So, as I detailed in the last entry, there were some clear issues with the CCCP map after the first playtest, the most glaring ones being the weak east, the not as compelling as I would like auction, and the not-yet-satisfactory goods growth pattern. All of these were addressed for playtest #2, on what is the 1.5 revision of the map. Major changes:

AoS Team is pleased to announce a pair of bonus releases for 2008 : Age of Steam Expansion - Washington DC / The Berlin Wall and the Age of Steam Box #1 . AoS Team has heard the cries of North American AoS fans, and are also pleased to announce that these releases will be made available initially to North Americans and will later be released at Ess

Well, it has been quite a while, but I finally had a break from school for a few weeks, and in that space of time I played a tonne of Age of Steam, including two plays of my new Soviet Union prototype. The quick run through of the non-Soviet stuff: The new Ted Alspach 1 and 2 player maps Ted is an odd designer, I like a lot of his early stuff, but

I know it's been quite some time since I posted anything on the blog, but I haven't been playing any Age of Steam, or any board games period. Work has kept me busy, and the Stanley Cup playoffs kept me even busier. Now that Summer is here though, I finally have had the opportunity to do some more expansion design work. This new expansion is a diffe

I managed to get in a playtest of Metro Pittsburgh last night. I foolishly forgot to bring my digital camera along, so I have no pictures to post, but I can give a brief report of how the game went: The central urbanization mechanic works almost exactly as I expected it to. In our playtest, most of the cities ended up being urbanized in the central

I originally tried to post this yesterday, but instead of typing it up in a separate program like Notepad, I foolishly wrote it directly into the Overblog form, and the system decided to temporarily crash and eat my post when I tried to put it up. On Monday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the initial playtest, I once again was able to get Metro

We are very happy to announce that we are planning to release a new set of three expansions. These expansions will come in the same triangular boxes than last year. They will only be available for the ESSEN fair in October for many reasons, some of which were discussed in Michael's last article. An additional factor is a lack of time: we simply do

That's a along time ago, we did not make a serious update here!!! I found time to write few words about these last Essen releases this nights ! For Paris, I wanted to make something new. I had the real map of the districts of Paris and I thought it would be nice to make something interesting with. I have to say that I am teaching the graph theory t

Playtesting time again...Michigan has fallen by the wayside, but over my vacation I came up with a new way to use the split level engines from Montreal and fashioned a map of the Soviet Union to go with them. The core concept here was to make the second number in the engine restrict players from going through towns. A 2&0 engine would, for example,

The subject line is a question that I've seen asked a bit on Boardgamegeek lately, so I thought I would do up a brief post on it here during this lull in playtesting. I can obviously not speak for the other designers, even Alban on this point, but I can give you the inside scoop on what is going on with me, Montreal, and my future expansions at thi