Steam Power
Designed by: Martin Wallace
Steam Power is a game of building railroad routes and fulfilling contracts – but all players share the connected networks, and can use each others rails – for a price.
The board – actually a cloth – is a map of the region players will build on, with the box offering the USA and Germany as options. The map is divided into hexes, some of which show cities, and one of your options on your turn is to build track, which allows you to place tiles on the map representing railways – with the initial goal being to connect cities. This does have a cost – you begin the game with some money – but it also gives you influence on the map, as you add a train of your colour to denote ownership. This will come in handy later.
Another option is to build a factory. When you add a factory to an empty city, you also place five goods cubes in the city (each city has a colour, and the cubes match that colour). All this track and factory-construction is in service of completing contracts: you begin with five contracts, and another option on your turn is to pick up two more from the deck. Each contract shows the cubes needed to complete it: you must have track connecting two cities (a ‘link’) somewhere on the map, and each cube needed for the contract to be fulfilled must be able to reach that city, either via your own factories and tracks (free!) or via other players’, in which case you must pay each player whose factories they come from and the links used to transport it to your chosen city. Completed contracts are worth points at the end of the game, but many also give short-term rewards such as money, or a free factory or track-building action.
As the game continues, the players’ factories will get emptied by completed contracts and the city tiles get flipped over: having a factory here at the end of the game is worth two points. Some cities – the 4pt cities – can’t have factories built on them, but simply reward points for your track being connected to them. And leftover cash at the end of the game is worth a point for every five coins. Most points is the winner.
Sam says
Steam Power feels to me like designer Martin Wallace wanted to take his classic Railways of the World and offer a simpler, smaller-box iteration that’s more accessible. I’m a huge fan of Railways – it’s a hall-of-famer for me – so it would be easy for me to say this isn’t the same. But the intent is to offer a simpler, faster game, and on that front it succeeds. I don’t think Railways is anything like as complex as its huge box and array of components makes it look, but I still appreciate what Steam Power is doing: easier to learn, teach and play whilst still containing some of that edge and tension of the original. I can teach it much faster and play it in an hour or so, rather than the older game’s somewhat more epic (but very fun!) undertaking. It’s curious to me that the publisher went for a sombre box design, because Steam Power, despite the name, is a lot friendlier an experience than the industrial-age aesthetics make it look – fast-moving, a little feisty and more than decent fun.
-
Take That!
There's nothing spiteful about Steam Power, but certainly there may be moments when cubes or connections you want for yourself may be claimed by others.
-
Fidget Factor!
Probably notable with 5, as the board fills up and decisions feel like they hit crunch time. But with 3 or 4 players turns are - mostly - pretty fast.
-
Brain Burn!
There's some strategy here, but largely Steam Power feels like a tactical game: what's the best move for me right now? It's predominantly a matter of looking for ways to complete contracts, but with a palpable side order of players getting in each other's way, and manipulating those moments can be key.
-
Again Again!
There are two maps with the basic game and you can buy more to mix things up. But the set-up varies from play to play, and player decisions drive the game more than anything else.
