I did a nice little addition to my board game session database. Previously I’ve been tracking Age of Steam plays by the expansion. That isn’t completely satisfactory, as most expansions include several maps. My software can track expansion plays, so that they count also as plays of the base game — five plays of different Age of Steam expansions will count as five plays of Age of Steam as well.

Well, I added the support for three levels of expansions earlier, so I could group all 18xx games together. Now playing, say, 1825 Unit 1 counts as playing 1825U1, 1825 and 18xx. I can easily see how much 1825 I’ve played and also how much 18xx in general I’ve played (12 games, during five years, thanks for asking).

Of course this works with Age of Steam as well. I added some extra games in my stats, so now when I play say the Ireland map, I’ll just mark the play as playing the Ireland map and it’ll count as playing the expansion #1 and also as playing Age of Steam itself. Sweet (and somewhat geeky, I know).

I do have a bit of a problem there. At the moment each game can only have one parent. This wouldn’t be a problem in most cases, but what about the Age of Steam maps that also function as Steam maps? Well, I think the solution here is easy. Don’t play Steam…

So far my most played Age of Steam maps are the basic Rust Belt and Ireland with three plays each. The rest of them I’ve only tried once each. There are several I’d like to play again (Montréal Metro, Zombie Apocalypse, London, 1830 Pennsylvania, Finland spring to mind instantly) and of course few I’d like to try for the first time…

Let’s see, I have a total of 30 Age of Steam expansions with 55 maps (make it 56 with the Rust Belt). I’ve played 20 different maps, so I only have 36 unplayed maps in my collection. Now that’s easy, considering I play Age of Steam couple of times each year (none so far this year, though I’m about to get my first play this year today, which is actually the reason I got into the whole manoeuvre). Nah, I’ll just have to push a bit more to get the game on the table. It’s just that it’s not my favourite game to play with newbies and it’s been slightly too long for our game afternoons, but even that’s getting easier now as Anni is slightly older, so it’s time to get kicking, I suppose.