Steampunk Rally review
Steampunk Rally is a drafting/dice-rolling and placement/racing game from Roxley games. The main idea of the game is that you are a turn of the century inventor building a contraption to race other inventors around the Swiss Alps (or on a track in Paris.) You draft cards to get parts for your machine, dice to power your machine, or cogs to help repair your machine. You roll dice to see what part of the contraption you can activate. The contraptions moves along the track. Finally you check to see how much damage you take.
It sounds like a lot of things are happening and when you watch a game you may get lost quickly. Game play is simultaneous. No waiting and watching here; you work on your invention and race at the same time.
There is some order to the chaos, the game is broken down into four phases:
Draft phase
You take one of the four types of cards and make a hand. Select a card and play it then pass the cards in the direction of the game play token (either clock or counter-clock wise.) After you play four cards, you have finished the draft phase. Cards are either: added to your contraption, discarded to gain cogs. discarded to gain dice, or kept in order to play later (if it’s a boost card.) There are several copies of each card so spending a coal burner this turn doesn’t mean you won’t see another coal burner card for the rest of the game. You’ll see another one, probably two. There are enough cards to see variety. You won’t see the same three parts over and over again. After only a few plays it seems well balanced.
Vent phase
Dice you play on your invention stay. Let’s say you used steam (blue dice) to drive your wheels last turn. Those steam dice are still stuck there on the contraption until you vent them. You can’t just keep tossing steam at that part of the machine without proper maintenance. Cogs are spent during the vent phase to clean and grease and generally fix up a part. 2 pips worth of maintenance happens for each cog spent. It’s a nice way of balancing out powerful machine parts that need high numbers (5’s and 6’s) to activate. Great, you use the time machine to get shielding and cogs but it’s going to take a lot of cogs during the next vent phase to reset the time machine back to working order.
Race phase
This is where the fun is. You roll any dice you picked up in the draft and you activate parts of your invention. Some parts move you; others generate dice; still others give you cogs or shield you from damage or even vent dice for you. The key for me is to try to build a machine that can with one set of dice (red for example) generate other dice and cogs while using those newly generated dice to move.
Damage phase
You take damage as you move around the track or if you activate certain parts or use boost cards. That damage is recorded on a counter and in the damage phase you lose parts equal to the number of damage taken. You can generate shields using certain parts that soak the damage. If you lose all your parts you explode and get sent to last place. You never get completely kicked out of the game.
Tips
Spend some time building your machine. If you move right away you can wind up exploded rather suddenly. My first game I was Ada Lovelace and I got a fist full of steam dice and tried to jump out ahead only to explode since I took three damage and had only one part to lose. My second game I took more time constructing the machine and then started out down the track. I didn’t explode that game and won by coasting two space past my opponent.
I find it helpful to plan a turn for a specific activity. Example: this turn I’m collecting cogs to vent since my contraction is packed full of spent dice –or– this turn I’m going to move as much as possible since I’m sitting on a +3 shield value. I haven’t found a way to do a bunch of venting and racing on the same turn, but perhaps I haven’t found the sweet spot between collecting cogs and grabbing dice yet.
Conclusion
It’s fun! After three or four turns you pick up on the phases and learn the symbols. They are easy to follow and there’s a helpful card for player reference. By the end of the game everyone I’ve played with is working their vent and race phases on their own. It’s exciting to see the machine you’ve cobbled together generate dice and cogs and move along the track. There’s something in this game for everyone. Drafting, rolling dice, placing dice (aka worker placement), resource management (collecting and spending cogs) and racing. All the mechanics work together to make the game go and none of them felt as an extraneous addition (i.e. “Quick! toss in drafting to attract 7 Wonders fans who cares if it doesn’t make sense for the game, <insert marketing jerk laughter here>”) There is hardly any down time and a little analysis paralysis when selecting cards or picking the order of machine parts to activate but it hasn’t made the game unfun or overly slow.
This is rapidly becoming my favorite game!