Greetings and a Session Report for AoS: Switzerland

Hi all,

I'm going to be posting semi-regularly on this blog with Alban now, and hopefully we'll be able to create enough content to make this an interesting stop for Age of Steam fans. My main interest in Age of Steam is as a fan, I've played the game regularly for a few years now, and I fortunately have a core group of regular players who also love the game, so it spends a lot of time on my table.

My contributions to this blog will likely be in the form of expansion mini-reviews, short session reports, and general reaction to news in the AoS world. I will also share information about future expansion design that I do (similar to what was detailed in my Geeklist: www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/1650/, but at this point it is hard to say how long it will be before I get another expansion into the active design phase. I have the start of a board and some ideas for AoS - Michigan, but I have not fleshed them out much at all, and I don't know if I'll have time to work on it in the coming months.

Anyway, enough with the introductions, here's a tidbit about John Bohrer's Switzerland:

Session Report - AoS: Switzerland

Switzerland is a map that I have had lying around for some time now. It was released at Essen 2005 with Austria and the Netherlands in a limited set of 80 by John Bohrer / Winsome. The other two maps have been re-released (Steam Brothers and Spielbox insert respectively) but Switzerland hasn't been yet.

The map is intended for 3 or 4 players, and as my core group is regularly 3 right now (one person in the military, another working at a Summer Camp and rarely around) we decided to finally pull it out.

The map itself is somewhat restrictive. There are a lot of hexes that can't be built on (representing mountains) and there are also a plethora of thick black lines. The rules changes are somewhat subtle, but create some interesting interactions...track costs are high ($4 per hex) and there are rainbow cities.

In our playing (Myself, Sean, Alex), the initial cube setup left some easy 2 ships in the Zurich area (eastern part of the board, full of cheap links) but nothing else was remarkable. I managed to win the first auction, took Locomotive, and was able to build a network near Zurich to get my income up to 4 during the first round. Sean and Alex each instead opted to start in the west, as there are two rainbow cities there, which are easy to locate at the end of one's line.

So the game progressed like this: Sean snuck into my area of the board just enough to connect to Zurich. Alex, meanwhile, was sitting on Sean's southern border, and blocking off his track access a bit. The two of them were constantly jostling for First Build because of how intertwined their networks were. They were also always taking Urb, a role that I was generally ignoring. Meanwhile, I was building circular routes in the NE section of the board, which were just enough to keep me at decent profitability.

Unlike normal AoS, I was actually keeping my shares down, Sean was taking a lot (this is a complete reversal of our normal play tendencies) and Alex was keeping as low as possible (his usual play style).

By about the mid-game, I realized that I was starting to run into trouble. I didn't have access to very many good deliveries anymore, and Sean and Alex, each with a rainbow vortex at the end of their lines, were having a much easier time keeping the income train rolling. Alex was a ways back from both Sean and I in income, but the networks developed such that Sean was occasionally having to hand him an income.

By round 5, some tunnels were auto-built, and this gave me an opportunity to build a VERY long link to the SE portion of the board which took 3 rounds to complete. During this period, Sean and Alex were each continuing to scrap over links in the west, with Alex generally getting the better of it, and he was gaining on both of us.

By the end game, I had just enough cubes to keep my income going up, but not at a consistent 6 pace. Sean and Alex were each able to keep the 6 ships coming, and Alex was getting the better end of it because of constant 1 income gifts from Sean. The final score saw Alex out in front by a several income margin and I was marginally ahead of Sean. (Yes, this takes into account track count, track is worth more in Switzerland).

My overall thoughts:
A tough map with some strange interactions. The heavy use of black lines seems like it will lead to rather predictable and samey track building patterns in the long run, but for occasional play they are quite good, because they lead to races and, perhaps most strangely, make First Build a very desirable role, even with only 3 at the table. I don't think the map is amazing, because the rules changes are not significant enough to make it really stand out from the pack, but I enjoyed playing it, and wouldn't hesitate to pull it out again in the future.

I think this expansion highlights some of my aversion to heavy thick black line use. I like how they can artificially create tighter corridors and races in certain parts of the board, but I think I dislike them because they shrink the map so much, and, functionally, because they can be hard to see once track has been built around them. This means it is hard for players to be able to see if they can build complex track to get through an area.