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News from the North: Martin Wallace’s Steel Driver
Ho, ho, ho! It is Christmas and Phil’s wife is no longer on the show/rehearsal treadmill that is Sunday nights. Accordingly, in the style of olde Christmas cards, Phil loads a trunk of baby beers onto the stagecoach, collects a generous wodge of excellent Christmas cake from t’mother-in-law, gives a blast on the post-horn and it’s off into the crisp December night to Roger’s.
Roger has recently acquired Steel Driver and is very pleased with it. ‘Tinner’s Trail’ proved a pleasant, sociable game and Phil has high hopes of a repeat. Certainly all three of the Halifax boys are enthusiastic about it; more of this anon.
The now to be expected high quality feel in the wooden pieces is present and there are quite a lot of them! The map board is attractive and the game accepts up to 6 players. Roger launches into the rules and Phil experiences a slight sinking feeling. Dave and Ian chip in their two pennyworth, mainly backing up Roger’s claim that each little bit is ‘really important’. To be fair, the rules aren’t long, but they are a bit like eggs, flour, brandy and a wide variety of fruit: until it’s gone in the oven it also is not yet a Christmas cake. Everything feels essential to making a decent fist of playing the game.
Keeping it brief, players bid for control of six railroad companies in 19th century America. Rather neatly the winning bid becomes the budget for that company for that turn. Bid high, and you have lots to spend, but not a lot else you can do; bid low and you won’t be able to build much track. After five turns a coloured cube is placed on each town; players then take it in turns to grab them for their different railroad companies. Sets of cubes bring in various amounts of points, and the more shares you have in a particular company, the more money.
Dave and Roger begin by building in Boston – one of the three rare red cities. Ian takes the other out on the west coast, but that’s fine as it’s all very expensive over there. Phil has a choice of taking the red city down in the south (interestingly, he can’t remember the name of the city, just that it was red) or making mayhem. Being a true Ragnar he goes for the latter, buys control of the green company and attempts to squash the two Boston companies into the corner. Initially it goes well.
“Why are you building there? It’s not where people usually build”.
Unfortunately there is a second cleverness in the rules. In order to set part one of the trap, Phil has to build three times. This is fine – he bid high for the company – but because he was one of the last to finish building his company goes later in the following turn. There is nothing he can do about it: although Dave’s yellow company is doomed on the long run. Roger manages to escape into the mid-west with his red company.
Anyhow play continues. The previous game was a three-player game – everyone spent the game effectively ‘owning’ two companies; it was only in the final turn that players tried to take over each others companies, and then try to mess up as much as possible. With four players, a very different game takes place. Roger and Ian still focus on building up one company, but Phil prefers to develop a mixed portfolio. After stuffing Dave’s yellow company early on, he continues to bid high on an almost random selection of companies. Ian manages to pick up a couple of weak companies per turn and begins to amass a fine collection of shares. Dave bemoans the yellow disaster on turn one, whilst Roger spends the night blaming his recent bout of flu for what he considers a below-par performance.
The game hurtles to a very early close. Phil has three pairs of shares in each of the top three companies and to his surprise finishes only just behind Ian (eight shares out of twenty is a lot to allow one person to control). A very quick game – rules and everything, it completes in less than two hours. The usual discussion follows – Phil hopes for a repeat (it is school holidays), but the other three opt for dominoes (plus lashings of Christmas Cake) and an early end to the evening.
Very interesting, and well worth a second visit. One problem with the game is that until you see the end game in operation, it’s very difficult to know what you are working towards. A lifetime spent playtesting Canal Mania (the cube removal system is similar) does help, but for a novice player the end game will probably prove something of a lottery – at least the first time they play it.
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