Mike and Dan joined me for our regular Wednesday night gaming session. We have been playing Age of Steam quite regularly lately. Our group size is three, though, and we all know that Age of Steam plays best with four or five. My personal favorite size is four. But, thanks to Ted Alspach and Bezier Games, we now had the chance to try our a new map specifically designed for three.
Let's just jump right into it. How did Ted alter the basic map and rules so that this game would rock with three?
First, check out the map. Here is the setup at the start of the game:
As you can tell, the map is perfectly symmetrical. Thus, each player could technically just start off in their own corner and leave the others alone...at least for a while. This is not what happened, but that's my fault and is something that I will get to later.
In addition to the cartographic changes, the game was left unchanged, with the exception of a few basic rules.
First, the yellow and purple new cities were removed, along with 3 of the gray cities. The yellow, blue, and red cube count was also reduced.
Second, two tokens for each player were placed above the Engineer, Locomotive, and First Build action spaces. One token per player was placed above the Production and Urbanization spaces. Turn Order and First Move were removed from the game. In order for a player to choose one of the available actions, they had to have a disc above it that they could move into the spot. This token was returned to the player at the end of the turn. Thus your available actions were very limited, and became increasingly so as the game progressed.
Third, the game is only 8 turns.
That's it. Now on to the game!
After scoping out the map at the start of the game, my initial goal was to build in the middle of the board and connect any two of the yellow cities through a town. I also wanted to leave a stub out of the town so that I could extend down to an additional city. That was what I thought I would do. But that all changed with Mike took Urbanization and chose to shoot out to a non-central city instead of connecting to the middle of the board. Some hateful comments were issued when I completed this build:
I ended up rocking right through Mike's fancy new city and then down towards the town that was part of my original plans. Mike (purple) had his connection to the blue city, and down was taking over the southern corner of the board.
Even though I had some nice connections after the first turn, I knew that I needed to get some real shipments in line. I wanted Urbanization, and I knew that I could place it in an ideal space for some future 6 link shipments. Here is the board at the end of the second turn.
On the next turn, I had two choices. I could head down to the red city or I could start heading north towards the black city that would ultimately provide me with some nice 5 and 6 link shipments. I headed north.
And then, on the next turn, I finished the build.
My network was doing pretty good at this point. But I will admit that it was getting pretty rough to keep the 6 link shipments going. The yellow cubes were all over the board, but I don't think that any of us really figured out a way to capitalize off of those shipments.
Here are pictures of the final three turns of the game:
And the scores:
Brad (Red): (31 Income - 15 Shares)*3 = 48 + 21 Track = 69
Dan (Green): (26 Income - 15 Shares)*3 = 33 + 21 Track = 54
Mike (Purple): (19 Income - 15 Shares)*3=12 + 11 Track = 33
I ended up pulling out the win in this game. It was close. I think that my early jump in locomotive power was a huge help, but I was also able to find more 5 and 6 link shipments in the late game, and Dan's shipments simply puttered out.
My thoughts on the map? It was fun. The limitation on action selection choices was fascinating, and it gave you this interesting bit of extra knowledge when you were thinking through your auction choices. If you know that someone cannot take an action because they no longer have a disc there, then it could make a huge difference in your decision making process.
The symmetrical map was also interesting. It was cool to see how it played out this time, and it would be neat to see how we managed things on another play.
Overall, the number of 3p maps for Age of Steam is small, and this is a great and welcome addition to the lineup.
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