We played Age of Steam today on Ted Alspach’s Oklahoma Land Rush map. It was a pretty rough match. Bankruptcies are pretty rare in Age of Steam, despite the reputation of the game. After today’s game, the amount of bankruptcies I’ve seen so far probably multiplied, as three out of four players went down.

Let’s start from the beginning… Oklahoma Land Rush is a fun map, where all the cubes are distributed on the map and players can pick them up by building track over. We played with the extra nasty version where you can only take goods to the original five cities on the east side of the map. There are five new cities (some gray cities are removed, so there’s one new city in each colour), but those can’t be used for deliveries in the nasty version.

It’s tricky. We found getting cash flow was pretty hard, as building from the east side is expensive. We were in trouble, fairly soon. Petri was the first to go under, on round two. He simply forgot to save money for expenses — a simple, but deadly brain fart.

I had a good thing going, but it was too expensive, I couldn’t make profit. On turn four or so I started to get a bad feeling about it and on turn I guess I knew I was going under — almost maxed out on shares, losing ~$10 each turn, not enough income and no prospects for deliveries without paying lots of money for new track. All that with fierce competition…

Well, it was over on round seven. I got lucky on round six and barely survived, but on round seven my destiny was sealed. No money, no income… Fortunately another player went down on the previous round, so at least I can claim second place. Hannu was the proud winner and the only player who didn’t go bankrupt. We didn’t play the final round, but I guess he would’ve had something like few points of income left. Actually, he might have ended up in negative points… Still, winner is a winner.

So, it’s a bit of a tough map. Sure, we played badly and perhaps a better financial control would’ve made a world of difference… But the next time I play, it’s the easier version. When you can start with an urbanization in the middle of the cube fields, things get a lot easier.

We also played Fladderadatsch, hilarious children’s game, where you must avoid stepping on turds while watching for birds and bees. Fun, especially as I was able to do almost a complete tour of the board without a single pile of shit on my way and managed a tied victory. We finished the games with a single hand of Sticheln, then unfortunately the World Cup intervened…