Steam - 9 November 2011

Orhan writes:  Wednesday the 9th of November saw an outing for Steam – Rails to Riches. After hunting around for an elusive set of rules we finally worked out what we were doing and got started. Several different strategies were played with David very effectively optimising his cash resources whilst Orhan went for a more business Moghul approach borrowing vast sums of cash. The interesting thing was that all the different approaches seemed to work well with an almost unbelievably close finish. with David on 29, Adrian on 28, James on 27, Orhan on 26 and Kieron just about out of the station on a 13. All agreed it was a very interesting game and one we have to play again soon before we forget the rules.

Steam - 27 April 2011

Another outing for Steam using the standard (i.e. advanced) rules with bidding for the turn order.  This works much better than the way we played this first time, and we had a close game where the positions continue to change as we did the final reckoning of scores (the positions on the victory point track being modified by players' incomes and the number of routes they had built).  Adrian won with  31 VPs (boosted by Orhan, Kieron and David all using part of his track to ship goods in the final turn) with Orhan on 28, James on 27, Kieron on 25 and David on 23.

Steam, 19 January

At Adrian's for the first outing of Kieron's new game 'Steam' (after a rapid show and tell of new Xmas games Tribune, Stone Age, Navegador and Kingsburg - all which look good).

Steam has echoes of Railway Rivals in terms of building track to link cities and towns - with extra costs for terrain features and joining up with others' track. But adds to this with the need to earn revenue from moving goods along the track from one city to another plus various special ability tiles which allow a benefit in the current turn and set the player order for the next.

In our game James found himself shut out of the track building in the early stages because of his starting player order; Adrian and Deej rapidly got into the black by building elements of track which allowed early goods shipments. Kieron's looping central route vied with Stu's for dominance, whilst Adrian pirated (or even depredated) James' goods, allowing Deej to build his route into a corner and bring on valuable goods there that he could then ship to his own cities. In the endgame, Adrian left conversion of dollars to victory points a turn or two too late, Stu and Deej racked up huge scores whilst Kieron and James steamed over blocked routes. The final scores were Deej 54, Stu 47, Adrian 45, Kieron 38 and James 35.

Whilst clearly a good game with lots of potential, for five players there was a fair amount of down time and a sticky wicket for the players that ended up by chance as playing last in the first turn.