Age of Steam Expansion: Secret Blueprints of Steam Plans 1 & 2

this feels a bit like an idea that wasn't developed. if the goal was to allow me to play out my plan without worrying about others spoiling it, how come production can so easily semi-randomly cripple a player? and for a battle of wits with everyone solving his own puzzle how come the game can so easily be decided by begining goods distribution?

(people/times played/rating) #1: 3/1/4

The Blueprints expansions are an odd duck. I can understand the basic idea behind them, but I don't understand the overall appeal. Each player has their own board which has 3 of the main coloured cities on it. Everyone plays behind a screen. All of the track building and deliveries happens simultaneously. The only place where the players interact at all is in the auction, where Urbanization is in hotter demand than usual because everyone starts with a colour deficiency. The auction also allows some mild screwage via the Production role, which filches cubes off of the other player's boards.

So, as I said, I don't really understand the appeal. Yes, this expansion plays a lot faster because players aren't interacting with each other, but interaction is why I like AoS to begin with. To add to the problems, this expansion uses the standard AoS goods growth with the dice. While this system doesn't bother me at all on normal maps, here it is a potentially huge problem because players who consistently have their numbers rolled in the first round or two can get a huge advantage in terms of viable delivery and Urbanization options while the other players will run out of delivery options in very short order. It doesn't exactly help that the best way by far to insure cubes, winning Urbanization, is only a smart gambit if one can actually afford to do so and stay solvent at the same time.

I guess if you absolutely have to play AoS in 1/2 to 2/3 of the time this is an option, but I would rather play a normal map, or just not play the game, personally.

A very curious version of Age of Steam where players build on thier own private boards hidden from the view of thier opponents, but still share the actions and cubes. It can be a bit unbalanced if players get a lot of cubes for a city they don't have (not all colours start of every player board) and loses the tension of cut people's routes off and beating them to cities or cubes. I also dislike not being able to check each players move since some players are notoriously bad at calculating thier costs correctly. But it was certainly a very interesting change to play this Age of Steam this way!

I haven't been that interested in the few AoS expansions that I have tried, but this one I really enjoyed. It reduced the length of the game and gave it a little more of a Euro feel with the individual boards. And yet, it still felt like pure Age of Steam.

Steam 蒸氣*地圖擴充