Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 2 hours
This game further develops the game system originally presented in Brass; accordingly, I've cribbed some game system description from my previous review of that game.
The Components
Age of Industry comes in a thick bookshelf box filled with components.
Game Board: A six-panel linen-textured board. It's two-sided, with each side of the board offering a different locale for the game: Germany on one side and New England on the other. The maps are filled with color-coded cities which themselves include locations for building industries, some of which are specified, others are which are not. Generally, the result is simple but attractive and easy to use. Along the edges of the board are a few displays showing coal, iron, and player order.
One of the great elements of Age of Industry is how it frees the Brass system from its geographical basis. Nonetheless, each of these two boards plays quite differently, and assuming the game does well there's the promise of additional maps down the line.
Cards: A deck of sixty glossy medium-weight cards. Half of them display the pictures of industries that can be build, showing off the attractive period-styled pictures of Peter Dennis. The other half are color-coded, to match the colors of the cities on the boards. These location cards show a somewhat abstract coast which I don't find very attractive. They also include icons that match the colors on the board, making it easy to distinguish among them, even if you can't tell the colors apart, which is always a nice feature.
Cardboard Bits: This includes five sets of counters showing the industries and railroads that each player can build, twenty loan counters in valuations of $10 and $40, and eighteen market counters which are placed on the board to denote extra market demand. THey're all printed on medium-weight linen-textured cardboard.
These counters are all fairly minimalistic, with just a picture and (sometimes) a single number distinguishing each counter. The result certainly allows for a simple board, but on the industries I felt like it detracted a little. The idea is that you have your counter sitting on your player mat (which I'll talk about in a second), and that the rest of the information is on that mat. Though it's certainly all right there, I still frequently found myself looking between the mat and the counter while building an industry, and I suspect that the fact that players sometimes forgot to pay all of the costs of their industry building was because those costs weren't on the counter itself. So, personally I would have preferred that these simple counters contained more information.
One of my players suggested that the info might have been left off so that there could be different costs on different boards, increasing the variability of the game. Perhaps, and if that's the intent it might off-balance the higher learning curve required by the bipartite information.
Player Displays: Each player gets a glossy cardboard display which is a great reference for all the industries, how they're built, and the costs of each. I found the organization quite useful, but see above for my problems with having the building costs on the board.
These full-color displays are pretty flimsy, which I was entirely fine with, but players complained about in both of my playtest games.
Money: Plastic discs in silver and gold. Some folks like this plastic coinage, some would have preferred cardboard. I will note, however, that I feel like there aren't enough coins every time I play the game--particularly since you're told to use the coins to score at game end.
Rules: An attractive full-color rulebook. Wallace has gotten these well-laid-out, example-fliled rule books down to a science, and this is no exception. As always, I particularly enjoy the Designer Notes and the quick reference page.
Overall, Age of Industry is an attractive, well-produced, and mostly easy to use game. I've given it a high "4" out of "5" for Style: very good.
The Gameplay
The object of Age of Industry is to build the most and the most advanced industries.
A Note on The Game Modeling: Most logistical games involve players creating businesses, then immediately using those businesses to produce and/or sell products. In those games, there's no questions of running costs, break-even, or the economy as a whole.
Age of Industry instead offers a very different model (as did its predecessor, Brass). You're creating businesses as part of a larger economy, and you're not trying to generate profits off of individual sales in your businesses. Instead, you're attempting to insert your businesses into that larger economic web and thus make them profitable in the long term--giving you money to make continued investments--and eventually earn victory points.
Setup: The gameboard (whichever of the two you prefer!) is laid out. The coal and iron demand tracks are filled. Market spaces are filled with tiles which reveal whether they demand cotton mill goods, factory goods, both, or neither.
Each player chooses a color and takes a full set of industry tiles in that color, organizing each set (cotton mill, factory, port, coal mine, iron works, ship) in order by tech level on their player mat. Each player is also dealt an initial hand of five or six cards.
A first player is selected, and the players' turn order markers are placed down in clockwise order from that player.
About Money. You may note from the setup that players don't start with any money. And, you need money to make money. That's where the loans come in: you can take them at any time in denominations of $10. You'll end up paying $1 interest each turn on each loan (and losing big points if you haven't gotten rid of them by the end of the game).
Order of Play: Age of Industry has a simple order of play:
- Take Actions
- Determine New Order of Play
- Pay Interest on Loans
Take Actions: This is the center of the game. There are six different actions, half of which require a card to take.
Build Industry Action: You build the lowest tech level cotton mill, factory, port, coal mine, iron works, or ship that you currently have on an appropriate space on the board. Coal mines, ports, and ships have specific places that they must be built, while cotton mills, factories, and iron works can be built on any non-specific space.
You can build in any city by playing a location card matching the color of its region. Alternatively, you can play an industry card of the appropriate type to build in a city that you are already connected to via industries and rails. You are limited to 1 industry in a town of 3 spaces or less and 2 in a town of 4 spaces or more.
Costs. Each industry has a cost in dollars. Some also cost a coal cube and/or an iron cube. Iron and coal are both communal resources that may be taken from the board or the demand tracks.
To get coal you must be connected to a coal mine that still has coal via some line of rails. You then remove a coal cube from the nearest source. In the New England map, these coal cubes are sometimes made available via ships that have been built.
Alternatively you must be connected to a port. Then you can buy a coal off the coal demand track, for 1 dollar or more.
Iron works exactly the same, but with iron cubes. Neither of the current maps has iron just sitting on the board, though.
Results of Building. Some of the industries have immediate effects when they're built.
The coal mine and iron works immediately get cubes placed on them. Further, if they're connected to a port, and some of the cubes have been removed from the appropriate demand track (coal or iron), you use your industry's cubes to refill the demand track, collecting money for doing so.
Flipping Industries. The object of the game is to get industries running to full efficiency, at which point you flip them over. This gives you money a ways in excess of what you invested in the industry. There are different rules for flipping each industry.
Factories and cotton mills flip when you ship their product to either a port or a market.
Ports flips when goods are shipped to them.
Coal and iron flip when all of their cubes have been used up.
Ships on the New England map always have one market and three coal cubes beyond them. They flip when the needs of the market are fulfilled and the coal is used up.
Combined Build. Instead of taking two actions on your turn, you can take a combined build action. You discard a card, and you build in any one location.
Build Rail Action: You can build a rail connected either to one of your industries or to one of your rails.
Sell Goods: You can sell your cotton from an unflipped mill to an an unflipped port or to an unflipped market that wants cotton goods. Similarly, you can sell factory goods appropriately. In either case, you flip both tiles. Flipped mills, factories, and ports produce money for the appropriate player, while flipped markets are just no longer available (though they could help a ship to flip).
Development Action: You can remove one of your industry tiles (allowing you to move closer to the good, high-tech stuff) for a cost of one card. This is required for ships and for factories which have some tech level 0 chits that can't be built.
Take Two Cards: To a maximum of nine.
Pass: If you really have nothing else to do. This costs a card.
Determine New Order of Play: After all the actions are taken, the new turn order is determined. This is based upon how much money you spent in the round, with the people who spent the least going first. This can cause some rather clever gaming of the system as players sometimes figure out how to go twice in a row.
Pay Interest on Loans: $1 per $10 loan.
Ending the Game: The game ends when the draw deck is exhausted and one player has played all his cards. Now points are scored.
First players earn money for their railroads: $2 + $1 per industry on either side for each link. Then players turn in dollars for victory points at a $5:1 ratio. Finally, players earn victory points for industry built on the board, equal to their tech level (and they get these points whether the industry is flipped or not, I should note, which is different than Brass). Finally, players lose 5 VPs for each $10 of loan they have (but everyone should have paid off their loans out of railroad earnings, if nothing else).
THe player with the most VPs wins.
Relationships with Other Games
Age of Industry is an extension of the gaming system created for Brass. The new system is a tiny bit simpler and definitely more polished. It takes out some of the special cases of the original game while simultaneously creating an experience that can be more variable, thanks in part to the varying boards, but also thanks to other elements like the changeable market tiles.
If you want to read more specifics about how the two games differ, read my complete article, Age of Industry vs. Brass.
The Game Design
As with its predecessor, Brass, Age of Industry is a great game. The design is very unique, both in the different ways that industries work and in the tactical elements that you have to puzzle out, as you figure out how to double up turns and otherwise take best advantage of what other people are doing.
As with its predecessors, Brass supports really interesting interactions among the players because of the way that coal, iron, ports, and ships can all open up action possibilities for your opponents. Beyond that, play is fast even though the game is fairly long at 2 hours.
So, generally, I have no qualms with giving Age of Industry a "5" out of "5" for Substance: it's a great, strategic game.
Now, for those of you who've already played Brass: is it better? That's really hard to say. A lot of really good work went into making Age of Industry cleaner and more variable. If you're going to play the game a lot then having the options for different maps will make Age of Industry worth its weight in Brass. However, there have been some simplifications that I didn't entirely like--mostly related to victory points and income. I think that Age of Industry does have enough benefits to make it a win over Brass, but I also suspect that I'm going to keep both on my shelf--at least for now--and I'm sure I won't be the only gamer doing so.
Conclusion
Age of Industry is an excellent polishing of the game system from Brass, now offered up with a few more options, some cleaner mechanics, and the option to play on different boards. If you've never played either game, you should give this one a shot, as it's an excellent game of serious strategy.
