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Silverton: The solitaire experience
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Game: Silverton
Designer: Phillip John Smith and Dori Smith
Publisher: Mayfair Games
Age Range: 12 & up
Number of Players: 1-6
Game Time: 4-6 hours
Mechanics: Railroad operations/economic investment
Complexity: 4
Challenge: 5
Train games are a board game genre unto themselves. As a definition, they embrace a variety of individual selections, while excluding some games with a railroad theme, like Ticket to Ride, or Transamerica. Basically, to be considered a ‘train game’ (by a worldwide and growing group of ‘train gamers’), the mechanics of play have to involve railroad operations of some kind; the laying of track, for example, or the delivery of goods and/or the purchase of stock options in developing train companies. Generally speaking, the winning condition for most of these games is having the most money at the end. The most notable examples of this are Martin Wallace’s designs of Age of Steam, Railroad Tycoon and a recent update of his systems, called just Steam. There are predecessors to Wallace’s designs, dating back to Rail Baron (1977) and the series of games, known as 18XX games, which began with publication of 1829 in the mid-70s and advanced through to Avalon Hill’s publication of 1830 in 1986 (generally considered to be ‘the’ basic game of the series). There is, too, the growing family of ‘crayon games’ published by Mayfair that began with the publication of Empire Builder in 1980. Presumably, the designs will continue, as Wallace introduces expansions and variants to his Steam game, Mayfair adds to its ‘crayon games’ and new designers join the train parade.
One of the many games in this field is an independent design by Phil Smith and his wife, Dori, called Silverton, which sets the train operations in a multi-state area that embraces Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Texas. While perusing the bits, pieces and rules, with the intent of getting it out onto a table for the next regularly scheduled meeting of the local board game group down here in Wilmington, I noted that there were variants that allowed for solitaire play. Normally, it’s hard to imagine anything lonelier than playing a board game by yourself, but as a means of understanding the mechanics of game play and always up for a challenge, I set out to play what the rules call the “Denver $6,000 Solitaire” variant. Starting with $1,600 and a home city of Denver, the object of the game is to amass $6,000 in the shortest number of turns possible. If you can accomplish this either during or before the 10th turn, you tally a “Decisive Victory,’ whereas, if it takes 18 turns or longer, you have recorded a “Decisive Loss.” In between are the Substantial Victory (turn 11 or 12), a Marginal Victory (turn 13), a Draw (Turn 14), a Marginal Loss (15 or 16), and the Substantial Loss (Turn 17). There are also Denver and Salt Lake City $10,000 Solitaire challenges, as well as something called the Denver Campaign Solitaire, in which the object is to amass certain amounts of money in 24 turns.
But first, there was the issue of the stickers. Hundreds of them, which had to be removed from a sheet and transferred to the colored poker chips representing the game’s various commodities (gold, copper, silver, lumber and coal). Call this a ‘major grumble’ when it comes to playing the game, but I took some ‘just before dinner got served’ time to go through the process (grumbling at a few of the stickers, which didn’t come clean off the sheets and were rendered useless) and settled in to play the game.
Like many train games, the functions are basically economic in nature; how much to invest at any given point in time, balanced against what you foresee as an eventual return on these investments. You’d think that getting from initial assets of $1,600, that an investment journey to $6,000 wouldn’t take as long as 18 turns, but it can (and in my case, did, a couple of times).
The board and cards in mid-game
There are two basic operations that occur during the process. One, is laying ‘claims.’ To do this, you commit to the purchase of a claim card, chosen from one of eight available on each of your turns (they are replenished to eight from turn to turn). These cards display a city on the map, a resource, a purchase cost and an operating cost. One card might show the city of Aspen, for example, with a Silver claim on it. It’ll cost $60 to purchase and $30 to ‘operate.’ The $60 will bring the card to your area of the table. The $30 will come into play each time you want to see how much Silver the claim produces, which is a dice roll. The first time you operate the claim, you roll a single die and add “6.” Thereafter, you roll two. Depending on your roll, you could get anywhere from two to four Silver, or discover that the claim is depleted. With the example Aspen card, for example, a roll of 2 to 7 will result in a depleted claim and the card is thereafter rendered useless.
The second operation is building track, which will allow you to deliver resource loads from your claim city to whatever city will take the resource(s). Gold, copper and silver can be delivered anywhere. Lumber and coal are only accepted in certain major cities. Each city on the board is connected by a length of rail line connecting the cities throughout the map and each segment of rail line bears a cost, related to its length and destination. Shorter segments are cheap. Longer segments or those that have issues related to ‘winter’ cost more. (You are not allowed to build track or make deliveries on ‘winter’ turns – 4, 8, 12, 16, 20 and 24).
So, the idea is that on each turn, you go through a sequence of events, complete whatever actions you choose to take, and then start over. Buy a claim, or a resource (passenger delivery options, for example, which allow you to collect revenue every turn), build track, operate your claim, collect revenue, deliver loads, change commodity prices (a dice/formula thing), replenish the claim cards to eight, advance the game turn, start over. As with any business enterprise, real or imagined on the field of a game board, there tends to be a lot of money going out the door early, with very little coming back. Your initial capital of $1,600 in the solitaire game diminishes rapidly and the dice rolls, central to the claim operation process, which determines how much you can deliver where, is not always friendly. You can purchase a claim that ends up being depleted before you’ve gotten a single resource out of it. The one die + “6” formula for the first operation of any claim helps, but in the Aspen example, rolling a “1” on your first ‘operation’ of the claim is going to finish your interaction with that card.
A close-up of the eastern perimeter of the Silverton map
As a solitaire exercise, it has a sort of inertia to it that keeps things moving. In the standard game, players will be placing ‘surveyor’ markers on selected tracks they wish to build, and ‘prospector’ markers on claim cards or resource cards that they want to own. In solitaire play, these markers don’t really need to come into play, because there is no competition for the prospective rail track or claim card/resource. With multiple players, when two or more select either the same section of track or attempt to claim the same card, there’s a dice roll process to determine who gets it. The price chart, which determines the turn-by-turn value of each commodity, is a bit annoying, because at the end of every turn, you have to roll dice five times to determine whether the price on five commodities is going up or down. This can get a bit tedious (I assume that it’s just as tedious with multiple players). There is an Excel file attached to Silverton’s entry on the BoardGameGeek Web site that does the ‘rolling’ for you, so that the physical action is reduced to the simple click of a button.
As a solitaire player, you are forced into choosing Denver as your home city. In a two-player game, both will start in Denver. In a three- through six-player game, players one and two will start in Denver. Denver, being in the Northwest corner of the map, is a tricky place to start, because so many of the cities are virtually out of reach. I never got any further south than Trinidad, about midway on the map’s eastern perimeter and certainly couldn’t see myself ever reaching El Paso at the southeastern corner, some $1,560 worth of track away from Denver. So, too, with Salt Lake City in the northwest corner and to a certain extent, Albuquerque and Santa Fe in the southern central portion of the map. You tend to be at the mercy of the claim cards that crop up. If you’ve started from Denver and a claim card shows up with El Paso as the city, you’ll never get there in 18 turns, so that card will sit among the display of eight permanently. The question becomes: can I reach this or that city with enough resources on the card to make the investment of building the track worth it? And you will inevitably find that when you continually operate your claim, turn by turn, you’re going to hit a dice roll that renders it depleted. You’ll be able to make the delivery of the resources you’ve collected to that point, but you won’t be able to add to them. When you do make the delivery of resources on a depleted card, that card becomes obsolete. On the other hand, if luck was a lady the day or night you played, you might, once you’ve got track built to the relevant city, be able to make multiple deliveries for as long as your claim continues to operate.
More telling than anything, I suppose, is the fact that after failing to reach $6,000 after 18 turns the first time I tried it, I immediately reset the board and started over again. On my second attempt, I was able to hit the $6,000 mark after 12 turns (a Substantial Victory) and got so excited that I reset the board and went at it a third time. Back to Decisive Loss as the ‘right’ cards failed to turn up and lady luck went to somebody else’s house. The point being that I was compelled to try again. And again. And the board still sits on a table in my house for when the urge strikes another time.
It’s clear that this game could take a while with multiple players (each of the solitaire games took well over an hour and the rules suggest that the standard game takes a minimum of four hours; advanced and long variants are suggested at six hours, minimum). It is clearly not a gateway game. It’s only been subject to just over 500 ratings on the Geek, with an average rating of 7.07. It has some die-hard fans, including one correspondent who rated it at “10” and called it “the Best Railroad game out there.” Its harshest critic, who rated it at a “2,” calls it “old school’ and suggests that there are newer releases that capture the same basic design idea without what he describes as the “clutter.”
From a personal point of view, I liked it. The mechanics are accessible enough without a lot of turn by turn brain burn. You either purchase a claim or you don’t. Build or don’t build track, always assessing the distance you need to ‘travel’ set against the return you expect to make. The Excel file on the game’s Geek entry takes some of the tedium out of the price chart dice rolls, but you have to be willing to either get your computer near the board and players, or the board and players near the computer. Phone app, anyone?
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