Steel Driver is a railroad-building and stock-management game by Martin Wallace, produced as part of his Treefrog Line of games.
Players: 3-6
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes
The Components
Steel Driver comes in a bookshelf box with the following components:
Map: A four-panel linen-textured map. It shows the United States, with cities and the potential tracks between them highlighted. Each city has a dollar-cost value and each track has a cube-cost value, making it clear what it takes to get anywhere and what you get as a result.
There are also spaces on the board for company stock, for order of play, and for a profit track.
Overall, the board is largely utilitarian, but does a great job of putting everything you need right at your finger tips.
Wooden Bits: The mantra of Treefrog Games is that all the bits will be wood, and this game has a number of high-quality wood bits as a result.
Each railroad company gets a control marker (shaped like a locomotive), 5 company shares (discs), 2 markers (bigger discs), and 17 track links, all in its color. There are also 2 black game markers (used to mark current companies and/or players) and 86 cubes (including white investment cubes and four other colors of cubes used to represent goods at the endgame).
Money: The money isn't wooden, a fact for which Wallace apologies (but which I think needs no apology, as paper sometimes will do a job better than wood). This is plain paper money in denominations of $10, $50, and $250. The three denominations are all printed on different-colored paper, to improve their differentiation.
Overall, Steel Driver has good-quality components (particularly the wood, which Wallace is right to highlight) of average beauty. The components are also pretty easy to use. As such Steel Driver earns a "4" out of "5" for Style: above average.
The Gameplay
The object of Steel Driver is to earn the most profits through building railroad lines and (at the end of the game) moving goods.
Setup: The board is laid out. Five shares and a company control marker are placed in the company boxes for each of the six railroads. A starting order of play is also laid out for the railroads. Each of their profits is marked as $0.
The Railroads. There are six railroads in the game (red, yellow, green, blue, purple, and black). These railroads do not correspond to players. Instead, each turn players will bid on the railroads, gaining the ability to control the railroad for that turn and to gain profit from it in the future. Players can control multiple railroads over the course of a turn (and, if you're playing with less than 6 players, at least one player should control at least two railroads each turn).
Order of Play: There are five phases in each of the five turns in the game:
- Take Investment Cubes
- Auction Control Markers
- Build Track
- Take Profits
- End Turn
Take Investment Cubes: Each player takes 6-10 investment cubes (depending on the number of players).
Investment Cubes v. Money. Investment cubes in Steel Driver represent "big money", the sort you can invest to actually make a company run. It's entirely discrete from profits, which are the "small money" which players earn as a railroad prospers (and which are actually victory points).
This is a pretty typical Wallace model, where a game is about turning industries into fully functioning, profitable businesses, then using the profits from your companies to determine your victory.
Auction Control Markers: In an order selected by the players, the control markers for each of the six railroads are auctioned. The auctions each go around until there's only one player who hasn't dropped out, who wins that auction.
The investment cubes used to win an auction are then placed in the railroad's company stock area. They'll be used to pay for the company's expansion that turn, which means that it's not a good idea (necessarily) to get a railroad on the cheap, because then they won't be able to build much.
Winning an auction gives two advantages. First, the player gets the control marker for the railroad, letting him decide where to build that turn and giving him the profits for doing so. Second, the player gets a share of stock, which will be worth points at the end of the game.
Build Track: Track is now built, one link at a time. At the start of the game, track has to be built out of certain cities marked by a hexagon (which are on the east coast, on the west coast, or around the Great Lakes). Afterward, a railroad can be extended from any space it currently occupies.
Links go from one city to another, along specific routes which also have specific costs (in investment cubes) listed. Each link only has space for one railroad, which means that there can be considerable competition for the best paths.
Each city that's built to generates profit for the railroad, starting at $20 and going up to $60. These profits are marked on a profit track and will be collected at the end of the turn.
Each railroad gets the opportunity to build one link at a time, with the order of play thus circling through all the railroads. If a railroad has enough investment left to build it must, but eventually its money will run out, then the railroad will drop out of the building phase. This will help to determine the order of play among the railroads for the next turn (with those early droppers going quicker next turn).
Take Profits: Now each railroad controller takes all of the profit from the railroads he controlled that turn. Note that other players with stock in the railroad get nothing (yet); their payoff will come at the end of the game.
End Turn: The turn ends with all the profit being reset to 0 and all the players turning in their railroad control markers. Players may carry investment cubes to the next round of play, as may railroads (though in the latter case, they'll usually only be able to carry 1 or maybe 2 cubes, due to the requirement that they build as much as they can).
Ending the Game: The game ends after 5 rounds of play. However, there's still a very important phase to conduct.
The board is now filled with goods cubes. Each city gets one cube placed on it. The color of these cubes depend on the cities and are broadly dependent on geography: orange to the west, black to the south, white to the north, silver to the east, and red in a few scattered cities.
Then, in the final order of play, each railroad takes one cube off the board at a time, from a city it was connected to.
When all the cubes have been collected, each railroad scores based on the set of different cubes it collected. A set of one different cube is worth $10, two is worth $30, three is worth $60, four is worth $100, and five (which is just about impossible to get) is worth $150.
Each share of railroad stock is worth the value of all the sets of cubes collected by that railroad. Each player takes all the money earned by his shares and adds it to the profit he earned over the course of the game; whomever has the highest total wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Martin Wallace is perhaps best known as a designer of railroads games. They've mainly fallen into two categories.
First, there have been the games about building your own tracks and then moving goods among cities to achieve profits. This "Early Railways" system first appeared in amateur productions by Winsome Games such as Lancashire Railways and New England Railways. The German Volldampf was the first professionally produced game which used the system, and it soon became Wallace's leading railway game with Age of Steam. It's since been redeveloped as Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame and should be forthcoming in a new edition called Steam, available from Mayfair Games in 2009.
Wallace's other game system, which concentrates on shared ownership of railroads, has gotten a lot less attention to date. This "Prairie Railroads" system includes Ferrocarriles Pampas, Veld Spoorweg, Prairie Railroads, Pampas Railroads, and Veld Railroads, all published in amateur versions from Winsome ... until now. Steel Driver is the first Prairie-system game produced in a fully professional version.
The Game Design
Steel Driver is a good railroad game that manages to pile several levels of strategy into a fairly quick gameplay.
At heart, it's an auction game. You have to figure out not only which railroads have the highest value (for end-game consideration), but also which railroads are likely to earn points in the immediate future (due to their vicinity to high-value cities). Then, you have to bid appropriately for those things (and hope that your opponents misvalue them).
The fact that all ownership is shared can create for some very interesting dynamics. You can try and set up a railroad that you own shares in to be attractive, and thus encourage others to bid it up--so that your investment in it continues to increase in value, while at the same you have the freedom to go and start gathering shares in another (hopefully profitable) railway.
The fact that your bid pays for the expansion of the railroad is also quite innovative and overloads yet another hard decision into the auction.
The game gets very interesting toward the end. On the last round you have two important strategic elements that you have to consider. First, you have to think about your railroads' positioning in the final order of play, which determines their order for picking up goods cubes. Second, you have to think about who has the most shares and whether you want to try and contest that, since that affects who gets to make the decisions about the good cubes. This is just icing on the cake of a game which plenty of depth already.
(Though I will say that after two games I'm still unconvinced about the final picking up of goods. It's sufficiently chaotic that I find it hard to really assess how much value each railroad will be able to generate. I'm hoping that will improve through multiple plays, but I suspect there's also going to be some degree of chaos implicit in the system.)
Overall, Steel Driver will appeal to those who like other Wallace economic games. It generally forces you to think about serious and mathematical strategy. It's a neat game system, and it's great to see it published in a fully professional form.
I've given it a strong "4" out of "5" for Substance.
The Game Design
Steel Driver gives Martin Wallace railroad fans an opportunity to not just build rails, but also share stock and thus try to optimize valuations through auctions and contested board positioning. It's a fast, yet deep game of profits (and losses).
Review Summary