Age of Steam: Washington DC/Berlin Wall pairs West with East-meets-West in a theme-rich take on everyone's most expandable train game.

On the Washington DC side of the gameboard, players can use Interstate 495, otherwise known as the Capital Beltway, to move goods quickly from one part of the city to another (think Clue with the Conservatory), but as the game goes on traffic worsens on the interstate until it becomes impassable. Says Viard, "As soon as one player has linked one highway, at the beginning of the next round, players have to throw one die, and this 495 will suffer traffic jams and be impassable, except for the player who has chosen the new Emergency! action. In the middle game, players have to throw two dice, and for the last two rounds, all highways suffer traffic jams and are impassable." Except for those flashing red lights, of course. Your tax dollars at work!

Building inside the District of Columbia is more expensive than in the outer areas, and the White House (yellow) and Library of Congress (purple) are the only cities of those colors on the board, although urbanization can bring about another one. The Capitol building, on the other hand, serves as nothing but an obstacle.

For the Berlin Wall, players step back in time to the days when international forces split a city for decades, a division which similarly divides the gameboard, with the reds (red cities, that is) and yellows on one half and the blues and purples on the other; specific rules are attached to each side of the city. Viard is hush-hush at the moment about the nature of the Wall, although he does say, "In the set up, you will have to build the wall first."

You can urbanize towns to bring new colored cities to the board, and the Engineer action allows you to break the Wall in a single hex – wait long enough, though, and the Wall will come down on its own for the final two rounds of the game. It's 1989 all over again...

Description written by W. Eric Martin and used with permission of BoardgameNews.com