Age of Steam Expansion: 20,000 Rails Under the Sea

I didn't really expect to like it, but it ended up being a lot of fun. It was particularly nice having a lot of cubes coming into the environment.

Needs more development -- it is too easy to build the board such that other player's activities are dictated

This is just about the most conditional upon scale rating there is, but this map is about the most rigidly low scale requiring map that I've ever played. While the rules might indicate that this scales anywhere betwixt 3 and 6, let me tell you, this is a 3 player only map. With that many people at the table, there is just enough space to build track that is useful to you, and to take control of your own destiny through careful use of urbanization, production (adding town markers) or first build. In our 3 player game we urbanized all rounds but 1, the end result was still a tightly clogged up ball of track with few useful options left at the end of the game. Each round, we had to carefully create useful moves through good action selection, but we were still able to. With even 1 more person at the table, there would have been no room to lay more track though, and the game would have suffered badly for it.

Now, with that out of the way, I like the ideas that this map has a lot, and it seems to play slightly faster than normal Age of Steam. The modular map gives players a lot of options for adding onto their network, but being able to build track first is often extremely important here, and options generally abound. The early goods growth that fills up the future sea beds is an interesting mechanism, and it seemed to inject a healthy enough amount of goods into the game to keep some possibilities open.

The 3 player auction, while normally problematic, especially on a map like this, which has many good options, was still hotly contested because winning the auction also gives players a free urbanize option at the start of the next round, and that was quite a valuable bonus.

The only thing I really don't like about this map is the weirdly mathy track building, which takes some getting used to. Beyond that, I like this map with 3, and would not hesitate to pull it out with that number. Be warned, any more than that, and you will NOT have a good experience here.

Major confusion not enough fun.

After several plays, I find the map is just too congested, no matter what. I hope they come up with a 2.0 revision of the rules, because i really like the concept, but the implementation is lacking.