Spain/Portugal (Steam Brothers): Initial Play Notes and Thoughts

I had the pleasure of playing the Spain map by the Steam Brothers last night with my regular play group, this being the last session prior to my move up to East Lansing, after which my AoS playtime is going to be greatly diminished.

For those who aren't familiar with the map, Spain's main features include its New City seeding (i.e.: all of the New City tiles except for the blue one are randomly placed on the board with the aid of a 12 sided die prior to the start of the game), the Insurrection action (which removes the New City tiles, destroys the goods present, and makes the city effectively colourless), and the team based play.

The initial city rolls placed most of the cities in the south, leaving the north quite barren. The colour placements were particularly irksome, as the colours were clustered together, making longer deliveries more difficult.

The teams were myself and Alex versus Sean and Jesse. The basic strategies that each team used were different. Sean and Jesse built their networks together from the start of the game, gathering their strength in the SE portion of the board. Alex started working in the west, which in the abstract, appeared to be the strongest area of the board because of the goods. I built north of Sean and Jesse, attempting to interfere with their access to the blue cities in the NE, and hoping to link up with Alex later in the game.

In the early going, Jesse and Sean seemed to play a fairly balanced strategy. Neither of them was issuing more shares than the other, and they were helping each other when it was convenient. On our team, I was issuing shares aggressively to finance my track building, while Alex was keeping his total down. Both teams were regularly using each other's track to facilitate maximum income and strength, and there was a lot of negotiation and discussion going on about track builds and goods shipments.

I think it's important to note here that in the rules, the scoring for this works as follows: sum the team incomes, the team with the highest sum finishes first and second based on their individual scores. We seemed to completely eschew that 1st/2nd distinction though, and were playing the map purely for team sums, which brought out some unique dynamics (I think largely because our group has a play for 1st mentality, and the team play doesn't seem to work well unless the team score actually IS what matters).

The story of the map basically was that Jesse and Sean were able to get ahead on the Locomotive track by being able to win the role, and by the mid-game they had enough money to repeatedly take the role to deny it to our team. Their networks also ended up being more effective, as they set up combined circle routes earlier, and were able to run big routes continuously in the late game. In retrospect, I probably should have advised my partner to issue more shares (he finished a few behind the other guys) to go after the role more aggressively, because it would have easily added on several income to our combined final score.The Sean / Jesse team prevailed in a landslide because of their engine superiority.

I think my final thought was that I liked the idea here, and I wouldn't mind playing the map again, but the team play seemed to add a huge amount of length to the game. This was not nearly as apparent in the other team map that we played, Golden Spike. I don't know if that was just because GS has a more restricted board and fewer options (probably is a huge part of it), or if it was just the pure team mentality that we were using, but Spain dragged a bit, and lasted much longer than a normal 4 player game does for our group.

I think I would be much more likely to play this map again in the future with solo scoring (no teams) simply because I like the Insurrection idea and the New City seeding, but found that the amount of time that the team play added to the mix was just too much.

As a solo game the map would be very nasty indeed though. Locomotive is so far better than anything else in the auction that inflation would probably be a major factor. Insurrection is useful, but not in the way that one would think. In our game it was being used much more often on cities within our own networks to clear the path than it was offensively. Some of this might have been because of the way the New City tiles were rolled out, but in any case, I found the role less powerful than Urb, and while it is interesting, and I like the reverse flow (i.e.: fewer cities as the game goes, destruction of goods) I didn't find the role to be particularly powerful either. Perhaps more plays would change my mind.

On a final final note, like most of the Steam Brothers maps, the scale on this is a minimum 4, and it would probably be at its best with 5. The map is just big, and there are a lot of goods to go around. Insurrection also means that it is easier to make cubes in bad locations useful.