Steam Power
- Selwyn Ward
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Train games cover the whole spectrum of board game complexity. Ticket to Ride (Days of Wonder) is often cited as a 'gateway game' for introducing non-gamers to modern board games but at the other end of the line are the countless complex economic 18XX railway games. With Steam Power, Martin Wallace has designed an easy-to-play game that's just as accessible as Ticket to Ride but which still has enough depth to appeal to hardened board game enthusiasts.
Steam Power is essentially a 'pick up & deliver' game, in that the 1-5 players can expect to earn the majority of their points by fulfilling 'contracts' for various combinations of white, grey, orange and black crates of goods. Tiles, randomly matching the four colours of goods, are placed out on all the cities on the silken cloth map board (similar to the map boards in Bloodstones (Wallace Designs). On your turn you get to take two actions: for each action you can place out two track tiles (initially from any city but subsequently tiles must always connect to your existing network; with ownership marked by placing out one of your trains), you can build a factory (just place one of your factories on any connected city and place next to it five crates of goods matching the city colour), you can take $5 or you can draw two more contracts.
To complete a contract, you just hand in the specified combination of different coloured goods and you collect your reward - usually money, an extra track-laying or contract-drawing turn and some end-game victory points - flipping your contract tile face down to show it's completed: the game ends when a player has completed a set number of contracts, depending on the player count. Obviously you fulfil contracts by taking goods from factories you control and which are on your own rail network but you can take goods from another player's factory at a cost of $1 per good plus $1 for each stretch of another player's track you need to traverse to get to your opponent's factory.
That's pretty much the entire game in a nutshell. It's a race to create the most efficient rail and factory network. The factories have a finite capacity, however. When their initial output of goods is exhausted, the tile is flipped: it'll earn end-game points for the factory owner but it won't produce any more goods. The initial random set up will mean that you can expect there to be more of some factory colours than of others, so you can find there's a relative scarcity of one factory type. You can build a factory on any city with a rail connection - it doesn't have to be connected to your own network - so there's scope for a player to try to become a monopoly supplier...
Tho' there's the semblance of a semi-cooperative element to Steam Power, in that you can pay to use another player's goods and network, there's some 'take that' interaction if you build lines to block another player off. There are upgrade tiles available that can let you cross or run parallel to another track but you have to pay and use one your actions to use an upgrade tile. When you replace a tile with an upgrade tile, the new tile must still match the tile you replaced, so it can be a bit fiddly finding just the right upgrade tile, or even checking whether it exists.
The game may be set in the age of steam but our plays of Steam Power at Board's Eye View have all proceeded at express speed. Even with four or five players you can expect to finish a game in around 60 minutes. And win or lose you'll find that players are eager to make a return trip.
Shown in our Board's Eye View 360 is the Deluxe edition of Steam Power which has plastic trains and resources and rather spendid plastic hex tiles. It also has additional cloth maps and soft bags for each player's plastic trains. The standard retail addition comes with two cloth maps. It has wooden trains and cubes for the resources, which some may prefer to those in the Deluxe version (the wooden cubes are actually less fiddly to stack than the plastic crates). There's nothing wrong with the cardboard hexes but they pall in comparison with the satisfyingly chunky hexes in the Deluxe edition.
(Review by Selwyn Ward)
