Steam Power looks like a board game about trains, a sort of Ticket to Ride with knobs on – except it isn’t really. It’s a boardgame about cities, factories, manufacturing and commerce. You build factories on cities, then consume the resources manufactured by the factories, thus gaining bonuses by fulfilling contracts with those resources, gaining money by selling or transporting them, or gaining points by exhausting the factories.
Steam Power looks like a board game about trains, a sort of Ticket to Ride with knobs on – except it isn’t really. It’s a boardgame about cities, factories, manufacturing and commerce. You build factories on cities, then consume the resources manufactured by the factories, thus gaining bonuses by fulfilling contracts with those resources, gaining money by selling or transporting them, or gaining points by exhausting the factories.
Trains are the mechanism by which you reach these cities and transport resources – which means laying the right tracks is crucial, though they score very few points by themselves.
Setup
The base game comes with two maps; America is the simpler map, with little tricky terrain, while Germany is more challenging. Choose a map and randomly select city tiles to place on all the – duh – city spaces. The tiles come in five colours: red, black, white and grey, representing the type of resource manufactured by the factory built on the city; and purple, which doesn’t support manufacturing, but gives points at the end depending on tracks leaving the city (the only way that tracks directly score points).
Create piles of track tiles, resources and money within easy reach of the map.
Each player takes trains and factories of their chosen colour along with five contract cards and $5.
And then the game begins.
Play
Each player takes turns in performing pairs of ‘actions’ until sufficient contracts has been completed – the number of contracts depends on how many players there are.
The actions that can be taken are:
· Lay track – extend your network by up to two track tiles, the aim being to make a network of cities. You must join tiles to one of your previously placed tracks or extend from any city to which you’ve already connected to. (On the first move, you can choose any city.) Most of the time, track laying is free, but hilly and mountainous terrain costs money. If you find you’re stymied by an opponent’s tracks, you can use one of your track-laying sub-actions to replace one of your tiles or pay to replace an opponent’s tile with one that includes a crossing, thus unblocking your path.
· Build a factory – if a city of any colour but purple has a track connected to it (any track, not necessarily yours), and doesn’t already have a factory on it, you can place one, and add the appropriate number of the city’s designated resource cubes to it.
· Fulfil a contract – this is the main mechanism for scoring points. A contract requires a particular set of resources, e.g., two greys, one red and one white on the contract card shown in the picture at the start. If there is a set of tracks between cities which have sufficient resources, and you have at least one link between cities on that track, you can gather those resources. They’re free if they come from your factories and are transported via your tracks, but you have to pay opponents to take from their factories or use their tracks for transport. If a factory is emptied of all resources by this operation, turn the city tile over, indicating that it gives the owner of the factory two points at the end of the game. You can also pay the bank for resources not present on the map at all, but it’s costly. A contract typically gives you money and/or points, but they also often offer bonus actions, such as taking more contracts or laying tracks.
· Take two more contracts – you can often avoid this action by fulfilling appropriate contracts.
· Take $3 from the bank – again, fulfilling contracts can mean you don’t have to take this action very often.
Game end is triggered by someone fulfilling the required number of contracts, and the game is over when that round is completed. You score for the money you’ve accumulated, plus points from contracts, exhausted factories, and connections to purple cities; the winner is the person with most points.
Notes
There are a couple of solo play variants in the game guide; a simple one where you randomly cycle through all five companies over right rounds, and ‘Mautoma,’ in which you play against a fairly complex Automa. Interestingly, you can play against multiple Automa or add one or more to multi-player games – that’s possibly a benefit since I find that the game lacks something with only two players; the map is so big that players can build separately without overlap, making it too easy to complete contracts cheaply early in the game. More players leads to more interaction possibilities.
In the basic game, the tiles are chunky cardboard, and trains and factories are wooden cut-outs. A deluxe version exists with prettier components, as well as acrylic tiles instead of cardboard. In both cases, the maps (two in the base game, six in deluxe) are made of silk-like cloth. I’m not quite sure how I feel about them: they’re a bit flimsy, but they do the job and don’t have the fold bumps you get with folded cardboard. (I think I’d prefer the feel and stability of neoprene mats. It’s a shame few games come with neoprene playing surfaces, but I guess they’re impossible to fit into conventional boardgame boxes—maybe manufacturers should start packing games into long thin boxes!)
The maps contain fewer city spaces than there are city tiles, so there’s going to be an uneven distribution of factory types across the map. This means there will more contention
for some resources than others, adding more competition to the game. There is also a score benefit for those scarce resources, which seems to give them an additional unnecessary bonus.
A difficult to find maps expansion pack exists, containing the terrain variants that are included in the deluxe version. There’s also a cutesy cat expansion, in which bumping into sleeping cats has consequences; trains vs cats feels rather one-sided, but the game setting moves to the playroom and garden, so I guess it’s toy trains… but with cities and factories…?
Final Thoughts
As I said at the start, on the surface this looks like Ticket to Ride, but it’s a lot more interesting, at least than the base version of Ticket. There’s a lot more going on, so it doesn’t feel quite as repetitive as Ticket. The actions are all fairly straightforward, so the game’s not that much more difficult, though it will take longer to play.
I’ve read that Steam Power is a stepping stone to Brass: Birmingham, which was created by the same designer, the prolific Martin Wallace. I’ve not played that yet, but thanks to Steam Power, it’s 100% on my wishlist.
It’s also said to be a simplified Age of Steam, yet another Wallace game, but I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that.
To wrap up, if Ticket to Ride is too simple or you find the Brass: Birmingham/Lancashire or Age of Steam games a bit much to chew on, Steam Power might hit in sweet spot between them.
