SteamParkSteam Park
Iello, 2013

Like amusement parks? Ever wanted to create your own? Steam Park is a strategic board game in which you must build attractions and support buildings in order to attract visitors and make money. But you must also keep a clean park as well, and visitors litter… In the end, the player with the most money wins.

Steam Park is played over a series of 6 rounds. Each player has a game board and 6 dice. The dice have blank, tent, building, visitor, dirt and dustpan faces.  The first phase is the “roll dice” phase. Players decide on their strategy and all players simultaneously roll their dice, and continue rolling until they achieve the dice combination that they want. However, the first person to achieve their desired roll, will quickly take the first player token, and subsequent players take the following initiatives. Besides getting the early play option, players also receive dustpans or dirt, depending on their initiative placement. So going early is a huge bonus. Players who take a lot of time to assess their rolls will not only play later in the round, but may also have to contend with extra dirt.

After all players have finished rolling and have taken their initiative markers, play moves to the next phase, the “dirt” phase. Some dice faces have dirt icons. Each player counts the dirt icons from their dice, any dirt from their initiative card, and one for each visitor in their park. At the end of the game, players are penalized and must pay to have their dirt removed, so keeping a clean park is very important.

Then, in initiative order, players resolve their dice, building rides of various colors, building buildings which have game effects such as helping with cleaning or giving bonus visitors, trying to attract visitors to their rides, playing cards, expanding their parks, or cleaning up dirt.

Attracting visitors has a strange but interesting mechanic. I mentioned that the rides are of various colors. There are visitors of each ride color. The object is to get the visitors of the same color as your built rides. The game has a bag, which at the start of the game contains one visitor of each of the 6 colors. When you attempt to gain a visitor, you add a visitor of your color choice into the bag, then draw randomly causing the bag to return to 6 visitors, but in differing color combinations,  in an attempt to gain the color visitor you need.  This can cause some nice strategic gameplay as you attempt to fill your park with different color rides, and seed the bag with visitors of the color you need (and deplete it of colors that your opponents need), in order to increase the odds in your favor.

Steam Park is an interesting and fun game with different mechanics, and a good amount of strategic play, and a little luck to shake things up a bit. The components are nice, and the game play is well balanced with many different ways to win. We played a 3 player game, and the all players were within 5 points of the winner.  Some players might be turned off by the “luck of the draw” mechanic for gaining visitors, but we found it added a nice little spice to the game.

Overall, fun and recommended.

FishCookFish Cook
Cheapass Games/2012

In Fish Cook, you and your fellow Fish restauranteers are competing to create an elite menu for your restaurant, fulfilling orders, and making money. Depending on the number of players, the game will be played over the course of 3-5 “days”. Each day consists of a “morning” phase, where players purchase fish, ingredients or recipes for their restaurant, and an evening phase, where players fill orders from their menu, or try to steal recipes from their opponents. At the end of each day, the fish market and farmer’s market are re-stocked for the next day. At the end of the last day, the player with the most money wins.

This game has good strategic play. You must manage your money wisely, to maximize your purchasing power and get the most profit from your recipes. You start with $100 dollars, and must budget to get the best bang for your buck. The hard part is that there isn’t always a good market for the items you need to purchase. As fish and ingredients get scarcer, they get more expensive as well. Recipes that give you the most money, also require the most ingredients. You can win with a strategy of making a few expensive recipes or making a lot of cheaper recipes.

Cheapass Games has a long history of publishing games that supply only the parts required for specific game play, assuming that you could find common parts (play money, dice, etc.) in your own home from other games. They were published with lesser quality components, in order to keep the costs down, and make the games more accessible to everyone. Their first games were published with photocopied black and white cards and multi section photocopied boards, and were published at $5 or under. Fish cook costs $15, still quite a bargain, and comes with 2 — 2 section full color game boards, 36 full color custom “recipe” cards (same stock and finish as regular playing cards), and over 100 full color ingredient tokens, a first player token, and five day markers. The components are decent quality. I’ve seen a lot worse from more expensive games. You will need to 12+ dice and some way to keep track of money. Your Monopoly play money would work, but we keep track with pen and paper and it works just as well.

We found this game to be entertaining, well balanced, and fun.  Recommended.