Age of Steam: Poland Session Report

I have always enjoyed the Winsome expansions for Age of Steam. Most of the maps introduce minor but interesting tweaks to the original system that make the game fresh. The Poland expansion was released this year as part of the 2010 Winsome Essen Set.

As I expected, the changes in the rules are minor. First, if you are the first player to build track into a town hex, your income immediately goes up by $1. Second, the Production action now allows you to pull a random cube from the bag and place it on any town on the board. Third, Warsaw gets a black cube during goods growth. That’s it.

But, I did have to wonder what drove these rules. I hope that John will chime in, but I have my own speculations. Warsaw is the capital and the largest city in Poland. It currently produces 12% of Poland’s national income. So, I suppose that the black cubes must represent exports. But I don’t know how to explain the town bonuses. My best guess is that this represents some sort of Government bonus given to historical railroads for building into new locations.

Anyhow, let’s get on to the game. I was joined by Dan, Mike, and John.

Game Commentary and Thoughts

Here is a picture of the board at the start of the game.

The first thing that I noticed was that the map is quite large. With three players, I would figure that you could just go off in a corner and build on your own. I am glad we tackled it with four. Because of the Warsaw rule, I wanted to make sure that I had a link into that city. But I also had a few backup links in mind, should the middle become too crowded.

I did okay in the first auction, and took Urbanization. I placed a Black city in the lower left of the board, with a 5 link network in mind that would connect to Warsaw. I would later regret this decision, as it became impossible to turn a nearly endless supply of black cubes into 6 link shipments.

In the second turn, I took Urbanization again, playing a Purple city onto the board and then driving hard to Warsaw. By the third turn, I was close, and the other player’s networks were starting to take shape. Dan had the left side of the board on lock down. It would take a concerted effort on my part to mess up a circular network that he obviously had planned out.

Mike and John also had some nice routes planned out. John was making excellent use of the Engineer action, which was particularly nice on this map. And he also had a low shares game going that would help him out at the end of the game.

By the fourth turn, I had my connection to Warsaw and was starting to think through my 6 link options. The board was getting somewhat tight at this point, but the board still felt open enough that I was not terribly concerned with my opportunities.

On the next turn, I connected to the Purple City that would provide most of my 6 link shipments. I had planned on doing some fancy building to turn the black cubes in Warsaw into 6 links, but Mike saw fit to ruin that for me.

On the final two turns, I was essentially on auto-pilot. I shouldn’t have been, as John would later prove. I build some links that would ensure additional 6 link shipments, and once took locomotive so that Dan, whom I thought was my main competitor, wouldn’t be able to use it.

Here are pictures from the last two turns.

And the Score Track at the end of the game.

Final Scores

Brad (Red): (32 Income - 11 Shares)*3 + 21 Track = 84

John (Blue): (29 Income - 10 Shares)*3 + 26 Track = 83

Dan (Green): (31 Income - 13 Shares)*3 + 24 Track = 78

Mike (Purple): (21 Income - 6 Shares)*3 + 21 Track = 66

It was a close game. In fact, it was much closer than I expected it to be. John, who has only played about 3 times before, played great.

Some Thoughts

Poland is another fun and basic map to add to John and Winsome games already great staple of expansion maps. I do have to wonder about some of the different terrain types on the map, which have higher building costs. In a four player game, there didn’t seem to be any desire to build in those spaces. I also did not take advantage of the town spaces, but I know that Dan and John did. I did utilize Warsaw. So it would seem that the map tweaks do make a difference, though I would definitely say that this map veers much closer to vanilla [gameid=4098]. And there is nothing wrong with that. I had a good time playing this map, and would highly recommend it as either an introductory map with 3 or 4 and a tighter map for more experienced players with a 4, 5, or 6 player count.

Note: This session report will show up on BGG Monday.