Steam Park Board Game How to Play & Review

Steam Park is a Theme Park Building game.

Title: Steam Park

Year Published: 2013

Designer: Lorenzo Silva, Lorenzo Tucci Sorrentino, Auerlien Buonfino

Publisher: Cranio Creations

Players: 2-4

Game Time: 60+ Mins

Set-up Time: >1 Mins

Ages: 10+

Theme: Steampunk

Mechanic: Dice Rolling, City Building

How to win: Have the most money.

Game Description

As owners of a fantastic steam park, you’re to build gigantic, coal-powered rides to attract as many visitors as you can – but building attractions won’t be enough. You’ll also need to manage your employees, invest in advertising in order to attract and please the different kinds of guests visiting your park, and, above all, keep the dirt that your park produces under strict control!

Steam Park Set Up

Set up is simple. Each player gets a Pig board, Ground tile and six dice. Also, deal 6 cards to each player, they will pick 3 and discard the rest. The deck is then shuffled.

Put one of each Visitor into the bag, the turn order tokens in the middle of the table, the turn counter onto turn one and the rest of the stuff is piled off to the side.

Steam Park  Game Play

The game is played over 6 turns with each turn having 4 phases: Roll, Dirt, Action, and Income.

Roll Phase

Each player simultaneously and frantically rolls their 6 dice as quickly as they can trying to get the results they want. When you roll and want to keep a dice, you have to put it on your Pig board. Once all of your dice are on the Pig board, you can take the lowest Turn Order token from the centre of the table and the Roll Phase is over for you.

When all players have finished rolling and the last token is taken, this phase ends. If you are the last player you can have 3 final rolls to see what you get then you’re stuck with what you have.

Dirt Phase

Now you work out how much Dirt you get.

For each dirt icon on your turn order token, you gain dirt.
Each visitor in your park, you take dirt.
For each Dustpan/Brush on your turn order token lose 2 dirt.

Add all this up, this is how much dirt you gain this turn.

Actions Phase

So this is where you use your dice! Each dice has 6 different sides each having a different action.

Build Rides – Rides come in 3 sizes, 1, 2 and 3 blocks. You spend 1,2 or 3 build symbols to buy a ride of that size and add it to your player board. You can buy as many rides as you can afford but can’t buy the same size ride more than once on the same turn.

Placing a ride in your park is simple. If it matches a colour of a ride you have, you MUST place it next to it. Rides of different colours cannot touch at all, even diagonally.

Attract Visitors – For each symbol you have, you pick one Visitor of any colour from the pool and put it in the bag, shake the bag, and draw one out. Any visitors you draw that can fit in a space on your ride may go on there, any that do not fit go back to the supply. There will always be 6 Visitors left in the bag at after this action is taken.

Clean Dirt – You’ll be collecting dirt so using these lets you discard 2 dirt for each die used. Simple!

Expand the Park – Using any die face (Except the blank one) add an expansion board to your park. you can’t do this more than twice per turn.

Cards

Play Bonus Card – For each of these used, play a card from your hand. Cards will give you bonus money based on meeting the criteria on the card.

Build Stands – Same as rides but each stand costs 1 per stand. Placement is similar, you can’t buy the same type more than once in a turn, it can’t touch a stand of a different type but MUST touch a stand of the same type. There are 5 types of stands.

Security – Lets you redraw from the bag once per stand when taking the ‘Attract Visitors’ action.

Info Point – Add a Visitor of the wrong colour to one of your rides until after the income phase.

Casino – Change the result of one die on your Pig board.

Toilet – Count one Dustpan/Brush symbol on one of your dice as 2 of those symbols.

Promotion – Count one Visitor symbol on one of your dice as two of those symbols.

Income Phase

Each player gains 3 Danari for each Visitor in your park. Everyone draws back up to 3 cards by drawing 2 and keeping one of those, discarding the other and repeating this until they have a full hand.

Move the turn counter to one space, put the turn order tokens back in the middle of the table and go back to the roll phase.

Game End

After 6 rounds, the game ends.

Check the Dirt Track. Pay money equal to the number of dirt you have, if you have 30 or more dirt you are out of the game!

Whoever has the most money left wins. In case of a tie, the player with the most visitors in their park at the end of the game wins.

Round-Up

This is a fun one. The frantic dice rolling part is cool, the building of the park is fun and it looks really nice.

The bonus cards are a great way to get a load of money in, but they also define how you play. I would obviously JUST by the purple rides EVERY game if it was up to me, but if my cards want Green rides or Red visitors then I need to make sure I’m doing what I can to get them.

A couple of people I have played with have mentioned the lack of interactivity between players and there can be a bit of downtime between turns, but those are the only real downsides.

Steam Park Rating

It’s part of my collection and although I don’t really play it much, I don’t see it going anywhere soon.

I give it 7/10