Steam

Finally got around to playing the much anticipated revision of the classic Age of Steam. Much has been made of the ridiculous dispute which led to Martin Wallace giving up the rights to the original title, in all honesty I think this may benefit him in the long run as I am sure that most devotees will be inclined to buy this new version and after one play and I can see why they might.

I have always admired the original game but must say I have never loved it, there was something inelegant about certain phases that - in my mind - diminished the overall enjoyment. I am happy to say that all those issues have been resolved and what we have is both a beautiful game to look at and also a staggeringly elegant to play.

Gone is the horrible production phase and gone is the awful dice rolling, now we have a pre-loaded production track ready for Urbanisation. In addition a new city growth option gives players the chance to add pre-determined goods to cities of their choosing.

Income and Expenditure is handled differently too, as players have the opportunity to glean managable debt early on and this allows for greater variation in play as noone really needs to be in profit from an early stage. The fact that players may take their shipping points as Income or Victory is a nice touch and creates further variation. I will expand on this later on.

The only other notable change in game play is the fact that with each player action choice comes turn order for round 2, thus the player who chooses to "bid pass" gets the start player role for the next bidding round. This enables players to plan ahead and allows them to make better decisions for the long game.

The board itself is, in my humble opinion, much more attractive and has an artwork nod to Railroad Tycoon, thankfully the artwork is the only similarity, as none of the processes which diminish Tycoon are here.

The game is now played out on a single two sided board with different maps on each. The board has a victory point chart and income chart (running from -10 to 10) a locomotive chart from 1 - 6 and spaces for city growth, each loaded with 3 randomly drawn goods. We also have turn order slots and slots for action selection.

Game play is very similar to the original, players begin by with no income and no cash and must choose how much debt to obtain, income units of 1 can be sold for cash of 5, thus if a player starts the game with 10 cash, they would commence with a debt of 3, 2 for the income and 1 for their starting loco. This debt must be repaid at the end of the phase, failure to repay the debt means further drops down the income track, players drop 1 slot for every 2 debt they cannot repay in income or cash.

The first stage of the game is the standard bidding for turn around and special privileges, these are more or less identical to Age of Steam. The Choices are "Bid Pass", "First Ship", "Engineer" "First Build" "City Growth", "Locomotive" and "Urbanisation" - these are listed in preference of turn order for bidding next round.

Only the Growth and Urbanisation are really different, with Growth a player may, during the build phase, choose to add 3 goods to a city of his choice, from the bundle of pre-determined goods on the board. Similarly, when urbanising, a player adds a bundle of these goods to his chosen built city. No longer do you have to seed a board and hope for good dice rolls, no longer can you claim to have been screwed over by the dice or bag.

After each player has built and shipped goods, they get the choice to convert their shipping points, calculated exactly as in AoS, into either income or victory points. A player cannot split his points between both. In our game it took around 5 rounds before the VP chart had any points on it, at which point pretty much all the goods shipped generated VP's.

After the action rounds the players repay their debt, 1 for each minus position on the income track plus 1 for each loco, or 1 income for each positive on the income track minus 1 for each loco. Cash is distributed and the next round commences with bidding for Action and Turn Order, commenced by the player who chose the lowest action last round. This is a lovely touch as it stops the inevitable run of always being last to choose and allows players the chance to gain position with strategic choices.

As in AoS the game ends after a pre-determined number of turns, Players count their VP's, add 1 VP for every 2 income (Maximum of £10 income = Max of 5 VP's) or deduct 1 for every -2 income (Maximum of -10 income) Players then glean 1 VP for every link, as opposed to 1 VP for every tile, a subtle change this but one which rewards a better network as opposed to a larger network.

All four of us who played it Ivan, David, Julia and I found it to be more enjoyable and more strategic than AoS and as the Board will support alternative maps as overlays, even the most over invested diehards will struggle to deny its superiority.

In four words .... Wallace does it again!

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