We built up a theme park for overworked robots in Steam Park, the next game in our A-Z game shelf play-through.
Steam Park
Players: 2-4
Time: 60 Minutes
Designers: Aureliano Buonfino, Lorenzo Silva, Lorenzo Tucci Sorrentino
Artists: Marie Cardouat
Publisher: Cranio Creations
In Steam Park, players are each running a theme park for robots during their one week off from work. Players use dice to take actions building attractions, constructing kiosks, attracting robots, and cleaning up dirt. Whoever can make the most money from these poor, overworked robots will win.
Game play
The game is set up with the various rides, robots, and kiosks sorted and placed out on the table. The money, dirt tokens, and park tiles are also placed nearby. The round track and dirt penalty table are placed so everyone can see them, and a number of finisher tickets placed out equal to the player count. One robot of each color is placed in the robot bag. Each player gets a pig board, starting park tile, and six dice. The goal cards are shuffled and each player gets six goal cards, chooses three to keep, and the rest are shuffled back into the deck.
The game is played over six rounds. Each round starts with a dice rolling phase where players all roll dice in real time. As players roll, they can take dice and place them on their pig board, then re-roll the others. Any die on the pig board is set and can’t be rerolled (even if the player accidentally rolled it onto their pig board!). Players can re-roll as much as they’d like … until the other players start finishing up. When each player is done, they’ll take the lowest numbered ticket from the center of the board. Once there’s only one ticket left, that player gets three more rolls, and that’s it — they’re stuck with whatever they’ve got.
Next is the dirt phase. Player count up the number of dirt symbols showing on their dice plus another one for each robot currently in their park. Then they’ll take that many dirt tokens. If the player has shovel symbols on their ticket, they can take one fewer dirt for each.
Then there’s the action phase. In ticket order, players will each take their turn, spending all of their dice on various actions. The actions include building rides, constructing kiosks, attracting robots to the park, adding on to the park, fulfilling goals, and cleaning up dirt. Each action can be done exactly once during a player’s turn. Any blank faces on dice don’t do anything.
When building anything in their park, the players have to connect like-things, so the same color rides or the same type of kiosk all have to be adjacent to each other by exactly one side. And things that aren’t alike have to have at least one square buffer from other things in their park, including diagonally.
To attract robots, the player will put robots into the robot bag equal to the a number of robots dice they rolled. Then they’ll pull out the same number of robots. However, the robots will only go on rides that match their color. The player places any robots they can on matching rides, and then puts the rest back in the supply.
However, the various kiosks allow the player to enhance various actions like cleaning up extra dirt, changing a die face, attracting extra robots or giving a ride to a robot on the wrong colored ride.
The goal cards give players money depending on how many times the meet a certain condition. This could be the number of ride spaces in their park, the number of a certain color of robot, or different die faces that they rolled. When a player meets a goal, they’ll draw new ones to replenish at the end of the round.
Once all players have taken their actions, then there’s an income phase. Players count up how many robots are on their rides and receive 3 money for each. This is when players replenish their bonus cards if they played any this round. And any robots that are on the wrong color ride (due to a kiosk ability) return to the supply.
The game ends after six rounds. At this time, players will lose money based on how much dirt they have left in their park — just a couple money for a few dirt, but it ramps up quickly! Finally, whoever has the most money wins the game.
My Thoughts
I can’t remember when I picked up Steam Park, but it was entirely based on the theme — I love theme park games, and the 3-D pieces in this on pushed it onto my have-to-have list. I’m also not typically a huge fan of real-time games, but the dice rolling here is just a small part of the game, and there are kiosks that help mitigate bad dice rolls.
I love watching my park build up over the game. It’s a challenge figuring out how build up the park with the adjacency restrictions and the small park size (until you add on!). It can be a challenge to get the right robots into your park, but I like that you can mitigate that luck with various kiosks.
And an the end of the game it is so fun to look at my park — the 3D pieces just make it so picturesque.
Three Quick Questions
How is it as a 2-player game? Steam Park works well at two players … though we’ve had to make a house rule that changes up which tickets to use in the 2-player game. We found that using the “1st” and “Last” ones that we’re supposed to use just felt too unbalanced.
How about the art and component quality? The 3D pieces in this game are amazing — they add so much to the aesthetic to the game. All of the other components are good quality, too. I also really like the art on the attractions. Each different color has a different theme, and they’re all fun to look at.
Will this stay in my collection? Absolutely yes. This is among my favorite games. The theme and look make it for me, and I love getting it to the table.
