Main Catalogue |  BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES |  StrataMax Games |  Days of Steam *Stratamax edition, without title on box*

Days of Steam *Stratamax edition, without title on box* Price: £19.99 Boardgame for 2-4 players, ages 10+, 30-60 minutes playing time. By Stratamax. Players place track and cities, create routes, and deliver goods. Bonuses are awarded to players who deliver multiple types of goods. This game requires careful management of steam to move your train as well as hand management to thwart other players as well as enable your own route. ++++++++++++++++++++ Counter magazine review ++++++++++++++++++++ 2-4 players, 30-60 minutes designed by Aaron Lauster reviewed by Stuart Dagger This is the game that Stratamax announced twelve months ago, in issue 42. They had decided that for Essen 2008 they would offer a professionally produced game instead of their usual ``white box\'\' affairs. Unfortunately they entrusted the production to JKLM and thereby got caught up in that company\'s notorious log jam. The result was that Max Michael and Aaron Lauster arrived in Essen to find that they had nothing to sell and nothing much to do apart from twiddle their thumbs and look miserable. That is not to say that JKLM had victimised Stratamax, as their own games weren\'t ready either. However, they did have a till, and needing to find a use for it they sold the games anyway, assuring those like myself who handed over their money that the games would be available ``in a few weeks\'\'. Eight months later ... Days of Steam is a tile laying game - school of Carcassonne - in which you place tiles in an ever expanding array and score points in the process. The main difference is that this time the points come not from creating formations but from building routes along which you then run trains and transport goods, because, as the name indicates, this is also a railway game. A very simple one, but a railway game nonetheless. There are 80 track tiles which, like those in Age of Steam or 18xx, show a variety of layouts. The only difference this time is that these are square rather than hexagonal. At the beginning of the game they are mixed and placed face down. At the start of each of your turns you will have a hand of 3, which you keep concealed from the other players. There are also 12 town tiles and these are placed with two exposed and the others in a face-down deck. Each town is either blue, green, red or yellow, and there are also goods cubes in the same four colours. Players of any of the games in the Age of Steam series may like to guess how these are combined! On your turn you perform one of three actions: Play a tile Move your train Use a water tower. When you play a tile it can be either a track tile from your hand or a town tile from the common stock. Placement is fairly free but not entirely so. There are restrictions on connectivity, on how close two towns can be at the time of placement and on how far a track tile can be from the nearest town. These are partly to make the placement process more interesting but also, I suspect, to keep play sensible. If you place a town tile, two randomly drawn goods are placed on it. Delivering goods is the main method of scoring points, and on this occasion you do it by actually moving a small wooden train around the circuit. You accumulate ``steam points\'\' (= movement points) whenever you lay track and these are then expended to move your train. A certain amount of management is involved here, because you can\'t store more than 6 of these points. So you can\'t lay lots and lots of track and then suddenly go whoosh; instead you have to keep switching between building and moving so as to make best use of your resources. The rule, naturally, is to deliver goods to towns of the same colour. Your train can only carry one goods cube at a time and some planning is called for if you are to cope with the speed limits on curves (going too fast requires a die roll to see if you crash), the fact that if you end your move in a town that isn\'t a valid destination you have to unload the cube you are carrying (thereby making it vulnerable to seizure by an opponent) and the rule on reversing at complicated junctions (possible between turns but not during one). There is nothing too taxing, but it does add to the interest. Water towers are a feature of some of the track tiles and offer you a quick way to boost your steam points in return for otherwise doing nothing that turn. The goal is to be the first to score 13 points. For each cube you deliver you score 2 pointsa and you also gain a bonus for having delivered cubes of different colours: 1, 3 or 5 points for 2, 3 or 4 colours. So one cube of each of the four colours and you have won. Points are also on offer for the completion of circuits, with a circuit being a loop of track containing two or more towns. This was an extra that we weren\'t too impressed with. It seemed to us that it just meant that placing a tile that brought a new cicuit to within one tile of completion was almost invariably just a way of handing a point to the player on your left. But perhaps we were missing some subtlety. The designers and developers have obviously played the game much more often than we have and the point must surely have been one that they noticed. Days of Steam is a very competent piece of game design. Aaron has taken two strong ideas from other games - the tile placing and array building from Carcassonne and the delivering of goods cubes to cities of the same colour from Age of Steam - added a neat one of his own (the way that the steam points are collected, stored and then spent) and put them together in a way that works well. The result is a game with plenty to think about and a scoring system that produces close finishes. That said, the game doesn\'t really excite me that much. It doesn\'t have that extra something that makes both of its parents stand out from the crowd. Another of those games that you are happy enough to play but would be unlikely to push for when the discussion is about what to play next. More ...

Main Catalogue |  BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES |  StrataMax Games |  Days of Steam *Stratamax edition, without title on box*