Age of Steam Deluxe Edition (2019)

Age of Steam is Martin Wallace's magnum opus and a classic. I bought it many years ago, and bought a few expansions too. A deluxe version was released in 2019, and I managed to play a copy. So here are photos of this very nice deluxe version.

7 Feb 2020. We played the Switzerland map. This was the first time I played this map. One unique aspect is all rail tracks are the same price. In the normal game, simpler tracks are cheaper, and complex tracks more expensive. I guess one way to look at this is this makes the game easier to learn because you don't need to worry about the different types of tracks. This map is tough though, because tracks are expensive, despite the flat rate.

The red borders are impassable. So are the grey mountains. These add to the challenge too.

The three side boards are designed following the flow of a game round. I find this helpful in teaching the game. This is the first side board. It covers the first three phases of a round - issuing shares to raise money, bidding for player order, and selecting your special action.

This is the second side board, and it only covers one phase - building tracks. Normally the price differs depending on the type of track tile you want to place. In the case of Switzerland, the price is fixed so you can ignore most of this board.

The third side board covers goods delivery, income, expenses, income reduction and goods growth. The markers at the top indicate each player's train capacity, i.e. how many links he can move a cube.

The money is designed to look like poker chips, which is nice. The size is much smaller than standard poker chips.

The red lines are tricky. After you place track tiles onto the board, they are easily blocked. So you must check carefully when you plan to build tracks. In this game I miscalculated once because I didn't realise there was a red line where I was planning to extend my tracks.

These two pre-printed stretches of tracks are tunnels. They are initially not in play, and take effect only by a certain round. This is yet another unique aspect of the Switzerland map. The white circles are towns. You can connect tracks to towns. Towns can be upgraded to become cities (coloured hexes). You may deliver cubes to cities but not to towns.

In the first half of the game we only developed the northern half of the map, where there were more cities and towns, and goods too.

Julian (yellow) connected to that multi-coloured city, which was a good thing. These cities accepted multiple types of cubes, which was convenient. When delivering goods, it is not necessary to use only your own tracks. You may use tracks belonging to other players, just that for these stretches, they will be getting the income growth and not you. Ainul (red) had a short track linking the blue and purple cities near each other. That tiny little track did much business in our game because I kept using it. It was a critical link between the eastern and western halves of the rail network.

I (green) was planning to connect to that multi-coloured city at the bottom left, but Julian (yellow) beat me to it.

In this photo you can see why I (green) had such a big dependency on Ainul's (red) strategically placed track. It was right in the middle of my long delivery route. I gave him much business.

Tracks need not be completed within the same round. You can build halfway and continue next round. Blue and red both currently have half built tracks.

Heng (blue) had issued 15 shares, which was the max, and could issue no more.

One scary thing about Age of Steam is Income Reduction. Every round, your painstakingly built income level drops. This happens as soon as your income exceeds 10. The higher your income, the more it is reduced. This mechanism is explained as inflation. I think it is there for game balance, and to keep you on your toes. Sometimes you intentionally hold back just to avoid the penalty. E.g. you may choose to strive for income level 20 instead of 21. At 20, it will be reduced by 2 to 18, but at 21, it will be reduced by 4 to 17! There is still a difference. For that round, you will earn $1 more, before the income reduction is done. Sometimes that does make a difference.

We started developing in the southern half. The northern half was getting saturated. Many towns had been upgraded to cities.

Cubes (goods) become more and more scarce as players deliver them. As the game progresses, some cubes become less and less attractive because players want to go for the long distance deliveries. Some deliveries are not lucrative at all. There is a mechanism which adds goods to the map. This goods growth is done once per round, and there is some randomness in which cities would produce goods. You know what's coming next at each city, but you don't know whether each specific city will produce, and if it does, how many. Goods for this goods growth phase come from a side board, and there is one player action which allows you to replenish goods on that side board. You draw cubes from a bag and decide where to place them. You may not get the colours you want. Even if you do, and you place them at your preferred cities, those cities may not produce and the goods would remain in the queue. This mechanism is the only aspect in the game where you have some randomness (die rolls).

In this photo, some cities had run out of goods, and some previously depleted cities now had new goods added.

Lugano in this far corner never had anyone building any train tracks for it, so the goods here never got delivered.

The white discs are towns, and they are the same thing as the white circles printed on the map. It is just that when you build tracks to the towns, you need to use the white discs to represent them. Later if you upgrade the town to a city, you remove both the white disc and the track tile under it, and place a coloured hex instead.

My table - Heng, me, Julian and Ainul.

The other table - Tim, Jeff and Kareem.

The other table played the Panama map.

They played much more quickly than we did, and managed to play a second map - Vietnam. Those black hexes are flooding I think.