I have an opinion about Steam: Rails to Riches. I really just want to write this down, so it’s full review length and likely skippable if not interested.
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In brief, for those unfamiliar, Martin Wallace originally designed Age of Steam as a way to bring 18xx sensibilities more into the core hobby. There’s no stock market but there is a difficult-to-manage economy and cutthroat competition over routes and cities.
Then followed Railways of the World, a softening and simplification of the system meant to make, again, Age of Steam more accessible to the hobby at large.
Then Wallace and the original publisher had some kind of dispute (Which I don’t really understand, because I thought Warfrog was Wallace’s own shop? These things get messy.), and the result was Steam: Rails to Riches (R2R from here out) under a new house.
R2R comes with two rulesets, Basic (which goes toe-to-toe with Railways of the World) and Standard (which is 90% Age of Steam).
R2R Standard vs AoS
As I said, R2R and AoS are 90% the same, but that last 10% is a doozy. First, the easy parts. AoS is Eagle Gryphon and Ian O’Toole. It’s just nicer. Nicer to touch, nicer to look at. On the other hand, you can get every R2R box and expansion, as well as both the Basic and Standard rulesets, for just over the price of the AoS core box. Those two discrepancies are quite clear.
And I’m going to allow that AoS is probably the better game up front. But the reason for writing is that I’m discovering, with more play, that the gap is smaller than I originally thought.
There’s a lot of small differences, but the main gaps are these: AoS has a single track, points, which you move up every time you deliver a good from one city to another, while R2R bifurcates the track into an income track and a points track. Then AoS sets what cubes will be added to the map at the start of the game, while R2R allows players to bid on, and determine, this growth through the course of the game.
Tracks. AoS’s single track tracks (ha) your points but also sets your income, which starts low, peaks, and then drops. You WILL need to take loans to get through the game, and each loan will deduct from your income for the remainder of the game.
In this way, there is a hard cap - your maximum income is set by the printed track, and each loan permanently decrements it. If you take too many loans, you can quite literally go bankrupt and end up in a loans-to-pay-loans spiral. The game enforces pretty strict calculus on you to take enough money to win, but not so much that you are crippled.
R2R is, in its way, gentler. Here the tracks are separated, income and points. But the rub is that, for each delivery, you can only choose one to move up. In many ways the financial math is identical. But the difference is that R2R has no cap. You can ALWAYS take more loans, and move down the income track. And then you can ALWAYS deliver a good to move back up. No bankruptcy.
The rub is, of course, that as long as you are wrestling with your finances you’ll score exactly zero points.
Regardless, at first blush, this looks like coddling (compared to AoS). However, with more play, it’s feeling more and more brutal. The key difference is that the punishment doesn’t come from the system itself, but from the other players. Sure, the game won’t bankrupt you, but if you mismanage your finances and fall behind when the more disciplined players flip the switch to points, you’ll lose just the same. It won’t feel quite as bad, as nothing is being rubbed in your face, but the victory itself is no more lenient.
And I kind of like that. Newcomers won’t get kicked in the soft bits, but veterans will tighten the screws and make each other sweat. The game won’t punish you but your friends will. Something about that feels the way games are supposed to be.
The second huge difference was how additional goods are added to cities. In AoS, all the goods, and their cities, are laid out at the start. A roll of the dice determines which cities grow at any given time. So you know what is coming, where it’s going, just not when.
In R2R, there is a market of growth cubes. One thing players can bid on in each round’s auction is the right to place cubes. If you earn that right, you choose the cubes, and the city, and plop them on down. Each city can only grow once.
This is, again, more forgiving. More coddling. If you don’t plan well, if you build that route but there’s a blue city in the way of your long delivery, or if you run out of track… just bid high and add whatever cubes you want to the city that helps you most!
AoS, on the other hand, requires you to take in more information from turn zero. To plan your routes from the start. And if you plan poorly, or run out of goods…. poof. As before, there goes your game.
And, as before, I’m finding this coddling is very comforting for new players, but progressively disappears with experience. As before, the system has grown less punishing but the room for players to punish each other remains. The better you get, the auction for urbanization and cube growth becomes more cutthroat (and hey, interacts deeply with how tightly you manage your economy and when you can switch from money to points). The better you get, the earlier you have to grab the needed cubes and put them where you want them, and the closer you have to watch the dwindling cube market. The more you have to anticipate where someone is going to drop a cube so you can build a route now to take it from them. With more play, this area of the game is growing more and more stressful and closing the gap with AoS’s blunt disdain for it’s players’ feelings.
There’s more. There are, essentially, six player powers to be chosen each turn. You auction for turn order, which sets the order for choosing a benefit as well as for taking turns. Three of those bonuses have obvious value (upgrade locomotive, place cubes, place a new city). The other three are kind of throwaways when you start (extra track, first build, first ship - those latter two interrupting other players’ hard-bought turn order). The more I play, the more value those three throwaways become. To the point where I’m sweating about whether to grow a city or claim first shipment.
Do I wish I had Eagle-Gryphon’s boxes and linen boards? Yes. Do I wish I had Ian O’Toole’s clean greens and stark rails? OH YES. Do I still wish I had AoS’s blunt lack of forgiveness and time honored mechanics?
I’m not sure. R2R is really growing with play. And I really like the way the harshness has moved from system harshness to competitive harshness. Not just that the latter may be more interesting, but also how the latter allows the game to move from welcoming to nut-kicking as you grow, rather than going straight for the gonads from the time you first pop shrink.
R2R Basic vs RotW
R2R Basic decimates Railways of the World. The only reason I’d every play RotW again is because it is on BGA and R2R is not.
RotW is just fiddly. Yes, the hard edges of AoS are sanded off (I can’t remember how exactly). It’s harder to tank your economy. But there is still SO MUCH going on, between turn order auctions, cards, and goals and such that it’s really most suitable for people coming down from the more complex systems.
R2R basic removes the auction but maintains a fight for turn order via the role selection, which are ordered and priced to create a gradient. It makes a tangible conflict, keeping you dialed in without needing to do any valuations or math as a first time player.
R2R basic also removes any risk of bankruptcy. You take loans, anytime, as needed, don’t need to pay to maintain locomotives, and due to the separate income track you can always grow your economy. This does not make it easy. Growing your income and flipping to points remains challenging and interesting, there’s just no punishment looming over your mistakes.
These two simplifications, and the removal of cards and goals, clarify the space for the real game - which is fighting over real estate (routes) and points/money (goods). And so you fiddle with your income and elbow over turn order, but the core game is the core game.
In Conclusion
I still kind of want AoS and all its maps. That’s hundreds of dollars. I paid $90 for Rails to Riches, in it’s entirety. It fits into two Chicago Express sized boxes. I can introduce Basic to nearly anyone and Standard is growing more and more toothy with play. I’m maybe only halfway up the learning curve and the ahas are large and startling. The stress is growing nearly unmanageable.
I’m wondering whether, despite the veneration even I have for Age of Steam, if Rails to Riches was the right choice all along.
It can be surprisingly evocative of taking a walk in nature—but I find that, like taking a walk in nature, seeing a sight for the third or fourth time is not quite as exciting as seeing it the first time.
It’s a testament, I guess, that I keep playing it?