Steam and Cheese How to Play
Transcript
Ooh, that looks tasty.
Welcome folks to the Hungry Gamer is back with another how to play video. And today we're learning how to play Steam and Cheese designed by Alexander Rhine with art by Roman Kucharsky and published by Skellig Games. And I do apologize if I mispronounced any of those names. And so to get started, we are going to learn how to set up Steam and Cheese. And I will say that there are a lot of different components and a lot of options that you can have for your first game. So I will be doing the suggested setup, though I will point out where you have different options as you go through the game. And so to get started, let's talk about the different components that we have. Here we have a player board and I'll be illustrating how that works later on. And each player will have seven ownership tokens and they will take six of them and place them down here at the bottom of their board. And then the final one will go here as a score marker. And for this game we're going to be setting up a two-player game, so I will go ahead and place a second one right there.
You'll take your four assistants and they will get placed out onto this spot of your player board. Each player will take their overseer and place it on the overseer track right here. And why you would choose different locations we'll discuss later on. And then to complete player setup, each player will get to draft one of these tiles that gives you your starting equipment. There are a couple of other starting tiles, but these are the recommended ones that you start the game with the options to have. And each one of them gives you different starting resources. And for the sake of argument, we will just say that we are going to start with this one right here for five coins and four milk. So I will take my five coins here and my four milk and I would place it right up here.
Then to continue the setup, we'll place our Zeppelin board up here. We will collect our five achievements that you can gain. And for the first game, you'll want to use the ones that have the star in the top corner and place those out where everyone can see. You'll collect all of the resource cubes, which are milk, milk or cheese, rennet, and spices, going from the clear, the light beige, and the dark beige. The rest of your coins, all of your bonus tiles, piled face down, and then all of your additional machine parts. Now, speaking of machine parts, you will then take all of the starter ones, which have the one in the bottom corner, and place those randomly into these gears. However, for your first game, the recommendation is you start it exactly like this. As I zoomed in, you can take a look at that positioning.
And as we go through, I'll explain what all of the symbols mean. You'll place your assistant board and the overseer board as we've already discussed, all out on the table within reach. And then over on the market board, you will deal out five different orders. Place a random machine from the remainder in each of these spots right here. And then place the remaining order cards in a draw pile next to the board. You'll then place the turn marker, the Zeppelin right here, on the turn one spot. And you will give the first player token to the last player to have seen a mouse. And then you will set out your dice. You will set out one die of each color per player plus one more. So, you'll see we have three brown, three white, and three yellow dice. Then, since we are playing a two-player game, we would then collect these three purple dice, and we would place them in these specific spots on on those three action board like so. The number facing up does not matter for the purple dice.
Then in later games, you will these dice be placed randomly in these four different action boards. And then once you've done that, you are ready to begin the game. All right, so let's talk about how the rounds will play. The game is going to end after six rounds, and in each round, each player is going to get to draft three different dice, which they will use solely for themselves, and then select one other die that will allow them to move their overseer around. First thing is, the first player will roll all the dice. Then you'll organize them by color, and then, starting with the first player, you will get to draft a die. And depending on which one you draft, different things are going to happen based off of the orientation of the numbers on the die. So, the first thing is, when you draft, you're going to get a resource that matches the type, and that is spices, gold, and rennet.
And so, let's just say I decide I want to draft this die first. That would give me two milk, which I would then get to place into my player board here. And since this is raw milk that has not been pasteurized yet, I would place it up in the top portion of my board right there. At the same time, perhaps I had decided to draft one of the yellow dice instead, and then I would gain rennet for that. So, if we'll say instead I chose to draft this die, which I will just place there for a moment, I would gain three rennet, and I would place that here on this section of my player board. And then finally, if instead I chose to draft one of these spice dice, I would then gain five spice, which I would place in this section of my player board.
And just to kind of advance this things ahead a little bit, I'm going to give myself some resources. Then, after you selected your die, you'll then place it in one of these areas on one of the three action boards. You also have the choice to place it here on your board. And by placing it here, you're going to get to select any one of the 12 basic actions and perform them. And I'll talk about those in just a moment, but the important thing is the number that matters now is not the number on top, but the number on the bottom of the die. In this case, my five, if I place it here, I would get to activate any one of those actions with a strength of two, because the two is on the opposite side of the five. And I'm going to zoom in a little bit to illustrate how the dice work on this board.
Now, taking my same five, I could place it in any of these three spots. So, let's just say I placed it here. Now, I can choose to activate up to two of the different machine tiles on this board. And you look in every direction and see if there is another die blocking line of sight to the tile. So, if I am here, nothing blocks me there, there, there, or there. However, if I placed here, I would be blocked going up there, but I could still could access this one, this one, or this one. So, we'll say I placed it there. Now, the strength of these actions around the board, and again, I will explain what each of those does in a moment, is determined by what number is facing that tile. So, in this case, on this side of the die, as you can see, it is a three. So, if I took this action, the strength would be three. On this side of the die, it's a six. So, if I took this action, it would be a six. On this side of the die, it's a four, so this action would be a four, and on this side of the die, it is a one, so if I were to take this action, it would be a strength of one. And again, you can activate any two that you have line of sight to. And you will proceed like this with each player drafting a die, getting their resources, and then activating machine somewhere until every player has done three dice.
And we will just pretend that we've ended up like this at the end of the round. Then, everyone will get to select, not draft, cuz they'll stay out there for everyone to pick, one of those dice, and that will allow them to activate and that will allow them to activate their overseer on the overseer board. Now, I'll move this one out of the way, and whatever number you pick, that's how far you're going to go. So, in this case, if I were to pick the one, I could move one space, and I would immediately, and the lightning bolt, gain five coins. If I were to go here, anytime I draft a white die while my overseer is there, I'd gain a point. Anytime I take a zeppelin action, I'd gain two points. Every time I do an upgrade machine action, I get a discount of five bucks, immediately gain three points. Every time you draft a yellow die, gain three bucks, and every time you take the zeppelin action, gain a spice, and then every time you take a brown die, you get to take an additional zeppelin action with the strength value that's on the face of the die. And again, all those actions will make sense in just a moment. It's also important to note that if at some point you are landing where another player's overseer is, they will get to take their overseer and move it somewhere else and get that bonus. You were playing with more than two players, and that were to happen, the first player that was displaced could not then
place their overseer where another player already was, creating a chain reaction of displacement. They would have to pick an open spot. Now, I'm going to move this off so there's a little more space on the board to demonstrate a few other things. Then, at the end of the round, after everyone has drafted all three dice and they have moved their overseer, then all of your milk will start to spoil. And it doesn't matter if your milk is pasteurized or not pasteurized, it will move down one space on your player board and should it ever move off the board, then it goes into your trash pile down here, which will be worth -3 points per trash at the end of the game. Now that we understand the overview of the turn, let's talk about the actions in particular. First action we're going to talk about is the pasteurize action.
In this action, you are taking your raw milk, pasteurizing it to make pasteurized milk. And so when that happens, you will drop it down to the pasteurized section and move it all the way back to the left side, meaning it will be longer before that milk spoils. And to be clear, even if it was all the way over here and I took that action, it would move all the way back over here. The number of milk that you get to pasteurize is directly related to the strength of the action that you've placed. So, if I had placed this die here with the two facing that way, I could pasteurize two milk like so. Next action is the cutting curd action. And for that action, what you will do is, again, depending on the strength So in this case, if the three was facing the cut curd action, I could then move three milk from my milk storage over into the basic cheese right here. Now, I can't just do that. It is a one-to-one cost of milk and rennet. So, if I had three and I wanted to move three, I would spend my three rennet and my three milk would move over to here.
If, let's say, I had some milk up here and my two over here, I could still do three one rennet with this one would move it to here and the other two would move it to here. Once you have gotten down to pasteurized, you can never go back to unpasteurized raw milk. Next action is the press action. This is what allows you to go from fresh cheese to soft cheese to firm cheese. And so, for the first press, again, turned by your strength value. So, again, in this case, I have a six facing there, so I could do this six times. I could go one to put it there, two to get that one there, three, four, five, six, if I so chose. And now I have three firm cheese, one of that is a raw milk firm cheese, and two that are pasteurized firm cheese.
Then you'll notice, no matter how many times you do your press, you do get waste, so I would take from the supply a single milk cube and put that into my trash. The next action is the refining action. And for each strength that you have, you can move one cheese from firm cheese over into the refined cheese, meaning you've added spices and flavors to it. So, in this case here, if my three is facing the refined, I can move my one, two, three over. Though, it is a one-to-one cost with spices, so I'd have to spend these three and then all three of these would then move over and now I have two pasteurized refined cheese and one raw milk refined cheese. The next action is dispose of waste. And then whatever your strength that's facing there is, in this case four, you can dispose of one piece of trash out of your trash bin. In this case, I only have one, so I could get rid of all of them, but but if I had more, I could discard up to four.
Next, we're going to talk about the zeppelin action. But before we can talk about the Zeppelin action, and there are two of them, there is the top and bottom Zeppelin action, we have to talk about your assistants down here. So, when you're going to take a Zeppelin action, or or as we'll discuss in a moment, a movement on the assistant board action, you will have to send one of your assistants off of your board. And as you can see here, depending on how many assistants you have out at the end of the game, which you can note by the blue ribbon instead of the red ribbon, red ribbon points are immediate and blue ribbon points are at the end of the game, however many you have out at the end of the game, will gain you extra points. However, there's also a cost for each one that you send out onto the board.
So, if I were to take the Zeppelin action with a strength of three, I would take my leftmost assistant, I would pay five coins, and then I could send it out to the Zeppelin board. And the Zeppelin board works as follows. Depending on whether you have taken the Zeppelin top or Zeppelin bottom action, you will move along the top or bottom of the Zeppelin. And you can move either direction up to the strength value that you placed. So, if you recall, we said we had a strength value of three. The first movement takes you to here. Then you get to move along, as I said, the top or the bottom. So, with my three, top, I would then go two, three. And every space that you pass through or stop on, you gain that reward. So, in this case, I would gain two spices. Well, had I gone on the bottom, I would gain one spice, and I would have to pay a coin.
Now, if at any time you have two of your assistants out, and they end on top and bottom, not only will you gain what you pass through and landed on, but you'll also gain the bonus in the middle of the Zeppelin track as well. And at any time you can say, "I'm going to take my assistant back and put it back on your player board." Thus giving you access to it again, but next time you send the assistants out, you will have to pay their cost again. And whenever you bring an assistant back, you put it in the furthest right spot on your board, like so. The next action is the movement on the assistant track. And so again, we'll note that my strength here is five. Which means I will be able to take an assistant off my player board again, paying whatever cost is listed, and then place it anywhere I want on either the outer track of the assistant board or the inner track of the assistant board.
And then, just like with the Zeppelin track, additional strength gives you movements around the track. The outer track goes counterclockwise. And anything you land on or pass through, you'll gain. While traveling on the inner track, which is clockwise, you'll see that you'll be gaining renit as you go around. And just like with the Zeppelin track, if you ever end on both sides of a bonus, you'll gain that bonus immediately. And just like with the Zeppelin, at any time, you can retrieve your assistants and they go back on your player board. Though the next time you put them out, you will have to pay the cost again. And I will note that when you are receiving the bonus, it is based off of the multiplier there. So in this case, if I had an assistant here and here, I would gain seven spice. If however the multiplier space or the bonus space is empty, you get no bonus.
So in that case, like this, I would gain no bonus, nor would I gain a bonus if I was here. Next we have rotate the wheel. And so again, you look at the strength, in this case strength of one. I could then rotate this wheel one space, changing the multipliers. And if that movement happened to cause my assistants to line up on either side of a bonus, and there is multiplier, I would get that reward. Next, we have acquiring orders and blueprints. And again, you'll look at what your strength is, in this case, four. And then I get to go to the market board, and I have four points that I can spend in order to purchase orders and new machinery blueprints. Over here at our market, we'll see that there is two things that you can buy. You can buy orders, and you can buy blueprints. And if we remember, my strength was four. So, I can either buy these cards down here, which have a base value of one for each of them, or I can buy these up here, which have their base value written on them, in this case, 3 3 2 2 2. Then, when you look at the cost, you take what that base value is, again, one for all the orders, or two or three for all of these, and multiply it by the tag in between. So, in this case, the orders would cost 1 2 2 3 3, while the machines would cost 2 4 4 9 9. So, in that case, maybe I decided
that I wanted to get a single order that cost me four, or perhaps I wanted to get this order that cost me one, and then this machine which cost me two, and then I would have one as a remainder. Then, at the end of your turn, everything would slide down one space, like so, and then you would refill from the supply. You may have noticed that some of these actions cost more than six, which is in theory the highest number you can get. However, some of the machines give bonus value to the actions that you take, and there are also some bonus tiles that may increase that. They have the complete orders. And for each strength that you have, you can complete one order. I will also point out that if you spend at least three strength, in addition to completing an order, you will then gain a bonus tile at random. And if you have at least a strength of six, you will gain two bonus tiles. Again, we'll talk about how these get used in just a moment. I will also point out that you can actually take this action even if you complete no orders in order just to get these bonus tiles. And then to complete the order, you must do the top part of the order. So, in this case, three pasteurized firm cheese. And that would gain me 12 points and three bucks. But then I could also optionally spend, in this case, three firm raw milk cheese, which would gain me another 12 points and another three bucks.
Some orders will only have one option, and some orders will have a bonus on the bottom which you can use specifically when you're using other actions as a bonus to that action. And when you use it, you simply flip it over cuz it is a one-time use per game. I will also point out that at the end of the game, there is a set collection bonus for the orders that you've completed, but we'll talk about how that works at the end of the game. Next, we have the modifying machine action. In this case, you take one of the blueprints that you've acquired from the market. If you recall earlier, we acquired this one. And then you can replace any of the machines on any of the actions, with the exception of the one that you are currently using right now. And so, you simply take that other action, and then you replace it like so.
Then, in addition to that, from your player board, you'll take one of your ownership markers. And again, there's a cost to each one, and as a reminder, on the overseer track, there was the ability to get a discount on these. And then you would place that on the board next to the machine part that you just placed. Now, on future turns, if another player takes this action that's owned by me, I would then gain a bonus of either a milk, a rennet, a coin, a spice, or a victory point. If at a later time a player decides they would like to replace this action, then I would regain my ownership token. It would go back onto my board, and the other player would place their ownership marker out, like so. It's important to note that in almost all instances, every time you take a ownership marker off your board, you will have to pay the price. I will also point out at the end of the game, depending on how many you have out on the board, you will gain extra points.
And that covers all the main actions. As you can see, the blueprints that you can acquire do various things. The level threes are usually going to allow you to take two different actions at the same time. While level twos will either give you a bonus on a basic action or give you a choice of two different actions. Now, I've mentioned bonus actions several times. When you have bonus tiles on your turn, you can choose to play a single bonus tile. You can either take that tile and simply use it for the action for yourself, or you can attach it to another action on the board. So, for example, I could attach it right here, like so, or perhaps up here. Now, as you can see, there's only space for one tile to be next to an active machine. So, if another player at a later time wants to, they could remove that one and place a new tile here, like so. And that means when you take the machine action, you also get to take the bonus action. I will also note that it is possible to place a bonus action onto either of the other two boards in the game, like so or like so. Whenever you place a bonus action out onto the board where another player could potentially benefit from it, you'll gain one victory point.
And if you place a bonus action out onto the board where there is another player's ownership token, you'll gain two victory points. The final thing to point out are the achievements that have been out on the that were available at the beginning of the game. On your turn, if you've accomplished any of these goals, for example, having 16 milk or having 16 spices, then at the end of your turn, you can take one of your ownership markers for free and place it out onto the board. These are first come, first serve, so the first person to accomplish it will get in more points at the Now, let's just say at the end of turn six, this is the state of my player board. Now, let's just say at the end of turn six, this is the state of my player board. This is the state of the achievements, and I finished the game with 20 points.
And I had completed all of these different orders. The first thing that happens is any milk that has not been turned into cheese will spoil and goes into trash. For each piece of trash, you lose three points. So, in this case, I would lose nine points. Next, you turn all of your remaining cheese into money. So, every fresh cheese is worth one. So, in this case, I would gain four. Every soft cheese gains two. So, in this case, I would gain another four.
And then every hard cheese gives you three. So, in this case, I would gain six. And then finally, every refined cheese gains you four. So, in this case, I would gain 12. All your rennet and spices are good for nothing at the end of the game. Then, for every five coins, you gain a point. So, in this case, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Take me back up to 18 points. Then I'll look and see how many points I gained for my assistance, in this case two, four.
And my ownership tokens, two, four, eight, 12. Then I look at my orders and see how many sets I have completed. And you're looking for sets of different types. So, in this case, I have a full set of five different orders. And so, that will get me 28 more points, putting me up to 62 points. Once you cross over the 50, you collect a plus 50 token like so. If you have a set of four cards, you gain 16 points, and a set of three different cards is worth six points. Anything smaller than that will net you nothing. So, unfortunately for me, if I had this, which is just two different colors, I'd gain nothing else.
I will also point out that these objectives you score immediately upon obtaining that objective, as it is a red ribbon as opposed to the blue ribbon. I'll also point out that if you circle again, you would gain a plus 100 token. Then you see who has the most points, and they are the winner. And that's how this game works. So, hopefully you now have a good understanding of how to play this game. You can also find down in the description a link to my preview of this game, where you can find out my thoughts on the game. And if you want to see the game in action, you can check out my play through, which is also down in the description. So, there you have it, folks. As always, if you found this video useful, please like, subscribe, share, maybe become a channel member. As always, thank you so much for watching. Have a wonderful, wonderful day.