Steam Tunnel
Game Type: Card Game for 2-5 players
Designer: James Ernest
Publisher: Cheapass Games
Medium: black and white card-stock
Price: $4.00
Steam
Tunnel is a member of the Hip
Pocket Game line from Cheapass Games.
Designed to be inexpensive games that are easily portable, this game
succeeds in that aspect. For your
$4.00, you get 48 cards and a rulebook that is smaller than an 8 ½” x 11” sheet
of paper folded in quarters. The
decoration on the cards is sparse, consisting of a tunnels on one side with a
gray background on the back. The
tunnel side has a glossy finish
and the gray side is cardstock.
The goal of Steam Tunnel is to
capture as many tunnels as possible.
There are 4 cards that are start points for tunnels. These are played face up. The remaining cards are played face
down in a 6 by 6 grid. The start
cards are placed in the 2nd row 2nd column position from
each corner. You play the game by
flipping a card, then placing a token to ‘capture’ a portion of a revealed
tunnel. The restriction here is
that you cannot capture part of a completed tunnel.
When all cards have been turned,
you tally up points. Each start
position has a number in it. You
determine who controls a tunnel by the number of tokens a player has in the
tunnel. The person with the most
controls the tunnel. A tie is a
tie, in which case points for the tunnel are split. You add up the number of points in the start position(s),
multiply this by the number of sections in the tunnel, and that is the value of
the tunnel. It is easy for one
tunnel to win the game if it is extremely long with multiple start positions.
However, the game is not without
problems. Due to the way turns
work, in a 2 or 4 player game, the 2nd or 4th player,
respectively, starts off with a disadvantage. Since you cannot place a token in a closed tunnel, but you
flip a card at the start of your turn, the 2nd or 4th
player ends up not getting to place a token in their final turn.
Worse than this skewing of
advantage, tallying the tunnels and points at the end of the round is a
headache. While not difficult, you
do need to keep track of which start positions have already been accounted for. I used a token to cover any start
positions that connected to each other so tunnels were not counted multiple
times. All in all, this part made
the game less fun that it could be.
Plus, the multiplication means the game isn’t for young children.
The
question of whether the game is worth $4.00 is up to you, but I would much
rather spend the money to pick up one of the other Cheapass Games.
Ratings
Playability: **
Game Mechanics: **
Presentation: **
Originally written 3/17/2003
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