20th Nov - Age of Steam St Lucia

I couldn't make it this week as I was working late, Richard's written this weeks report.

With Gary un-available Steve & I took the opportunity to play one of the new 2 player St Lucia Age of Steam map he acquired at Essen - see what happens once Colin has departed we immediately start playing Age of Steam again!!

Apart from being a 2 player variant St Lucia also differs in that cubes are places on every 'normal' or 'normal river' hex on the map and the cities themselves only serves as destinations for cubes as the there is no production phase. Cube deliveries also generate an additional $1 for the owner of the first section of track.

Also rather than having an auction for player order the players alternate in getting the chance to pay $5 to go first - if the first player declines to pay the second player may pay $5 to do so instead - if the second player declines to pay $5 the first player may go first for free.
In our game in the first turn Steve decided to make sure he would go first by paying the $5 so that he could urbanise Micoud as a blue city and then build as many stubs as possible out of it to try to cut me out from making any blue cube deliveries. I took the train upgrade, delivered one cube and upgraded my train again.


For the first few turns Steve continued to take the Urbanisation Action - whilst I either took the locomotive or engineer action and strove to build a long distance line on the western side of the map - though my additional track costs necessitated me issuing a significant number of shares above what Steve had. However with the completion of a 5 city circular loop on the western side of the board I had the flexibility to deliver most available cubes for $6. Steve meanwhile was struggling to access the large number of black cubes at the northern end of the board to give himself similar sized deliveries.

With the game end approaching a final turn black city urbanisation by myself blocked Steve's long distance deliveries on the eastern side of the board probably sealing the game result.

Richard 115, Steve 100

All in all a very enjoyable game, and as Steve commented after we had finished, we felt it would definitely be a map that could handle multiple replays.