New York, Mississippi, and Iraq Sessions/Mini-Reviews

Tonnes of Age of Steam play last weekend for me, as I visited both of my old gaming groups on the west side of Michigan. I don't have the energy for full session reports, but here are my thoughts on the three new to me maps that hit the table in the order in which they were played.

New York Subway

I was thrilled to get this map onto the table for the first time. The complete overhaul of the system here includes virtual track routes based on subway stations and goods which are actually the player disks stacked into skyscraper formation. We played the map with 4, and the basic flow of the game saw two of us playing in our own parts of the map, and two others fighting from the get-go. By about mid-game, 3 of us were connected together into a big, fat tunnel and one other player was still relatively isolated. Sean, one of the players who was in constant competition throughout the game, ended up winning by 1 income over me.

I like the map, and I think the changes are neat, but I think they make maximum length deliveries a little too easy. As long as you build a fat tunnel, and are sure to place two stations on each skyscraper (city), it is easy to make maximum length shipments. In the early game, I set up in a small area, and simply moved goods of complimentary colours back and forth between a few skyscrapers while I built up my infrastructure.

In fairness, I think this map would probably best best with 5 or 6, and we played it with 4. Neat though, very interesting changes.


Mississippi Steamboats

This was one I had had lying around for a while, and I finally got it to the table with 4, including a newbie (Ted has said that he thinks this is a good learning map). From the get-go, I found the central mechanic, the "steamboats", to be irksome to an annoyingly high degree.

For those who aren't familiar, the board is long and skinny, and is divided by a river. When you urbanize, you put the city on the river, and it moves up and down at the end of each round based on dice rolls. Unfortunately, the colours are set up on the board to create shortages on each side of the river, and the only way to get across is to have a steamboat sitting there with two docks on either side of it. In other words, there is no predictable way to bridge the river, and there is no predicatable way to ensure the city you want is going to be in the area when you want it.

I found the map maddeningly random, and as much as I've enjoyed Ted's other maps, I felt this one was a huge whiff, it's easily my least favourite AoS expansion.


War in Iraq

At the end of a long day of gaming, a few of us still had enough energy to pull this map out. The primary flavour in Iraq comes from the lucrative oil field hexes, which are loaded up with black cubes at the start of the game. These can be delivered to the black cities if they are urbanized, but they can more profitably be sent to the EU/US, in which case they are kept in front of the player shipping them for an end-game scoring bonus.

I liked this map, and I found that even with 3 the competition was very tough. Using the veteran rules, we only were rolling 2 dice for goods growth, and the map ended up with only 5 goods on it (and this was with above average rolls for the oil fields prior to the game!).

Of the "high value goods drive map decisions" expansions, I consider this solid, a slight step below Alspach's PA, and a slight step above Mars. The only really soft thing here is the auction, because there are so many goods roles to choose from, but there were still some high bids and tense moments because sometimes players couldn't be sure what the other person wanted, and had to bid high for security.


Overall, a most enjoyable, AoS heavy weekend :-)