Age of Steam, a board game that we played for the first time Saturday night.  I really enjoyed playing it, although I felt a little bit lost.  I want to get it so Laurie and I can play.  Even though it lists 3-6 players, having played it we don't really see any reason why two couldn't play.  Some of the turn order stuff wouldn't be nearly as competitive, nor would be board fill up as fast, but that could be solved with other little tweaks.

One thing struck me, though, throughout the game.  It was very familiar to me.

The basic game involves selling shares to get money to build tracks.You then use these tracks to hopefully make more money back than you spent, or you can make a bigger train.  You then collect money based on certain metrics on how you used your tracks and then you pay for expenses.

This reminds of a computer game that came out recently and that we have: Sid Meiers Railroads!

Sid Meier's Railroads!, a computer game that is basically a railroad simulator in interesting settings starting around the time railroads were just being put in within the US.  This game is very fun and I enjoy it greatly.

In the game, you start with a little bit of money and a railroad company.  You can start building tracks and putting trains on them.  You can also sell shares in your company to have extra cash to develop your railroad company faster than the competition.  Sound familiar?

All of this is, of course, in real-time.  Besides just doing the build, you also need to do the routing of the track, which is made more difficult based on the game settings.  Then you have to design routes over the track based on what cities produce and what other cities want.  In addition to this, you also can buy various industries in the cities to make even more money when stuff is produced with them. 

As I mentioned, you can sell shares to get some extra cash on hand.  However, you have to be careful because one of the game winning conditions is owning all of the competing railroad companies. Yes, that means you can also buy shares, should you have extra cash on hand.  You can buy the shares in either your own company, to keep other companies from buying them, or buy other companies' shares so you can try to take them over.  When you do, you get all of their assets should you choose to keep them.

There are plenty of other complications within the game, but it's actually fairly easy to play.  Performance is pretty good on our machine (a QX6700 with 7950GX2 video card on a 2560x1600 display) but when a lot of rails are around with a lot of trains it tends to start slowing down. (It doesn't appear to be a multithreaded app, though.)  It's also crashed a fair amount, too.  I could avoid this be restarting from a save that wasn't too far back, but the last time I played I couldn't recover from the crash condition.  Maybe a future patch will fix the problem?

In any case, Age of Steams was very familiar because it has a lot of similar features. Sid Meier Railroad games have actually been around longer, but both are unique in their play and style (and not just because one is a computer game and one is a board game). 

Posted by Shane on February 4, 2007 10:18 PM | Permalink