24th Oct 2024 - Age Of Steam Berlin 1890
by Robin. Sun, 27 Oct (Updated at Sun, 27 Oct)I've never done a write-up for Age Of Steam. It's an old game, there's a contingent of train-game aficionados at the club who are far more into this stuff than I am; and after its third appearance in the Tournament this year, I don't imagine there's much I could tell anyone about it anyway.
But this week Andrew-M brought along the Berlin 1890 map, which is from expansion volume 2: so - unless you happened to buy a particular edition of FairPlay magazine in 2010, in which it first appeared as an insert - you'll only have come across this one in that 2023 map set. So you might not have played it before... So I'll do a review of it, hopefully using all the right jargon to satisfy the aficionado contingent as well.
I guess the thematic interpretation of "Berlin 1890" is the building of the urban railways / U-Bahns. So more "Age Of Electricity", and the cubes represent passengers rather than goods types, and the coloured destinations are the type of place they want to go to. The USP of this one is that we're in a busy city, so there are always people wanting to go places, but they're queued up. You have to clear the front cube to its destination before you can move the second cube to its. So typically you find you could get 5 points for moving a purple cube from a place, but to get at it you need to move a red cube first, which would only give you 1 point - and maybe give other points to someone else. And the map is really small - it was on 1 quarter of a 4-fold board that had a bigger map on the other side - so you inevitably use others' tracks a lot.
Now for the controversial bit: I found this to be a nice challenge and really enjoyed it. The others were more ambivalent, to put it mildly. I could see their point: for one thing, the small map meant that, with at least 2 rounds to go, there was nowhere left to build. So it ended up a bit "1830", in that all you were doing in the last part of the game was moving stuff, which never ran out, so you could have probably run the last couple of rounds with a spreadsheet.
That said, the queuing mechanism meant that moving things was always a bit of an art - there were almost always multiple things to move, and the challenge was to move something that benefitted you while not helping someone else by unlocking a good movement for them. But the lack of building at the end was a killer, as it just exacerbated Age Of Steam's existing problem with a lack of catch-up mechanism. In the later rounds, money was only useful for the turn-order auction: as the first one to turn a positive net income, I found myself able to utterly rule that auction. So what started off as a marginal advantage over the others quickly snowballed into a vast difference by the end. No wonder I enjoyed it more than the others 🙂
So I would play it again, but probably only until I lose, and then I'm sure I'll get bored with it like the others already did. But then I'm not one of the train-game aficionados - I'd recommend it to them at least. It is, after all, a train game.
What else was going on this week? We had Kavango again, and Terraforming Mars, and Sol: Last Days Of A Star - which I'd not seen before. And then there were the two final Tournament games of Carnegie.
As those of you on the WhatsApp group will have heard, the result was that Ian finished in 2nd place in his game, which means he has finished in the top 4 overall, so got into the final! Though by the look of it, it was a close-run thing, with him pipping David-K to 2nd by just 1 point. One less, and it would have been a different story. As it is, Ian now has the unprecedented opportunity to finish last in 3 consecutive Tournament finals. And Ed has the equally unprecedented opportunity to finish first in 3 consecutive finals. We wish them both well in their respective endeavours.