AoS: Metropolitan Pittsburgh

I know it's been quite some time since I posted anything on the blog, but I haven't been playing any Age of Steam, or any board games period. Work has kept me busy, and the Stanley Cup playoffs kept me even busier. Now that Summer is here though, I finally have had the opportunity to do some more expansion design work.

This new expansion is a different take on a city that has already received some attention, Pittsburgh. Though I like John Bohrer's map, I feel that the Steel city deserves a more true to geography map that shows how difficult the terrain is rather than just abstracting it out. In that spirit, I decided to theme my new 3 player map idea to Pittsburgh, and in this particular case, creating a sort of alternate reality Pittsburgh where a large light rail service serves the golden triangle area of Pittsburgh and the surrounding neighbourhoods. In real life, of course, Pittsburgh does have a small system, The T, but it serves almost exclusively the southern suburbs and still has not been fully developed. This map, instead, zooms in on the downtown area, and several of the stations are skyscrapers.

Here's the first draft:



Metropolitan Pittsburgh is going to build on some of the ideas I had when I was designing Montreal, much like CCCP, but in a different direction. Some of the 3 player rules which first appeared in that map are going to reappear: the auction tweak, the contiguous track rule. Metro Pittsburgh's central mechanic, however, is the pre-determined urbanization idea that I used in a limited fashion in Montreal.

If you didn't follow the development of that map, let me bring you up to speed: at one point in time, Montreal had 3 timed urbanizations to reflect the history of the city. Round 3, the island of Jean Drapeau urbanized for Expo 67, in Round 6 Pie IX urbanized to reflect the Summer Olympics of 1976, and in round 9 Montmorency urbanzied to reflect the present. I liked how those timed urbanizations worked and the sorts of races they created, but I ended up removing them late in the development of Montreal because they just didn't quite fit that particular map.

Flash forward to the present: Metro Pittsburgh is going to centre on that timed urbanization concept. There are 18 towns. Prior to the game, the 8 new cites will be shuffled, and will have a town locale and round randomly assigned to them. This will all be noted on a sub-board. At the start of each round, 2-9, one will then be placed at its appointed spot.

I know the concept sounds basic, perhaps even a bit pedestrian, but the effect that it has on gamepay is very interesting. Players race to hook up to lucrative new cities, which provide cubes, and new delivery points. In this first draft, the blue city is of particular importance.

There are a number of other particulars that are still being fleshed out, but this is what I have so far. The terrain costs on this map are going to be beastly, particularly the rivers which are going to be nigh impossible to build over without the aid of the engineer. I will probably have to tweak the starting stations a bit, and I might need to add more of them, but I'm not sure at this point. The first prototype is ready to go though, and I'm sure I'll be posting more on this soon.