Stephensons Rocket

From: Rio Grande List Price: $40 Players: 2-4 Playing Time: 60-90 minutes  Type of game: Strategy Skill level: 10 Complexity: 7  Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 23, April 2000

Railgamers were salivating at the prospect of a railroad game designed by Reiner Knizia. The bad news for them is that Stephensons Rocket is closer to Union Pacific than 1830. Like most of Knizia’s efforts, this is a dressed up abstract game which could just as easily have been about earthworms or rivers. The theme mostly works, but there’s no real feeling of planning or operating railroads. The good news for the rest of us is that you don’t have to be a trainspotter to enjoy this intense game which ranks among Knizia’s best.

Unusually for a Knizia design, there are no random or even hidden elements whatsoever. Not even the initial setup is randomized, consisting instead of an abstracted hex map of England with towns and cities occupying specific hexes and seven colored railroads starting at fixed locations. This was initially cause for some concern, but so far no opening move or strategy seems clearly better than any other. The success of any approach— and as in most Knizia games, there are many— is dependent on the response from opponents. Analysis of the board yields some obvious opening ploys, but no single stratagem dominates.

In what has become a Knizia trademark, players may take only two actions each turn but will always yearn for more. The most obvious and simultaneously complex option is to expand a railroad by moving its locomotive to one of the three hexes it faces, thus earning a share in that railroad. Players can spend both actions expanding railroads, but can’t expand the same railroad twice in one turn. The complexity arises when an opponent initiates a veto. In such a case, each player clockwise from the locomotive-mover may bid shares in that railroad to redirect the locomotive. While other players must increase the bid or pass, the original mover gets last licks and only needs to match the high bid to retain control. The high bidder discards his bid shares and completes the move. This single mechanic is the most important one in the game.

Instead of expanding a railroad a player can take a commodity token from any city on the board. When a railroad connects to a city, players owning tokens from that city earn a bonus. The bonus is paid each time a new railroad connects to a city. At the end of the game a larger bonus is paid to the players holding the most tokens of each of the game’s four types, but only tokens from cities connected to the rail network count. Players therefore often steer railroads towards cities they’ve got a stake in. Token-grabbing tends to occur in the early game to maximize their payout, but those payouts are small potatoes compared to the profits available through stations and shares. I’ve taken just a single token and won the game. This is obviously a case where groupthink comes into play. In a group that eschews tokens, fewer will be required to secure the larger game-end bonus thereby generating a greater payoff per action. If competition is stiffer, the payoff per action decreases. The less attractive tokens are perceived to be, therefore, the more attractive they actually become. Fascinating.

A player’s final option is to place a station onto the board. Stations can never be placed where they “touch wood”— next to another station or a locomotive. A station is worthless unless a locomotive enters its space, thereby putting the station on its line. When a locomotive first connects to each town, the two players with the most stations on that line get a payout based on how many cities and towns are connected to the railroad. Such payouts can occur many times for each railroad, increasing every time, and occur a final time at the end of the game for each surviving railroad. While there are other methods to score points in the game, this is clearly the most important one.

To create some gravity around a station, players earn a “passenger token” for moving a locomotive onto an opponent’s station. The player with the most such tokens at the end of the game gets a bonus. This incentive doesn’t usually outweigh the potential benefit to the opponent for getting his station on a line, however, and so it’s wise not to rely on it. Since stations must be placed at least two hexes away from a locomotive, a player generally needs to control a railroad’s direction for two turns in order to connect. This control can be significantly reduced through what we’ve dubbed “tweaking.” When it’s obvious that an opponent wants a railroad to go in a certain direction, you can tweak him by moving it somewhere else. Now that player has to spend shares to redirect the railroad, thereby diluting his stake and control. How much he spends is something of a cat-and-mouse game as he evaluates how much you’d be willing to spend to stop him. This produces an agonizing mini-game of brinksmanship and counterbluff, but can also mire the game in minimax calculations.

Letting someone get too many shares ahead in a railroad is dangerous, as it becomes difficult to wrest control away. Worse is allowing a player to maintain sole ownership of a railroad, leaving him in complete control over its course with nobody able to tweak him for even a single share. It’s usually worth it to grab a share just to give him something to worry about. A player with many shares in a railroad can reap cascading awards through mergers.

When one train moves onto a space touching a locomotive or track tile of another, the two railroads merge. In a counterintuitive yet mechanically necessary way, the moving line dies and is absorbed into the line it rammed into. The top two shareholders get a paid as for stations, and then players convert every two shares of the dead company into one share of the survivor (odd shares are lost). Mergers can shift the power balance not only in share holdings but station majority, as the stations in the dead line become part of the surviving, and suddenly much larger and more valuable, line.

The game ends when the last track tile is played, or if all but one railroad is out of stock, dead, or isolated (unable to ram another railroad). Final bonuses are awarded, including payouts to the majority shareholders in the surviving railroads, and scores are tallied.

An often overlooked subtlety involves the value of stations. By the endgame it often becomes difficult to trigger a payout for station owners. Railroads are either already connected to all the towns nearby, or are blocked from reaching new ones. The only remaining payout to station owners will come at the end of the game. A player can easily be robbed of that payout if the railroad on which they have a station majority merges into another. Although his stations get added to the surviving line, they may not be enough to give him the majority in that line and are suddenly worthless. Savvy players will guard against this and work to end the game before the two lines can merge.

The balance of mechanisms in the game seems unusually lopsided for Knizia. The rewards for stations are clearly larger than for any other scoring opportunities. Shares can earn big payouts when the game ends, but are far more useful as tools to force railroads into stations. Tokens are an interesting kicker, but a strategy based on them faces an uphill struggle toward victory. None of this breaks the game as long as all players are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each flavor of scoring, and it would be time well spent to brief new players.

Seemingly innocuous actions in Stephensons Rocket can have crucial ramifications later down the road, and the player who spots them gains an advantage. It’s possible, for example, to set up a case where a locomotive has no choice but to pass through a certain hex, making that hex an ideal spot for someone’s station. As in Durch die Wuste, two actions are never enough for everything you want to do. Performing triage on the fly to pick the most pressing actions can be difficult and, for some players, slow going. The board generally changes little enough between turns to allow for advance planning, however, and players are well advised to take advantage of that time to speed things along.

Stephensons Rocket is a cerebral yet visceral game. I usually come away from the table mentally and emotionally drained, but tingling from the great tension and challenge. Lying in bed after my first game I found myself turning it over in my head, thinking of new strategies to try the next time around. I found out later that others in that game had the same experience, so the game must be doing something right. I’d rank this just above Euphrat & Tigris in complexity and heaviness, which puts it a tad high for casual play but leagues below most rail games. I can see how many players will find this game difficult to assimilate and it won’t be to everyone’s taste, but for me it’s one of the best games of the past couple of years. I wish it were a bit lighter, and I’m somewhat worried that the static board setup will yield certain standard openings and play sequences over time. The number of plays required to get to that point, however, more than justifies the purchase.