Steam: Rails to Riches Review

TL;DR ⭐⭐⭐⭐, 4 of 5 stars, a fun mobile boardgame if not quite as thematic or challenging as I’d like.

Last year, I played a lot of railroad boardgames, mainly Ticket to Ride: San Francisco. I wanted something heavier to play on my phone while I travelled, so I picked up Steam: Rails to Riches by Martin Wallace (available, no surprise, on Steam as well as for the iPhone and Android). The game is a redesign of Age of Steam, which I’ve played a bit and always found to be a taut experience.

In Steam, you’re bidding to go first and select an appropriate action, such as building an extra track (Engineer, #3), building the first track, upgrading your locomotive, growing a town into a city (with goods for you to move), etc. 

After bidding and selecting your action, in turn order you place up to three or four tracks, growing your rail network, paying more for harder to cross or more crowded terrain. After everyone has built track, you have two movement turns: you can move a good, or you can upgrade your locomotive (once in the two movement turns). The more powerful your locomotive (it starts at 1 and can go to 6) the more cities you can move goods to. You collect 1 income or victory point for every link you move a good; income maxes out at 10, at which point you only ship goods for VPs. You may use other players’ links, in which case they collect income or VPs for those links. You must move a good to a city of the same color (e.g., move a red good to a red city, a blue good to a blue city). For the green player below, they can move the yellow cube from Albany down to New York then Philadelphia, then northwest to the unlabeled yellow city, scoring 3 VP and letting blue take 1 income or 1 VP for the final link.

The game lasts 7 to 10 rounds, depending on the map and the number of players. You earn VPs as you take them from deliveries throughout the game (the first scoring column below). At game end, you earn 1 VP for each link between two cities (the second column) and for each pair of points of income (the third column). 

You can download the full rules here [PDF].

I’ve played the game dozens of times, so it’s a great value. Advantages:

• As a mobile game a complete round is nicely self-contained. Select an action card, build track, deliver twice (or deliver once and upgrade your engine once). It’s really easy to just take a turn at a time, while waiting for the microwave, standing in line, being the first one on a Zoom call, etc.
• The AI was good enough to beat me when I first started playing, with a range of bot styles, but as I mastered the tactics (see below) the AI stopped being competitive.
• There are seven maps, counting in-app purchases. I ended up buying them all. I played the USA/Canada map more than any other.

Unthematic

While Steam: Rails to Riches is much more thematic than something like Ticket to Ride, I wish it wasn’t quite as unthematic as it is.

Cubes are just different colors; they don’t represent common trade goods (unlike Spike’s 12 commodities, for instance: fruit, beef, ore, steel, and so on).

You try to fulfill contracts by shipping a good through as many different cities as possible, since you get value (1 VP, 1 income) per link you own. So there are times you might have been able to move a cube just one city over, yet you go the opposite way on a loop instead (see below). 

You can’t ship a good past a city that needs it (i.e., is of the same color as the good).

Every turn you’re bidding for actions, artificially constrained. 

In real life, the range of locomotives steadily increased from around 100 miles in the 1830 to about 300 miles in the 1850s, 400-500 miles in the 1870s, and 600-800 miles in the 1890s. This is nicely represented by the steadily increase range of the locomotive from 1 to 6, but upgrading an engine forgoes shipping a good instead. It really should just be a function of time and money.

Emergent Properties

Some of the emergent properties of the rules work well for me. 

Because you want to ship by longer routes, it does encourage you to create rail networks rather than just straight lines like you often do in Ticket to Ride.

Some goods are more valuable than others because they can go farther before hitting a city of their color. For instance, here is the city count by color in the US/Canada map: 4 black, 7-8 blue, 7-8 purple, 5-6 red, 0-4 white, and 4-5 yellow (8 cities are available to place during Urbanization as the game goes on). So all else being equal white cubes will have further to travel than any other colored cube: after that, black will have further to travel, then yellow, then red, then blue and purple.

The random distribution of cubes on cities at the start of the game, and how players urbanize cities during the game, adds nice variety to the map each session. 

Tactics

The most common structures for your track are straight, triangles, and loops.

Straight – It’s the rare game where cubes are arranged in such a way that you can just build a straight track with maybe a branch. But I’ve seen it.

Loop – With a loop, you can ship cubes the other way around the loop for longer paths and more points. Below, instead of shipping each yellow cube one link, you can ship them the other way around the loop, for 4 points each instead.

Triangle – Typically a triangle of three cities lets you make a route longer to get an extra point. Below, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Louisville (white town, the rail tile covering its name) form a triangle. Instead of shipping a blue cube 4 cities (Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis) you can ship it 5 cities by going to Louisville from Cincinnati, extending the trip.

As a tactical rather than a strategic game, it’s often difficult to plan ahead in Steam.

While it’s really a game of auctions, the AI is bad at bidding. It should have more random bidding and should learn from a player’s bidding behavior over time. With a human opponent, bidding for turn order can bleed off much of your income.

The AI also prefers to take shipped links as income rather than VPs, so long as no points would be wasted (e.g., it won’t add 6 income if income is already 5 or above, given the max income of 10). This becomes a problem for the AI later in the game, because at game end income is worth half its value in VPs (rounding down). For instance, in the screenshot below, I would have lost to Earl Harley if the AI had diverted two points of income to VPs instead.

Action selection is interesting; I like in the Basic game that the action you pick sets your selection order in the bidding round next turn. For instance, the most coveted action, Urbanization, will go last in turn order the next time. I have found games where I was able to pick Engineering (turn order #3) every single turn.

While the cost of building track increases for terrain (+$1 for each edge where track leaves the tile, +$1 for a town or river, +$2 for hills), with the computer doing the accounting, the cost becomes pretty immaterial (I tended to guesstimate tile costs when taking out loans rather than calculating it exactly) and this fades to the background. I don’t think I ever lot cost deter me from building track; tactically, I spaces that were cheaper first, but if none were available, I still built.

The play in general becomes pretty routine. You have two delivery actions every turn and the first five or six turns should see you spending one of them each turn on upgrading your Locomotive. In only a single game I calculated that not upgrading my engine to 6 power would make me more money, because the trade goods were distributed in such a way that there weren’t enough opportunities for 6-link deliveries to forgo getting 5 income from the trade that would be consumed by the upgrade. Every other game it made sense to upgrade to 6.

As a thought experiment, I wonder what the game would be like if you didn’t have to level up your locomotive:

• You’d move goods more often and might need more cubes.
• People who built short links would be able to move more goods faster, where the engine size currently limits them.

Alternatively, if you could level it up each move turn, you’d have an interesting decision: how far would you be willing to go into debt before you started shipping goods?

Acram has implemented a few other boardgames: Charterstone, Eight-Minute Empire, Inkborn, Istanbul, and Stone Age. Based on what I’ve seen, I’ll check some of them out.

All in all, I recommend getting Steam: Rails to Riches.