Tuesday 3rd May - Age of Steam/Ireland

AoS-Ireland-2
Originally uploaded by coljen.

Tonights session was at my place, I did tell everybody that on Saturday but Richard still managed to end up at our usual venue. Still he did arrive eventually, and as there was only three of us it was a good opportunity to play Age of Steam, Ireland map.
The only differences between Ireland and normal was that you couldn’t urbanise, if you picked that option you could remove a block from the board. And if you picked the locomotive upgrade it allows you to upgrade twice instead of once during shipping blocks. The board has a number of brown cities that have 3 blocks on them at the start, you can never ship to them and they never get replenished.
This game always does my head in. How many shares do I need? First where shall I build, can I ship, what are my expenses likely to be and so on. It is a favourite game of our group and I will always play if chosen, but I can’t say I would choose it myself. As you can see from the picture Richard (red) starting building in the south, Steve (blue) in the north and myself (green) across the middle. I was getting tight on money and it looked as though I might have to go a couple of turns not taking shares at all. But I managed to get a 5 train and start shipping for five which eased my monetary concerns.
De-urbanisation and production seemed to be the most picked jobs. If you lost a block you could also seed the production chart and hope to get something back. The game was pretty tight with Richard easing into the lead with me second. But Steve was catching me fast and I shipped a yellow block for 5, giving me 4 and Steve 1. This was not ideal, but if I had left it Steve could have shipped it for all 5. We were all shipping for 4 or 5, nobody had a 6 train. The final scores had Richard the clear winner, but it was close between myself and Steve, perhaps that yellow block made the difference.

Final Scores
Richard 99, Colin 82, Steve 79