when trying to figure out how to squeeze out the maximum net points out of the available cubes. And remember, after set up, it's all there. There are no more random events, just random players. This is the sort of thing that leads to analysis paralysis as players go over all possible scenarios going forward. Also, the game has something in common with Automobile: It feels like your treading water for the first half of the game, and then once you finally get going, the games over (in the case of Steam, there's simply nothing left to deliver).

Tips: I got nothing. Well, I have a few tips, but maybe once I get some actual experience I'll try and share something. Maybe I'll leave it to Darren.

I have to say, it must be nice to get three wacks at designing a game.