Steam Power

• Designer: Martin Wallace
• Publisher: Wallace Designs
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 14+
• Time: 60-90 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In Steam Power, players “race” to build the best rail network to meet their contractual obligations and make the most money. On your turn, you can perform two actions from a selection of choices, letting you lay tracks, build factories, fulfill contracts, earn money, or collect more contracts. Building a factory brings resources to the board that all players have access to…at a price. The game ends when a certain number of contracts are fulfilled, which varies by player count. The player with the most points (and money, which converts to points) wins.

Choose a board to play on, then place the city tiles into a bag, and then draw one for each city space and place it on the board with the city side up (2vp side down).  If there are any unplaced city tiles, place them next to the board so everyone can see what resources will be more scarce.  Players take all the trains and factories in their color, $5, and each is dealt a hand of 5 Contract cards.

On a player turn, you can take two actions. You can repeat the same action twice.

• Lay Track – take any two Track tiles and place them on an empty hex on the map. Plains spaces are free, Hills are $2, and mountains are $4.  Rivers on the board are art only, it does not affect the ability to place tiles nor the cost.  Your first track must originate from a city. Later track you build must connect to one of your track tiles or to a city you are connected to – i.e. all of your track is contiguous. As a result, you may not lay track so that it connects or extends another player’s track.   Any links, complete or incomplete, are marked with one of your trains to show ownership.  You can also use one of your track placements to remove the most distal piece of an incomplete link and put a new tile in that place. You can also place a crossing tile for a $2 surcharge.
• Build Factory – place one of your factories on any empty non-purple city tile that has at least one connected link. You do not have to own that link. Place 5 resources that match the color of the city onto that tile. 

• Fulfill Contract – you must have at least one completed link on the board, show one of your contract cards and acquire the resources shown on the top and deliver all of them to a city in your network. Resources come from factories; if you own the factory, the resource is free. If an opponent owns the factory, pay them $1 for the resource. Then when you move the resources to a city in your network, your track is free, but you must pay opponents $1/link to use their track. If you do not have access to a particular resource, you can buy it from the bank for $5.  Place the completed contract face up in front of you.  You will earn money shown on the card as well as get a bonus action (lay track, build a factory or take contracts).  If a factory is out of resources, flip the tile over to show the 2VP side; the owner of that factory will score 2VP at the end of the game.

• Take Contracts – draw 2 contracts from the deck and add them to your hand.
• Take Money – get $3 from the bank

The game is played until a player has finished a certain number of contracts (9 contracts in a 4p game).  The current round is finished, and then the scores are calculated.

• Each fulfilled contract is worth the VP printed on the card
• Money scores 1VP per $5
• Factories on flipped tiles score 2VP plus 1VP for each city tile of that color not placed in setup 
• Purple Victory point cities are each worth 4VP, distributed equally (rounded down) by all players that have a completed link to that city

The player with the most VPs wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most fulfilled contracts.

My thoughts on the game

So, I think that sometimes my impression of a game is directly influenced by my pre-game expectation for said game.  Perfectly fine games that fall short of my expectations could end up with an unfairly harsh judgement.  Steam Power is certainly a game that different gamers will have varied pre-game conceptions about – because it is inevitable that many gamers will compare it to Age of Steam, an earlier design by Martin Wallace.  For me, I think I escaped a lot of that problem because I honestly couldn’t even remember the last time that I played Age of Steam – even though it has been in my top 10 all time games for a long time…  

So, the obvious question here is – how does this stack up to Age of Steam, the classic game by the same designer…  Steam Power certainly looks familiar and has some similar concepts, but by and large, it is a much simpler version.  There are no auctions and the economy does not feel as tight.  I would not say more streamlined though as there are a lot of rules here that take some practice and repetition to get right.  For instance, the whole bit of delivering goods to a city anywhere in your network makes sense to a newbie, but it might take an Age of Steam vet a few turns to get the old AoS rule out of their head and the new Steam Power rule in its place.

The game is all about building a good network so that you can make nice deliveries.  Additionally, figuring out where and when to build your factories is key.  You’ll want to make sure that you have the cubes you need to finish your deliveries.  In that sense, you might want to keep those cubes protected in an area that not many people can access.  On the other hand, if your cubes are more readily available, they are likely to be chosen and delivered by everyone, thus getting you the victory bonus for the empty factory sooner. 

The rules are honestly pretty simple.  There are only a few action choices, and they are easy to grok.  I do wish that there was an individual player aid – the back cover of the rules nicely summarizes your options, but it would have been handy to have a small version of this for each player to reference in their first few games.  That being said, after a few games, you won’t need such a reference given the simplicity of the options.

Strategy wise, the games tend to fall into two phases for me. First, I work on building up a solid backbone of a network, both of rails and then factories.  As the game turns towards the end, there is a lot more emphasis on getting contract cards that I can deliver.  There is admittedly a fair bit of luck in this part of the game.  If you’re lucky enough to draw a nice contract that already has the needed cubes and rails on the board, you might be able to instantly deliver it.  If not, you’ll have to spend more energy (actions) to either add the things to the board or to draw more contracts hoping to find ones that you can deliver now.  There can be a bit of a snowball effect to a lucky draw as most fulfilled contracts grant extra actions, and it may be possible to generate a string of actions as a consequence of one lucky draw.

The game definitely lacks the brutal edge that previous Wallace train games have had.  You can’t go bankrupt here and eliminate yourself from the game.  You can’t get boxed in on the board and end up with a teeny network with no ability to connect further.  For many, this will be a positive as it will make the game much more accessible to the casual player.  The only pinching point that I’ve found (and I make sure to let all newbies know about) is that you can run out of certain colors of cubes near the end of the game; though the distribution and location of all the factory tiles is known at the start.

Component wise, I’ll admit that I’m not a fan of some of the choices.  Some of this might be personal preference as well as due to my usual poor lighting, but Steam Power definitely hits a few of my hot buttons as far as UX goes.  First, the board is a silky piece of fabric, similar to a small headscarf.  It looks nice, feels luxurious to the touch, and it is so thin that it can easily be knocked about and wrinkled.  And… if there are light wooden and cardboard pieces on top of it, those can also therefore be jostled about and easily moved.  SPIEL 2024 has had more than a few games with fabric or cloth boards, and it’s a movement I’m not in favor of.  We had a number of Midwestern earthquakes caused by sleeves ruffling the side of the scarf or once when a card got stuck partway underneath an edge.  Also, even when you don’t jostle the board, unless you’re willing to carefully iron the board out, the ridges from the folds remain a constant unintentional mountain.  

I will always prefer to play a BOARD game over a scarf game.  That being said, while I don’t like the cloth board, it certainly doesn’t hinder play. Second, the color choices in the game are… puzzling.  The gray and black goods cubes are too close to each other.  From afar, they are quite difficult to tell apart.  In one game, we had a player stack the wrong color cubes when placing a factory (which no one caught), and as the tile is then obscured by the cubes when full, at least half the cube allotment was delivered before anyone realized that the wrong cubes were placed on the tile.

Steam Power is a kinder, gentler Wallace train game, and one that has been enjoyable in its first few plays.  As an Age of Steam veteran, it’s maybe a bit on the easier/gentler side than I was expecting – but this is most definitely a game that I’ll be more able to get to the table given the shallower learning curve and shorter play length.  To make a broad analogy, this is a lot closer to Ticket To Ride than Age of Steam, and it will (I think) appeal more to lovers of the former than the latter.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Doug G (Garrett’s Games Podcast/Media): Shelley and I LOVE this game! Dale is correct that the components could be better color-wise, but I actually like the choice to put the maps on cloth, as that should make expansion maps easier to create/ship. This one fits our wheelhouse well and we reviewed it on Episode 959 of the podcast, as well as creating a video for it. Though it’s a HUGE longshot, Shelley would love to see this one up for KdJ!

Dan B. (1 play): I’m not against having a much shorter and simpler take on some Age of Steam concepts (I admire AoS more than I want to play it) but this didn’t quite do it for me. It works but the decisions on the Midwest board did not feel very interesting – possibly it’s better on a board with significant amounts of terrain. I also don’t much care for the possibility of randomly drawing contracts you can immediately complete in a game that attempts to be at least medium weight – sure, Ticket to Ride has that but it’s a lighter game, and if I wanted to play that I would just play it.

I also note that the game is very similar to Wallace’s earlier Via Nebula, but I think I like Via Nebula more.

Simon W: I got to play this once before it was published and I’m waiting for my KS copy. I am a fan of train games in general and I liked the originality of this implementation – how Martin has stripped the game down while keeping it tense enough and short enough to warrant much enjoyment.  With more plays this will probably become “I love it”

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Doug G
• I like it. Dale Y, John P, Simon W
• Neutral. Dan B.
• Not for me…