Strategy Blog
Age of Steam strategy, backed by data: every article uses measured statistics from completed games on this site — share math, map difficulty, first-turn play.
Age of Steam Strategy Guide: the Fundamentals, Then Your First Turn 2026-08-29 How to win Age of Steam: the income engine, why shares are debt, engine timing, and a concrete first turn on Rust Belt with 4 players — backed by stats from 246 completed games. How Many Shares Should You Issue in Age of Steam? 2026-08-29 The most common first-turn mistake in Age of Steam is the share decision. Data from 246 completed games: 64% of first turns issue exactly 2 shares. Here is the math behind that number. Which Age of Steam Map Is Hardest? Numbers from 246 Games 2026-08-29 Win rates, average scores, and game length for Age of Steam maps, measured from 246 completed games against AI on this site: Rust Belt, Scotland, Switzerland, Great Lakes North, Osaka. Which Age of Steam Map Should You Play First? 2026-08-29 Start with Rust Belt: no special rules, the most-played board, and the map every guide assumes. Then where to go next — short 2-player Scotland, or high-scoring Switzerland. Survive Turn One and You Will Probably Finish 2026-09-07 Visitor data from this site: 23% of new players stop in turn one, two thirds of them on the share screen. Get past it and 77% finish the game. What finishers do in their first 30 seconds. Age of Steam, Steam, Railways of the World: One Game, Three Lineages 2026-09-07 Why three boxes play almost the same game. The 2002 original, the 2005 simplification that became Railways of the World, the 2009 rename that became Steam, and the map culture that outlived all of it. Ireland: The Map Where the Cubes Emigrate 2026-09-07 On the Ireland map there is no Urbanization. Instead, Deurbanization removes a cube from the board. The island lost half its people between 1841 and 1901 while building one of the densest railways in the world. The rule and the history match. Making the Bupyeong Underground Map: From a Guestbook Post to a Board in 42 Hours 2026-09-07 A visitor asked for a map of the Bupyeong underground shopping mall, a 1,408-shop maze in Incheon. Machine rooms became walls, stairs became mountains, the Gyeongin railway became a river. How a fan map got built and what seven finished games say about it. How We Trained the AI Opponents, and the Three Times It Went Wrong 2026-09-07 The opponents on this site are 38 weights, two personalities, and a nightly self-play loop. A dev diary: the three weeks of training that never reached a human, the evolution that learned to never bid, and what 341 games say about where it stands. Rust Belt: Why the Default Map Is a Place That Had Not Rusted Yet 2026-09-07 The name Rust Belt dates from the 1980s. The map shows the same region around 1900, when it was the Steel Belt: Chicago the rail hub, Pittsburgh the steel, Duluth the ore. Three rivers, nine mountains, and what 224 finished games say about it. Korea: The Map Where Cities Have No Colour and the Cheapest Link Is the First Railway 2026-09-07 On the Korea map no city has a colour; a city wants whatever cubes are sitting in it. The $2 Inchon to Seoul link is the 1899 Gyeongin line, the first railway on the peninsula. How the 2004 expansion came to be, what it borrows from history, and how the community plays it. Start playing