August 24, 2004 |
I moved Game Night to Tuesday this week to incorporate my new fascination with the Madison Board Gamers, who meet on our Wednesday nights. I was tired of Age of Steam gathering dust on the ol' shelf, so I brought it out and we gave it a go.
| Age of Steam |
| Results | |||
| Player | Score | Place | First Time? |
| Mike | 60 | 1 | * |
| Scott | 56 | 2 | * |
| Karla | 48 | 3 | * |
| Dan | 45 | 4 | * |
| Annie | 9 | 5 | * |
Notes: In Age of Steam, everyone has to balance a very tight budget and try to make your company the one making the most income. In the end, the player with the most victory points (Income*3)+(completed track)-(shares outstanding*3) is the winner. The only way to get money is to issue more shares, which must be paid each turn at 1 dollar per share, and to increase the company's income by transporting goods across your tracks.
There are a lot of things to keep track of. You need to build track that will be profitable, and you also need to improve the power of your locomotives, so that you can carry goods farther in a turn. Your income increases for each good you transport to a city that requires it. The further you carry the good across YOUR tracks, the more income you generate. Think of it as each player being a track-building company.
The economics are very tight, and if you muck it up too badly at the beginning, you can go broke quickly. In our game, Annie and Karla were hit with a couple income deductions for not being able to pay their bills. Karla rebounded nicely but Annie didn't. Annie started out well, with a 2-strength engine on the first turn, but never increased her engine after that point, and didn't build much track until later. Her track was spread all over the board, and she frequently would only move a cube 1 track. This resulted in very little income for her.
Dan built in the East, from Toronto to Detroit. Annie and Scott started in the middle, and Scott made a nice Urbanization, which gave him some early income despite not upgrading his locomotive. I started from Chicago and connected down to St. Louis, with a stop in Springfield. Karla connected Minneapolis and Duluth.
The next turn saw a lot of issued shares. I connected to Des Moines, Annie started hedging a bit and started to have a problem with red ink, and Dan Urbanized in the East, and started a nice connection. Karla continued a track down the west side of the board, and fell into debt when she was unable to make deliveries. Scott made some nice connections on the east side of the board, connecting to his urbanized Terre Haute.
Dan was getting some nice goods to deliver, and after a few initial turns of only moving 1 link, he upgraded his locomotive and made some nice transports along the east side. Annie stole one of his goods from Detroit, after making a link down to Cincinnati. Most of the goods were on Dan's connected cities, and while he had easy transportation choices the rest of us had to brainstorm. Scott and I eventually managed to have the most profitable connections, as we both had 3 link locomotives and the most flexible rail network. By that I mean we had very interwoven connections and could transport goods from many of our connected cities to other cities. I had built a small track in the east, but it was mainly to slow Dan down - if his links had extended to larger than the 4 he had, he would have clobbered us. As it was, he really stopped building links once he made his Detroit to Wheeling connection. This would hurt him at the end.
Karla eventually upgraded her locomotive and made a nice run at Dan, Scott, and me. She actually passed all of us but Scott at one point, but then ran out of goods. Dan had run out of goods, too, and he was running out of big profit deliveries. Again, Scott and I were most able to make good, mainly because we were connected to so many cities, and because we had the biggest locomotives (4 each).
Annie had fallen way behind and was content to foil my plans by moving goods a worthless one track. Over the last couple turns she made two 1 point deliveries, getting her company to 11 income. Then, income reduction would take place and she would drop back to 9. Dan hoped to add another link at one point but when he tried to connect to the new city by replacing completed track, I told him it was no go. He got mad at me for not stating this, and I feel kind of bad, but he should have asked. A player can't make connections through a non-town space to existing track (only go over or under a track). I think Dan suspected it wouldn't work and wanted to get angry with me about it.
As the game was wrapping up, I told everyone how the scoring worked. Karla groaned that if she had known that outstanding shares were counted against her she wouldn't have taken as many (she had taken 7, like Dan and I). I replied that I didn't want anyone to go broke for fearing to take shares. The game needs players to invest early on, and if they had worried about the -3 points at the end we would have had a terrible game.
The last turn resulted in a lot deliveries that had to span other people's tracks. Scott and I, with the most useful tracks, were the prime recipients of these points. Karla gave me one last point by the end, and Scott worried that that was the one that did it. It wasn't, as I had built enough completed track (and taken out 1 fewer share than Scott), to get the win. Score breakdowns:
| Player | Income Points | Track Points | Stock Penalty | Total |
| Mike | 60 | 21 | -21 | 60 |
| Scott | 63 | 17 | -24 | 56 |
| Karla | 54 | 15 | -21 | 48 |
| Dan | 54 | 12 | -21 | 45 |
| Annie | 27 | 15 | -33 | 9 |
Dan said it was a good game but he felt that Empire Builder was better. I replied that Empire Builder was more like multi-player solitaire. I also noted that Empire Builder would probably take too long with 5. Age of Steam took right around 2 hours, which wasn't as long as I feared, and it would have been shorter if we were more familiar with it. I, in fact, was the main culprit, as I would spend everyone else's turns helping them perform their actions before it was my turn. Then, finally given the chance to analyze my place, I would spend a minute or so trying to figure out what to do. So intense was my aiding everyone that I had no time to look at my own position. Age of Steam is definitely a solid game, and it requires a lot of balance. Spending too many turns without building track damages you, but spending too much too soon is bad, too. Moving goods gets really tricky in the late game, especially when people take your goods! Fortunately, with all my good routes, I was always able to make a move that netted some good income. That helped me keep up with Scott. My track building helped to clinch it.
| Cartagena |
| Results | |||
| Player | Score | Place | First Time? |
| Mike | 6 | 1 | |
| Annie | 4 | 2 | * |
| Dan | 2 | 3 | |
Notes: It was between Cartagena and Can't Stop for the final game, and Dan vetoed Can't Stop. The last time we played Cartagena I thought it ran a little long, but this time the game played very very quickly, right around 20 minutes. That being the case, I'll have to bump up the rating a bit.
Our pirates raced for the lifeboat, and Annie was impatient, spending all her cards and moving two pirates into the boat right away. Dan got caught up in Annie's impatience, and sped a couple of his guys along pretty quickly, too. I managed to get all 6 of my pirates out before getting any on the boat, and when Dan or Annie used a certain card too much, I tried to take advantage. Dan made some nice early game moves, but then I was careful not to give them any easy plays.
Near the end, I had 2 men aboard, Dan had 3, and Annie had 4. But Annie had 2 pirates way near the front, all mine were at the halfway point or farther, and Dan had one pirate way back and two more up by mine. Slowly but surely, I accumulated the cards I needed. I managed to get 4 on the boat, then backed them up a bit to get some extra cards. Annie refused to take her pirates from the boat and played leapfrog with her two remaining pirates - spend a card, slide back, spend a card, slide back. Her lack of patience did her in. Dan finally took a pirate off the boat to get some cards, but I was in the process of moving 4 guys into the boat that were only 3 spaces away. I got them in and the boat left without 4 of Dan's pirates and Annie's two leap-froggers.
Dan, though listed above as in last, was in much better shape. All his men were in the last 1/4 of the maze (with two of them in the last couple spaces), while Annie's 2 men were barely halfway.