Steam: Rails to Riches app.

Steam: Rails to Riches was itself a reimplementation of an earlier game, Age of Steam, both by designer Martin Wallace, the man behind the game Brass … which, like Steam, was also just adapted as a an app for tablets. The Steam: R2R iPad app (no Android version available) had an early bug issue to work out, so I played and reviewed Brass first and tried Steam last week. Like Brass, it’s a solid implementation if you already know the game, but the AI players could use some work and the tutorial isn’t very thorough. Unlike Brass, Steam still has a few glitches to work out, particularly if you change your mind while doing something on the screen.

Steam: Rails to Riches (just “Steam” from here on out) came out in 2009, shortly after the release of the third edition of Age of Steam, cleaning up some flaws in the first game’s mechanics and starting what appears to be a long debate over which version of the game is superior. Since Steam is the one we have in app form and I’ve never played or even seen Age of Steam, I’m going to pretend that debate doesn’t even exist and will focus on the app.

Steam is a train game, but rather than just connecting cities and building routes as in Ticket to Ride, Steam players have to raise funds, lay tracks, and then ship goods along the tracks they’ve laid (and sometimes tracks opponents have laid) to earn either recurring income or one-time victory point bonuses. The base game’s map covers the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada, with various cities already placed on the map as stations with cubes representing the different types of goods in five colors.

For each round – the number of turns varies with the number of players – there’s an auction to determine the turn order, which also determines which special ability or benefit each player gets in that round, which can include the ability to turn a town (marked on the board) into a full-fledged station, to add goods to a city on the board, or to increase the player’s locomotive power, which determines how far that player can ship a goods cube. After the bidding ends, each player gets three actions: one to build tracks, and two to ship goods. Each player can use a shipping action to upgrade his/her locomotive power. Each stop on a track – a station or a non-upgraded town – counts as one segment, and a player can only ship a goods cube along a number of segments equal to or less than his locomotive power. The maximum locomotive power is six, so obviously getting to that mark and then shipping as many goods as you can along six-segment paths of your own tracks is the optimal strategy. You can ship a good along another player’s track segment, but that player gets the bonus point or boost to recurring income.

Once upon a time there was an engineer…

Of course, building those perfect routes is difficult with other players chasing the same goal and frequently blocking your path or stealin’ your goods. The AI players in the Steam app are good enough to teach you the game, as they all tend to build delivery loops – tracks that appear to be convoluted but provide 5- and 6-point plays for shipping cubes. (There’s no reward for efficiency here; if anything, inefficient delivery networks are key to racking up points.) But they’re often not aggressive enough in bidding for turn order, and they appear to struggle with creating enough options for big-point deliveries in the final round or two. I went from having never played the game to consistently beating the best AI options in 3- and 4-player matches – only by a few points each time, but never losing, even once in a game where I accidentally borrowed $0 in round 2 (which meant I could do almost nothing that entire round).

That’s the main issue with the app, but not the only one. The tutorial is too simple and probably wouldn’t suffice to teach anyone the game if s/he hasn’t played it before; I didn’t understand the rule around building through undeveloped towns (and how that could be beneficial – it adds a segment to a line between two cities). Turning a track tile to orient it properly is a little more finicky than it should be, and the app itself often “guesses” wrong with its initial orientation after you drag a tile on to the desired space. I also ran into frequent graphics glitches if I started to drag and drop a track hex from the array at the bottom of the screen to the map, but changed my mind and tried to return it – the image would remain in the middle of the screen unless I backed up to the main menu and resumed the game. The app also will let you take the City Growth action even if there are no more cubes to add to cities on the board, which makes it a wasted move. Tightening up the AI players should be the top priority, but I’d like to see these other hiccups addressed before fully recommending the app for solo play.

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There’s a new, free, official Dominion app available today for iOS and Android tablets, but the early comments on Boardgamegeek’s post are overwhelmingly negative. It doesn’t seem to work well, and in-app purchases of expansion decks are $15 a pop. I love Dominion, but this sounds like a pass for now.