This week marked the beginning of a new month and therefore a new Game of the Month!  Soon after arriving at Hypermind on Tuesday evening, we jumped right into it...

Steam: Rails to Riches

Since we are a relatively new group of boardgamers, none of us that I'm aware of have ever played previous versions of Age of Steam.  However, based on its reputation and the admiration that several of us have for Martin Wallace games, Steam: Rails to Riches was chosen as our Game of the Month!  The musical theme that I chose to accompany it is Peter Gabriel's appropriately named song, "Steam".  However, Britt also made the suggestion of having Blackfoot's "Train, Train" as a possible alternative, so I may at least give it associate-theme status.

But anyway, we were playing the Base Game with 5 players, so we were on the German Ruhr Valley map for the first time.  In the very first freaking turn, I made two mistakes that were pretty costly.  First, I pulled out of the auction for initial turn order too soon.  There was a certain area on the board which, to me, seemed to be decidedly better than anywhere else, and I should have paid whatever was necessary to have first shot at it.  Ending up last, I then was faced with the choice of either City Growth, Locomotive, or Urbanization for my action tile, and I chose Locomotive (which cost me $6).  When I got around to actually building track, however, I realized that there was no where on the board where I would be able to move any goods on that turn.  If, however, I had chosen Urbanization (for the same $6), I would have had the flexibility both to essentially build 4 spaces of track (including the new city) and been able to choose goods that I could move immediately.  With my powerful but useless locomotive, however, I decided instead to build down the center of the map to set myself up for the upcoming turns instead and went up to a level 3 train as my only action in the move goods phase.  


The board after our first "build track" phase (I'm blue).

From this point, however, I think that I played a pretty solid game.  I continued to build south, connecting next to Köln while using the City Growth action to drop two more purple and 1 red cube into Duisburg at the top of my network.  I started shipping the purple cubes down to Köln to bring myself back from the -5 income where I found myself.  I connected next to Bonn (so I could send red cubes there) and Urbanized again in Siegburg to place the first gray city on the board, giving me a virtual monopoly on gray cubes for most of the rest of the game.

With the exception of Chris (who got behind early), the game was exceedingly close.  Despite it being his first game, James (playing green) actually ended up with the "ideal" spot that I had identified, and did a good job of capitalizing on it.  Alton (yellow) played by himself in the southwestern corner of the map and therefore didn't have to compete much throughout the session.  Chip (red) fought with me over the center of the board, and probably had the most effective rail network and got the most out of goods movement.  While my network wasn't quite as efficient as Chip's, however, it was somewhat larger (by four links).  

In the last turn, I was last to ship goods and found myself six points behind Chip even after accounting for my extra track.  Unfortunately, even after subjecting everyone to minutes and minutes of my analysis paralysis, I could find no way to get 6 points from anywhere on the board.  Instead, I had to settle for upgrading my locomotive to level 5 and shipping just one cube to finish in second place by one stinking little point!  And what was even more galling is that I had an odd income, meaning that if I had been able to get by with selling even one less "share", I would have won (since my income was still more than Chip's, and that's the first tiebreaker). 

Time: 93 minutes
Score: Chip 37, Me 36, Alton 33, James 33, Chris 22
Ratings: Chip 8, Me 8, Alton 8.5, James 8, Chris 7

I'm definitely enjoying Steam: Rails to Riches.  It's a nice, thinky game with good weight but also really solid balance.  As opposed to the dreaded Power Grid (which is very similar in weight and length), however, I feel like there is so much more variety in actions and strategy in Steam.  Despite us playing the only the "Base" game so far, I continue to be surprised by the complex and subtle nature of the decisions surrounding choosing actions and moving goods.  In fact, the only thing I'm worried about right now is that no one will be willing to try out the "Standard" game with be before the end of the month.  But I've still got 3 weeks to work on them...


The board at the end of the game.
Long Shot

In general, I like race games pretty well.  And while I may have become a bit more of a discerning "game snob" in the last couple of years, I'm usually still able to appreciate a game for what it is, especially if it's supposed to be light filler.  But Long Shot didn't do it for me at all.  But hold on... I'm getting ahead of myself. 

Of course, there's not much point of giving any narrative report about the game, because it was all random luck one way or the other in how it played out.  If you're not familiar with Long Shot, each turn starts with the player rolling two dice, a horse die (10-sided, since there are 10 horses) and a movement/speed die (which has six sides numbered from 0-3).  The identified horse is then moved the indicated number of spaces.  You then have the chance to perform one action, where you can purchase ownership of a horse, play a card, or make a bet.  If you own a horse, you may also be able to move it if you roll certain other numbers on the horse die (on your turn only, not when other people roll it).  The cards do all kinds of things like giving you extra money (sometimes straight up or maybe for meeting various conditions), letting you bet on horses using money from the bank, stealing cards from other players, moving horses forward or back, and all kinds of other stuff.  Plus, if you ever roll a 0 on the movement die, you get to steal a card at random from the owner of that horse (sucks to be them!).   

But let me tell you why I don't like this game.  It's almost like the designer was sitting around and said, "You know, I don't think that rolling dice to randomly move horses is enough randomness in this game.  Why don't I also stick in some random cards that will provide benefits to players that will vary randomly in power depending on a number of random conditions!"  You see, if you happen to draw cards that don't benefit you very much (because you don't own the indicated horse, or you don't own enough horses, or the horse you could bet on is in last freaking place), then you're going to be at a distinct disadvantage against people who draw more useful cards.  Especially when you finally draw a really great card for you only to have it stolen because one of the other 5 players happened to roll your horse's number and a 0 movement and then proceed to steal the freaking thing from you (or if some goober plays a card that lets him steal 3 cards from up to 3 players but he instead chooses to steal all three from you).

Unlike games such as Winner's Circle, Top Race, Cartagena, and even the freaking awesome children's game Giro Galoppo, there is just no way to effectively mitigate the randomness in Long Shot.  I did my best, picking up one of the expensive horses that I could move any time that I rolled any one of 5 different numbers (giving me, of course, a 50% chance of moving him each turn).  But when you're only one of 6 people in the game and the dice appear to hate you, that's still not much mitigation going on there.  And since I only had the chance to buy one horse due to not having cards early on that would give me extra money, and then the horse apparently got confused midway through the race, took a few steps backwards and took a nap for the rest of the game, I didn't have much chance of earning money for finishing in the top 3 spots (I actually sold the freaking horse to the glue factory for his original price in the last few turns).  And since you were limited to betting $5 at a time on horses that you have no way of predicting how they will perform, I'm not convinced at all that winning bets could ever make up for the payout you get from having your horse actually win the race.

Time: 58 minutes
Score: Britt $300, James $285, Chip $150, Chris $150, Me $100, Alton $65
Ratings: Britt 8, James 8, Chip 7.5, Chris 8.5, Me 5, Alton 9

Frankly, I don't know what kind of drug-induced, mass hallucination that everyone else at the table was participating in when they rated this game, but I thought that it pretty much sucked.  In summary, in the time that I could have played two games of Pandemic, I instead suffered through layers of indiscriminate randomness in playing one rather hopeless game of Long Shot.  I can't think of a single race game that I would want to play less than this one, and I'm not seeing much of anything to redeem it in my mind.

Witch's Brew

But then, we had some real fun.  There was some shuffling around of players as different games wrapped up and a few headed home.  The five of us remaining struggled for a bit in deciding what to play, but finally we settled on Witch's Brew.  Only James and I had played before, but everyone picked up on what to do in no time.  In fact, whether it was the zany fun of the game itself or the fact that were all getting a little squirrelly as it approached 11 o'clock, we had an absolute blast throwing around, shall we say, "spirited" table talk inspired by the game. 

There's just something special about the joy you get from saying, "No... I am the fortune teller!"  Or in mocking someone who decided to "So be it..." and then had everyone after them pass.  And believe me, there was lots of both to revel in.

But the coolest thing about Witch's Brew is that there really is some strategy and skill involved in the game.  There is a level of anticipation and guessing what others will do when it comes to choosing your hand.  Then there's some interesting hand management in deciding which roles to lead with in order to get yourself into the powerful "last" position.  And finally, there's some good, old-fashioned bluffing when others are trying to decide whether to "So be it" or claim the role themselves.  And this group picked right up on all of those elements and more!

In the end, Alton masterfully chose four roles in the last turn that no one else chose, managing to pick up 8 points or so pretty much uncontested.  I pulled off a few extra points as well to tie him, but all of the extra ingredients he got that turn as well, he won the tiebreaker.

Time: 40 minutes
Score: Alton 20 (+10), Me 20 (+6), Chip 16, Kenny 16, James 15
Ratings: Alton 9, Me 8.5, Chip 8.5, Kenny 10, James 9 

Over and over again, I'm finding that Witch's Brew does not disappoint.  Most of the new players were not expecting much from it, and were therefore dramatically impressed with what they experienced.  I guess that I just need to bring it more often!

And thus did yet another game night come to a close...  

Other Games Played

Blood Bowl
Time: 120, 100, and 120 minutes
Game 1: Britt 3, Chris B 1
Game 2: Mark 2, Kenny 0
Game 3: Mike 2, Chris B 1
Ratings: Britt 8, Mark 8, Mike 10, Kenny 8, Chris B 10

Race for the Galaxy
Time: 20, 32, and 32 minutes
Game 1: Mark 66, Alton 38
Game 2: Alton 79, Mark 73, James 61, Chris 40, Brett 37
Game 3: James 56, Brett 52, Alton 49, Chris 42
Ratings: All 10's

Stone Age
Time: ?
Score: Denise 151, Michael A 149, Josh 148, Ian 102
Ratings: Denise 8.5, Michael A 7.5, Josh 7, Ian 9

To Court the King
Time: 30 Minutes
Score: Yarden - WIN; Steve and Britt - Big Fat Losers!
Ratings: Yarden 10, Steve 8, Britt 7

Zig Zag
Time: 40
Score: Steve - WIN; Josh, Britt, and Yarden - Lose
Ratings: Steve 1, Josh 0, Britt 1, Yarden 10