7 Feb

Steam

Filed under: Boardgames No Responses

The income and VP tracks and goods available for production are all integrated onto the board, making everything look neater.

We first played Age of Steam a while back, long enough ago for me to forget almost everything about it. It is essentially the same game with some modifications. The lawsuit thing confuses me so I’m not going to dwell on that and will just go straight to my thoughts about the game.

  • The components are professionally-produced and consequently much nicer this time around. There’s now a separate Victory Point track in addition to the Income track so players must choose which of the two to advance. Both of these tracks plus the goods available for future production and the locomotive level are now all integrated onto the main board, making everything neater. The special powers available for selection each turn are now implemented as role cards and there is even space on the board for them now.
  • We played the Base version of the rules, which omits the cut-throat mechanism of forcing players to calculate and raise in advance each turn exactly how much money they will need. Instead, you can simply move down the Income track any time you need cash for $5 per space. Another simplification was that the bidding for turn order happens only once at the beginning of the game. After that, turn order is determined by the numbers on the role cards the players selected the previous turn. Needless to say, this makes things much easier and I think probably makes the game go faster because players don’t have to agonize over how much money to raise. I understand that this eliminates some of the tension found in Age of Steam but I was surprised to note that quite a few people prefer these Base rules to the Standard ones which are closer to the original.

The role cards encapsulating both special abilities for the current turn and turn order for the next one.
  • As usual I fared the worst by far. Shan did quite well by making a rail network that looped into itself, thereby ensuring by the end of the game that she could always make 6-point deliveries of whatever color was available.  She could regularly earn 6 points for a delivery between two cities that were actually next to each other on the map by taking the long away around between them. Sean prospered because the two of us left him alone for far too long, allowing him to completely cover the entire eastern side of the map. Even by mid-game, any deliveries of less than 6 points were obsolete. This left me far behind as I had to be satisfied with 4 or 5 point deliveries much of the time.
  • Shan confessed later that her looping network was an accidental by-product of simply trying to build lots of cheap connections between cities. For my part, I tried initially to build an efficient network but learned that this game is all about creating as inefficient a network as possible. Plus, even if this point is getting a bit stale on my blog, I was once again hamstrung by visual and color processing problems. Sean could easily many different routes on the map but I had a lot of trouble visualizing everything. Both Shan and I also had problems remembering routes we’d spotted. Often, we’d check a route length to see if it was long enough to be worthwhile but forget how it goes when rechecking. It was very frustrating. This reminds me a bit of playing Ricochet Robots.
  • It occurs to me that the combinatorial explosion in this game is ridiculous. There are just so many possible ways to make moves and connections. If you urbanize, where do you do it and which color? If you urbanize or produce, which groups of goods do you choose to appear on the board? Which cities do you try to connect? It’s almost like a boardgame version of the travelling salesman problem. All the more reason to just stay with the Base version. Even this level of play is more than beefy enough for me!

As with Age of Steam, I find that I don’t really like playing this because it’s so much work and I’m so bad at it, but I dearly wish that I were better at this sort of game. Maybe I should buy a game with lots of visual processing involved to practice more. Shan suggested Through the Desert. Finally, the fact that the gameplay in Steam is so at odds with its theme that it continued to frustrate me long after the session was over. What kind of stupid transport game rewards you for delivering goods in the most circuitous manner possible to its destination?

Look at how many connections Shan’s cities have (in red)!

It made me imagine a real transport game in which players are actually rewarded for delivering the most goods in the most efficient (cheap and short connections) possible. Let’s call it Transport Tycoon after the PC game of the same name. (Actually it seems that a little-known boardgame of that name already exists in the BGG database, but it has no connection with the PC game and seems to involve only road transportation.) Some tentative design ideas:

  • You’d have multiple modes of transport, say, road, rail and air. Each has different initial investment and usage costs. For example, building a rail connection represents a significant investment cost and connects only these two cities, but after that using that link has negligible costs. Initial investment for road transport would be the equivalent of building a truck depot in a city for medium cost but let’s say that the depot automatically reaches out in all directions from that city simultaneously. However, each unit of distance traveled out from that city per trip incurs a high cost. For air, you might need to build an airport in both the source and the destination city at high cost but using an air route would impose a flat, medium cost regardless of distance between the two airports.
  • To differentiate ourselves from Steam and its variants a bit more, we’ll make it a demand-based economy instead of a supply-based one. Each city is assumed to produce an infinite quantity of the goods of its color. However each city has different demands represented by chits. The first player to satisfy that demand earns its value and removes that chit from play. Perhaps we could have different types of goods earn different values and if demand is unmet, perhaps its value could go up over time?
  • So the object of the game would be to use the cheapest way possible, through a combination of different transport modes, to bring goods from the areas where it is produced to the areas where there is demand for it.

Sounds good? Well, I’ve learned that anyone can have dozens of game ideas but the hard part is making it actually fun. And given how many boardgames there are out there, it’s equally likely that something exactly like this already exists.

Written on February 7 2011 and is filed under Boardgames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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