Steam Park Board Game Review

I love theme parks!

Whenever I can, I’ll jump at the chance to ride cool roller coasters. I love taking advantage of extra time after business trips to head off to a close amusement park to get those thrills in.

Many years ago, a cool computer game was released called Roller Coaster Tycoon. In the game players build their own theme park complete with roller coasters, food stands, and other amusements to attract customers and earn money. It was a quick purchase for us. After all, who wouldn’t want to put their unique spin on a theme park?

So you can see why Steam Park, a board game about roller coasters and amusement parks naturally jumped right up on my “want to play” list.

To boot, it’s published by iello, the board game company that’s made fun family board games like King of Tokyo, Innovation, and Ghooost.

Fun at the Steam Park
Steam Park is a fun family board game with racing, strategy, and luck elements all thrown in.

Steam Park also isn’t your run of the mill amusement park. In the game your job is to create a steam park for the robots of Roboburg. That’s right, you get to built coal burning, steam powered rides to attract visitors. And you’re competing against other park owners who are trying to do the same at their parks.

Can you build enough rides and attract the right visitors to earn the most money while not generating too much dirt?

Because there’s a high tax on running a dirty park that will eat into your earnings and could decide the outcome in the end.

How to play Steam Park
Steam Park is a 2-4 player game played in a series of 6 rounds with each round consisting of 4 stages: Roll, Dirt, Action, Income.

1. Roll phase:
This is the racing, quick-thinking part of the round. Players simultaneously roll their 6 dice and set aside dice results they want to use in the Action phase. Players keep rolling the remaining dice until they’ve set aside all 6 dice onto their pig-bank board for use.

But players can’t take their time here because the first one to set aside their 6 dice gets a benefit. That benefit decreases with each player until the last player – who instead is hit with a cost. And that cost is more Dirt.

2. Dirt phase:
This is where the costs pile up. Certain die results will cost you in dirt (like the die icon that let’s you build an attraction). Players take a Dirt token for each dirt symbol on their dice and for the number of visitors in their park. And if they’re the last in turn order, they take an additional 2 Dirt tokens.

Building and running an amusement park, even for robots can get messy.

3. Action phase:
Now that the dice race and dirt phases are over, players, in turn order, get to build their dream park and attract visitors.

The actions a player can take depend on the dice they choose to set aside. Players can build rides (tool symbol), build stands (stand symbol), attract visitors (robot symbol), clean dirt (shovel symbol), play bonus cards (mound symbol), or expand the park (use any symbol).

The way to carry out each of the actions are nicely explained in the rule book and indicated on the reference cards. So we won’t cover them in detail. But suffice it to say, they’re very intuitive and easy to remember.

Let’s hit on one for an example – Visitors – since this is what the game is all about. For each robot symbol you’ve rolled, take 1 wooden visitor from the visitor pool and place it in the bag (where there will already be 6 visitors of varying colors). Then shake the bag and draw out the same number of visitors that you put in.

If a visitor you drew out of the bag matches the color of a ride you have in you park, and there’s an open space on the ride, that visitor has found a seat and will ride your ride until the end of the game. (They can’t get enough of roller coasters either.) If the colors don’t match or spots are full, the visitor goes back to the visitor pool.

As you can see, even with great planning and good dice rolling to get visitors to your park, they may not come. Oh, the fickle amusement park world!

4. Income phase:
Now it’s time to earn money!
Players receive money for each visitor they have on their rides. So of course, more visitors = more money. It’s a very simple phase to complete before moving on to the next round.

Another thing we should mention is that building stands will help you in other areas of the game depending on which stands you build (security, information, promotion, toilet, casino). And the bonus cards provide opportunities for earning additional money. Very nice to have.

Strategy/Luck Balance
Steam Park really plays just like the theme. Just like at amusement parks, there’s plenty of ups and downs and lots of variety. At times you’re frantically rolling dice and at others you’re plotting out where to construct your rides. At times you’re flying high with lucky rolls and visitor draws and at others you’re bemoaning all the dirt in your park.

But overall, Steam Park has a good mix of strategy and luck for a family board game. There’s plenty to think about while managing your park yet enough luck to offer some light fun.

There are also two difficulty levels mentioned in the rules. If you want to play a simplified version, skip using the special abilities of each stand and just let them produce more money. But if you like more to think about when building the best park, then you’ll definitely want to use the stands.

While we didn’t explain all the rules, hopefully we hit enough to help you decide if Steam Park might be a board game your family will enjoy too.

Great components you construct
We can’t end a review of Steam Park without mentioning how cool the components are. The first time you play Steam Park you will literally Build the rides. The ride pieces come in board sheets and you get to put them all together to make cool 3-dimensional rides.

In addition to cool rides, we also love the stands, the artwork, and the reference cards. The cards may be simple, but they’re much handier than referring to the rule book when needing a refresher on the special abilities of the stands for example.

How does Steam Park score on the “Let’s Play Again” game meter?
Since Steam Park was just barely released, we’ve only played it a few times. But we can quickly see that it will score well on our “let’s play again” game meter.

It’s a board game with a fun theme, a variety of engaging play elements, great components, and a mix of strategy and luck that call out to be played again. Because maybe “this time” our luck will improve or our new strategy will work better.

If I can’t get out to an amusement park on a regular basis, at least we’ve got a fun amusement park board game that we can visit as frequently as we want.

Thanks iello for another great family board game.

iello website: www.iellogames.com
iello facebook page: www.facebook.com/IelloGames
iello twitter page: http://twitter.com/IelloGames

I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

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