Players: 1-6
Playing Time: 2-3 hours
The Components
Age of Steam comes in a bookshelf box full of bits.
Game Board: A linen-textured four-panel map showing the Great Lakes region of the US, roughly bordered by Kansas City, Duluth, Toronto, and Wheeling. The map is quite simple, just showing relatively plain terrain, but as you'll see the map quickly becomes covered with all manner of stuff, so this simple design is exactly what's needed.
The Railroad Tycoon games put out by Eagle Games (which are related to Age of Steam, as discussed below) had problems with the purple, blue, and black hex colors. This time around, they're easily differentiated, but at the cost of the hexes being much lighter colors than the goods pieces. (For example, the "black" cities are actually gray.) This can be a little off-putting when you're looking at a color in isolation, but it's a small problem and a real improvement over the earlier game.
Tiles: 136 hexagonal tiles which shows straight track, curved track, or a wide variety of more complex crossings. There are also 8 tiles for new cities. They're all linen-textured cardboard.
Wooden Bits: White discs are used to mark towns on any tile, while 96 good cubes in red, blue, purple, yellow, and black represent the opportunities for profit in the game. These are all good-quality painted wood.
Displays: A Goods Display lists which cities will soon be producing new resources (and also has the possible actions listed). An Income Display lists income and shares (as well as player order and engine size). These are both printed on surprisingly sturdy cardboard, but in black & white, which is a pity given the beauty of everything else in the set.
Money: Paper money in a three denominations (and colors). I'm never that thrilled by paper money, but this was nicer than most because it was printed double-sided, showing a front and back for each bill, which offered some nice veracity.
Dice: A set of plastic dice.
Trains: Previous versions of Age of Steam used colored wooden discs to mark ownership of tracks. This one instead uses plastic locomotives (as Railroad Tycoon did). They're gorgeous and evocative, really making the game look neat.
Rules: A nice full-color rulebook with lots of illustrations (though also a few awkward explanations that I had to reread to figure out the sense of what was going on; make sure to grab the errata, which adds a missing rule concerning auction costs).
Bonus Maps: The game also comes with two bonus maps designed by Ted Alspach. Barbados is for 1 player and St. Lucia is for 2 (whereas the main map is intended for 3-6 players, with 4 or 5 probably working best). These bonus maps are printed on folded glossy paper. It's not particularly sturdy, but nonetheless I'm very pleased that these maps were included as an extra.
Overall, the components of Age of Steam are all high-quality. The two displays cover most of the specifics of the game, making it relatively easy to play while also making it easy to swap out the map for a new one, which is an excellent piece of foresight (and has worked well, as tens of maps have been released since the first edition of this game). Some of the components, such as the trains, are quite beautiful while some, such as the displays, are more average. Nonetheless on the whole I've let Age of Steam eke in a "5" out of "5" for Style. It's a good-looking game whose box is just jammed full of stuff.
The Gameplay
The object of Age of Steam is to earn the most income from the delivery of goods, while trying to ramp up your entire railroad operation.
Setup: The map is laid out with 2-3 random goods placed on each city. An additional 52(!) goods are laid out on the Goods Display. This describes future goods which will appear in either cities currently on the board or else in cities that might appear later, due to urbanization.
Each player is given $10, but is forced to issue two shares of stocks for that starting money. Each person's engine size starts at "1 link".
Cities v. Towns. Cities and towns both appear on the map, and both demark individual "links" within a railroad network. The big difference between the two is that cities can both be the sources and destinations of goods. Towns cannot, though they can later be "urbanized", which turns a town into a city.
Colors. Every good has a color (red, purple, yellow, blue, or black). Every city likewise has one of these five colors, though there are no black cities on the board at start; they only appear through the urbanization of existing towns.
Order of Play: The game is played over several rounds (depending on the number of players), each of which has the following phases which the players all participate in:
- Issue Shares
- Auction Player Order
- Select Actions
- Build Tracks
- Move Goods
- Collect Income
- Pay Expenses
- Income Reduction
- Goods Growth
- Advance Turn Marker
Issue Shares: Each player in order gets to decide how many shares of stock he wants to issue, earning $5 each for them.
This is a very tricky phase early in the game, because you have to figure out your monetary needs for the rest of the round all at once.
Auction Player Order: Now the players do a roundabout auction to determine player order. As each player drops out of the auction, they go into the last remaining position.
The first player out pays nothing, the last two out pay their full bid, and anyone else pays half their bid.
Select Actions: Now, in player order each player gets to choose an action that hasn't been selected yet. These are "roles", which each give the player some special power for the round:
- First Move: Player goes to the head of the "movement" order.
- First Build: Player goes to the head of the "build" order.
- Engineer: Player may built 4 track tiles during the track laying phase (rather than 3).
- Locomotive: Player's locomotive immediately increases its speed by 1 link.
- Urbanization: Player will get to turn one town into a city on his build track phase. He'll have some control over what color the new city is, since he'll be selecting it from among the remaining "new city" tiles (which include 4 black tiles and 1 each of the other colors).
- Production: Player will get to place 2 random goods in empty spaces on the Goods Display during the Goods Growth phase.
- Turn Order: Player gets a free pass during the next auction.
Build Track: Each player gets to build track, starting with the player who took the "first build" action, then going in player order.
A player can usually build 3 sections of track (unless he took the engineer action which allows a 4th tile of building). The cost of each tile is $2 for plains, $3 for rivers, and $4 for plains. Placing tracks over a town cost a more variable amount and there are also some more complex rules for building "coexist" and "crossing" tiles, which do come up, but mostly later in the game when the board has gotten pretty crowded.
All track buildings goes from cities to towns and/or cities. A set of tiles between a town or city and another town or city is called a "link". It defines how goods movement occurs.
A player doesn't have to keep all his track connected, but he'll usually do better if he can.
Move Goods: This is what everything has been building toward. Starting with the First Move player, then going in player order, each player now gets to move two goods, one at a time. A good is moved from a city, through one or more links to the first city whose color matches that good.
A good must be moved all at once, and it can't be moved more spaces than your engine rating. When you've moved a good, you then earn income (which means you move your marker up on the income track, which will generate actual money later in the round) based on the number of links you moved the good. The income for each link goes to the player who owned that link. Typically that means you get all the income, but for a longer run, you might have to move over 1 or 2 links belonging to other players to finish the delivery.
The Locomotive Alternative. You may, instead of taking one of your two move goods options, increase the size of your locomotive by 1.
Collect Income: Each player takes cash equal to his income. This means that your income increases will keep paying off, round after round.
Pay Expenses: Each player pays $1 per share issued and $1 per size of locomotive. Usually this means that players run at a deficit for the first few turns.
Income Reduction: Each player may lose some income based on how high they are on the income track. An income of 11-20 is dropped by 2 points, 21-30 is dropped by 4 points, etc.
Goods Growth: A number of dice are rolled which cause goods to come off of the Goods Display and be placed in the appropriate cities, slowly rebuilding the resources on the board (and letting players plan ahead).
Advance Turn Marker: Finally, the turn marker is advanced, and the game ends if the set number of turns have been played.
Winning the Game: At the end of the game, each player counts up their points: 3 x their income their number of track tiles - 3 x their shares of stock. The player with the highest total wins.
Bonus Maps: Each of the two bonus maps has some new rules, necessary to either adapt Age of Steam to the smaller number of players or to create unique theming for the individual map.
Relationships to Other Games
This is the third edition of Martin Wallace's Age of Steam. It's also an edition that has caused some controversy, as the designer states that it is unauthorized; his name no longer appears on the game as a result. After some considerable consideration, I've opted not to let the controversy affect this review because I necessarily could only comment on what's been said on the 'net, not on the contracts and discussions which form the basis of the dispute. I'll generally say that the main dispute is between designer Martin Wallace and developer John Bohrer, and that in my opinion Eagle Games unfortunately ended up caught in the middle of the other twos' issue. If you want more info on this issue, you can find it elsewhere on the 'net.
Getting back to the game, this edition is very similar to the previous two editions of Age of Steam. The main difference is (as I already mentioned) that the wooden track ownership discs have been replaced with plastic track ownership trains. Some of the rules have also been slightly tweaked from edition to edition (such as the scoring, which used to have everything worth a third of what it's worth now).
Age of Steam is the ultimate game in the Early Railways series of small-press games, which includes Lancashire Railways, New England Railways, and Australian Railways, and which was later followed by the more professional Volldampf. All of the games share certain mechanics of track construction and goods delivery.
Age of Steam has been quite successful over its editions and has generated a few new games as a result. The first was Railroad Tycoon, a slightly more forgiving version of the game with some new random elements in the form of card draws; it was supplemented by Rails of Europe which in my opinion polished up the Railroad Tycoon system to good effect.
There's another game on the horizon called Steam: Rails to Riches, which will be the mirror to this product: authorized by the designer, but with no input (one presumes) from the developer. Steam: Rails to Riches is due out from Mayfair later this year, and from early reports it looks like its going to be another evolution of the Early Railways system, rather than just an alternative printing of Age of Steam.
There's a nice explanation of the differences between the three modern games, Age of Steam, Railroad Tycoon, and Steam here that may or may not be accurate for the final, to-be-published version of Steam.
Age of Steam also has some connections to another of Wallace's top games, Brass, which uses a similar idea of taking actions to generate long-term income and taking loans against that income as the game goes on.
The Game Design
Age of Steam is a highly strategic game that rewards considerable forethought. It gives you lots of opportunity to plan ahead by considering where you'll want to build to and what resources those locations will offer both now and in the future.
Though this is Age of Steam's greatest strength, it's also its biggest weakness because you really need to think ahead. At a minimum you have to figure out your likely expenses each turn, but you should be looking across the entire Goods Display and board to figure out how you're going to be making great long-distance deliveries as the end of the game closes in.
However, the game goes far beyond the financial strategies already outlined. The connectivity aspect is meaningful as the board is very tight and restricted. There's great interaction via the first-playe auction, role selection, building ordering, and goods movement ordering. It's impossible to get everything you want because of the many different ways to go first, and this ultimately adds to the game as well, because you're constantly compromising and taking risks, hoping that the halfway measures that you can take are sufficient.
If you think this all adds up to Age of Steam being a great game, you're right. It's a very dense 2-3 hour game that really rewards good gameplay. However, it isn't necessarily for everyone. If you don't like to have think ahead or make calculations in your game, Age of Steam probably won't be for you. I'll admit that I'm one of those people, and nonetheless I can still see the superior design of Age of Steam and enjoy playing it ... a couple of times a year.
I give Age of Steam a full "5" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Age of Steam is an excellent game of building tracks and moving goods that allows for a dense and rewarding experience for those willing to expend 2-3 hours of serious thought on their gaming. It's one of the best games in its class, whether that be railroad games or financial games.
