Jumbled jalopy

Horseless Carriage is set back at the dawn of the automobile. Back when car designers were still deciding what needed to be on a car. Brakes, for instance, weren’t necessarily seen as a necessity. The main part of the game sees you laying out your factory floors in a tight, congested tile-placement problem. Each of your mainlines (the spots on the factory floor where the cars are assembled) needs to be connected to a station where a thing is added to it. Doors, brakes, engines, radiators – even the paint job – these can all be added to the cars you create if you can link them orthogonally to the correct side of a mainline. Each station can be connected to multiple mainlines too, if you manage to link to them.

The problem you’ll very quickly learn is that space on the factory floor is very limited. It can be really tricky to find the space you need. Space optimisation and planning is crucial. Not just important – crucial. Delbert Wilkins levels of crucial (ask your parents). The real kick in the teeth is knowing that once you’ve decided what goes where in the factory, you cannot move it. Not ever. Nor can you remove something to make space for something else. Once something’s bolted down it stays there. At the end of each planning phase you have to add another extension board to your factory, which just presents you with another set of tough choices while you decide which direction you want to expand into.

Each piece you add to a car is colour-coded, with each colour representing a selling feature, like reliability, safety etc. Different customers of the sales board demand different numbers of each feature, so to make the big bucks you need to make sure your cars deliver enough of those features. It’s not enough to just to make the cars, you also need to market and sell them too. How do you do this? You add dealerships and marketing departments. The fly in the ointment is that dealerships need to be adjacent to a mainline too, but dealerships are big and take up lots of space. Space that you want to use for stations to add things to your cars.

If you think games like Isle of Cats, A Feast For Odin, or even Barenpark are tricky tile-placement puzzles, then you ain’t seen nothing yet. Horseless Carriage is a harsh, unforgiving mistress. Too harsh? Depends how much you like agonising over every single placement you make. The factories feel so small sometimes. It’s less ‘knife fight in a phone booth’ and more ‘just-in-time supply chain and logistics in a phone booth’.

Brain not fried yet? We can fix that.

The spatial planning of the factory could genuinely be a game on its own. It’s not far off from what’s happening in Fit To Print (review here) for the entire game. As you might expect though, this is Splotter, and they’ve got a few more tricks up their sleeve.

The biggest part of the shared main board is the Market Board which represents your potential customers and their demands. Some of the spaces are populated by a neutral deck, but each player gets to choose where new demand will spring from in each round of the game too. Customers’ x and y positions on the grid indicate their demand based on the the current spec axes for the round. In one round you might have people who just want a little reliability and safety, while in the next their might be people who insist on higher standards for the cars’ range and design. Your own factory’s production is measured by how many features matching these specs you can deliver, so there’s plenty of foresight required when you conduct research.

Oh yeah, research. Another part of the puzzle. You can add research depts to your boards to move your company’s marker up each of the spec tracks, increasing the variety of stations you can add to your factory, hopefully meeting market demand later in the game. There’s a shared track on the main board which represents two ends of a scale. If you’re on the left of it at the Engineering end you get first dibs when it comes to choosing from the limited stations on offer to make your cars. You also get to use technologies which players other than you have researched, which is pretty awesome. You could even spend your own research points on moving someone else’s markers, just because you know you’ll have access to it.

The other end of that track is for Sales. The further to the right you are on it, the sooner you get to sell your Wacky Races cars to the unsuspecting public. Demand is limited, so getting the first chance to sell to the people who want the most expensive cars can be really important. A double-edged blade and no mistake. Do you make the most of everyone else’s research and build your own awesome KITT car from Knight Rider, but risk only being able to sell them for buttons? Saving and spending the Gantt charts (again, produced in yet another station) your factory makes is the only way to influence your order in the track. It’s easy to overlook how important this is, but you’ll only make that mistake once.

Fiddlier than fixing a faulty fuse on a faithful Ford Focus

Horseless Carriage has a staggering number of pieces. 92 cards might not sound like a lot, but couple that with the nearly 500 wooden pieces, and then add the 629 cardboard pieces that you’ll have to punch from 19(!) sheets of punchboard, and you get an idea of what I’m talking about. Just setting the game up to play means making stacks and stacks of station tiles, and when you get further in the later reaches of the game the market board will be swimming with little wooden cars. In addition to this your factory boards start to spread and swamp your own bit of space at the table.

When your factories get really complex towards the end of the game you need to be so careful to not bump the table, or let your clothes brush across it as you reach across the board for something. It’s all too easy to act like your own personal Godzilla and lay waste to all your hard work, destroying your factory’s layout. The station tiles just sit atop thin, card factory boards. There’s nothing to keep them in place. I’ve honestly taken photos later in the game just so I can use them to rebuild the factories in case they get moved.

The same is true of the market board. All those little wooden cars wouldn’t be an issue if it weren’t for the market windows. These are thin, really nicely made (by Splotter standards) plastic frames that you drop onto the market board to indicate where your customers will come from. They look great and do the job, but they’re difficult to manouevre and take back off the board without bumping and moving the cars, which are packed tight in the squares.

My final moan about all of this stuff is the spec boards. Each player has a wooden piece showing how far they’ve researched that thing, but with each new round one of these boards has to be moved away from the main board, and a replacement brought in. It’s too easy to bump one and send the pieces sliding, which again can be a real problem if you don’t know where everyone was on each board.

It’s all just an unnecessary distraction during a game which will already strain your mental aptitude to its limits.

Final thoughts

Horseless Carriage is a really tricky game for me to try to deliver a verdict on. I love a heavy, complicated game with interlocking gears and mechanisms, but at times this one almost feels like too much. The puzzle of filling the factory floor is really enjoyable, but tracing which thing connects to which other thing, making sure all the relevant tech markers are in the right place, and ascertaining what specs your finished cars have can be hard work. When you get it right, which takes time, it’s a deeply satisfying experience. When you get it wrong and realise you’ve stuffed up your chances of building anything decent until you get more factory boards in the following rounds, it can be really disheartening. That’s Splotter though, right? You know what you were getting into when you sat down to play.

The sheer amount of stuff in the box is just incredible. Good luck trying to get it all back in the box and have the lid shut flush. There are nowhere near enough baggies provided, which doesn’t help. I even ordered a set of trays to organise it from Cube4Me (who are excellent, by the way) and it’s still as ready to burst as my shirt buttons after Christmas dinner. If you want to play it before you buy, you can play an excellent version over on onlineboardgamers.com.

Horseless Carriage is a game which, with the right group of people, is an amazing experience. It’s heavy, it’s complex, there’s plenty of meta stuff happening with turn order and waiting to see who does what, and what’s left over, much like in Food Chain Magnate. Even after four plays I still don’t think I’ve scratched the surface of the strategy available in the game, but I can’t claim that as fact. It’s just the feeling I get from having seen how different each game has developed. The intro game where you all just build cars is a good way to learn, but it really comes to life when you add in the mainlines for trucks and sports cars too.

The part of the game which is the most fun is also the biggest deviation from the hard-fought, interactive nature of the game. Building your factory is cool, but it results in an intensely quiet period of the game where everyone has their head down, concentrating, and occasionally swearing under their breath. It’s not until everyone comes up for air and you see the results of all that planning and hard work that the interaction springs to life. Could that have been avoided? Probably not. It’s a game that takes the push and shove of FCM and throws in a geometric puzzle that’ll leave your brain in bits.

If you don’t enjoy heavy games, especially ones that’ll drag you over the coals the first couple of times you play, you won’t have a good time with Horseless Carriage. If you can invest the time and effort and have a group who dig that sort of thing too, you’ll be hard-pressed to find something better. A very clever game, an excellent game which asks its players to invest in it to truly appreciate it.

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

Horseless Carriage (2023)

Design: Jeroen Doumen, Joris Wiersinga
Publisher: Splotter Spellen
Art: Jan Lipiński
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 180-240 mins

The post Horseless Carriage Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Not all those who wander are lost

The premise of Trekking Through History is pretty out there. You’re tasked with going on a three-day tour of human history in a time machine. No biggy. To make things easier on the ol’ time machine, you’re trying to visit each year in chronological order, so you head back as far as you dare, and then step forward through history. If you ever need to go backwards, that ‘trek’ is over, and you have to start a new one. As you might have guessed, longer treks score more points, so ending treks isn’t ideal.

Choosing where – or more accurately, when – you go to is as easy as choosing a card from the central market and adding it to your splayed collection of cards. That on its own would be pretty dull, so instead the game offers you these cool plastic experience tokens for taking cards. Some come from the card you choose, and others from the slot you took it from in the market. The tokens fill in spaces on your Itinerary sheets, which get swapped out after each day (round) is complete. Fill in the correct spots on your itinerary sheets to get points and time crystals.

So now you’ve got headache of choosing not only a card which fits into your trek nicely, you also want to maximise the benefits from collecting and placing the experience tokens too. On top of that, each card you take also has a number of hours printed on it, and you’re forced to move your counter around the clock that many spaces. Bigger rewards generally mean better bonuses, but it’s always the player furthest back on the clock that takes the next turn, so it’s possible to take cards which keep you at the back, giving you consecutive turns.

Not as easy as it first seemed, eh?

Collect moments, not things

One of the things I really like about Trekking Through History is the amount of care and attention that’s been lavished on it. It would’ve been easy to make the cards have a cursory title and date, and not really get into the detail of the place/time you’re visiting each time. Instead, the back of each card has a proper explanation of the event you choose, giving some flavour and context to what would otherwise be a very abstract trip.

For example, the 500BCE card is titled Drink “hot chocolate” with the Mayans, and it gives some nice background to it. I now know that the Mayans didn’t drink their chocolate hot, it was served cold, but the addition of chilli peppers certainly made it taste hot! From travelling the Silk Road in the 13th-century with Marco Polo, right through to tearing down the berlin wall in 1989, many of the world’s important times and events are covered. I really appreciate it when a game’s designers take the time to add this level of colour and flavour.

The moments from the game aren’t the only ones I’ve been collecting. It’s been one of the few games that my whole family universally enjoys. My son doesn’t have the patience for games that drag on, and my wife doesn’t like it when games start ramping up the complexity. To have this game which plays out pretty quickly and is really easy to not only teach, but also understand, means we’ve been able to enjoy more time playing together, as a family. That’s worth a lot to me.

Hidden depth

I’ve made Trekking Through History sound like a light game, and it is, but that’s not to say there isn’t plenty in here for a hardened gamer to enjoy. Deciding how to fill your itinerary and weighing up turn order against the cards on offer is plenty to get your brain chewing over. The time crystals I mentioned earlier are a great tactical asset. When you take a card and move your stopwatch counter around the clock face, you can subtract one from the total movement for each crystal you spend, down to a minimum of 1. It makes for some really interesting combo opportunities.

It’s true that it’s another of those games where you’re at the mercy of the cards that come out of the deck and the order they come out, but it’s not as bad as it could be. Each day has its own deck, and a reference sheet which tells you which dates are available in each deck. This proved to be priceless during our games, because planning your trek out is really dependent on what’s possible. You don’t want to try to keep stringing out a trek in the hope of a later date, only to find there aren’t any in that particular deck.

Once you’ve played a couple of times, I recommend opening the little Time Warp packet inside the box and adding those tiles into the game. They just spice things up a bit with a random choice of additional rules or actions each day, and it’s enough to elevate the game from ‘by the numbers’ to something with a little more bite.

Final thoughts

When the folks at Underdog Games asked me to take a look at Trekking Through History, I was keen, but seeing the low Weight rating on BGG (1.8 at the time of writing) made me wonder if I’d get much out of it. I am very happily surprised. I taught myself how to play with a two-handed game, which is the way I usually learn, and after just ten minutes I knew that I really liked the game, and I knew that I wanted to get other people to play.

The whole game feels like the deluxe edition of a standard game, with the custom plastic tokens, stopwatches, and GameTrayz insert, which is a great feeling in a game that costs £36/$40. The artwork is great throughout, with bright, vivid colours, and the various tokens tracks all have unique symbols too, to make them colourblind-friendly.

If your group likes things on the lighter end of the board game complexity spectrum, or you have a family who enjoy playing together, I highly recommend Trekking Through History. If you’re only really interested in heavy games, or games with no degree of randomness in them, it’s not for you. For the rest of us, however, it’s a great addition to our collections, which happily sits alongside Ticket To Ride and The Quacks of Quendlinburg (review here) on my family games shelf.

Review copy kindly provided by Underdog Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Trekking Through History (2022)

Design: Charlie Bink
Publisher: Underdog Games
Art: Eric Hibbeler
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Trekking Through History Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Rather than enlisting the design services of Messrs. Turczi & Tascini, this time around the game comes from the brain of Punchboard favourite, Fabio Lopiano. His hallmark as far as I’m concerned is creating games that are tight, tricky, and always feel like they end a turn or two too soon. Both Ragusa (review here) and Merv (review here) did this, and I really enjoyed both of them.

The premise of Zapotec is pretty standard Euro fare. Players are building buildings and pyramids in ancient Central America, by gathering resources and making an engine more efficient than the rest. Play an action card from your hand, take turns in numerical order, rinse and repeat. What makes it interesting is the clever way your player boards, buildings, and cards interact.

Tic-tac-toe

The action cards you play to start each round have a clever triple use. The number on each dictates turn order, as I mentioned above, and the icon in the middle dictates whereabouts on the board you can build. That initiative system for turn order is a nice treat, usually reserved for the likes of Gloomhaven, and it introduces some fun mind games. The final use for each card comes into play on your player board, and in Zapotec, those are the bones with the most meat on them.

Yes, they’re those cheap, thin, gloss player boards which are unfortunately all too commonplace now. Nevertheless, the tiles you take from the board when you build, are slapped into spaces on a 3×3 grid on your board, à la Noughts & Crosses / Tic-tac-toe. Each row and column in the grid has one of the three resources next to it, and on the top of your chosen action card, you’ll find one of those resources.

Find a row or column that matches your resource, and activate every building along it. Boom – resources-a-go-go! If, that is, you’ve made clever choices about which tiles you build, and where. This is easily my favourite aspect of the game, it’s a proper little puzzle, and you can try out different combinations each time you play, which is something I always appreciate in a game.

Timeshare pyramids

While the majority of the game is spent with your brain squishing itself into submission, trying to work out the best efficiencies from your buildings, there is some player-to-player interaction. Pyramids are the order of the day, and on the side of your player board you’ll find some chunky pyramid pieces. They’re really nice sculpts which lock together really satisfyingly. Starting a pyramid on the main board is no guarantee that you’ll be the person to finish it, as the other players can chip in and add a layer of their own colour if you give them a chance.

While the pyramids are a nice touch, I think too much of the budget for the game went on them. The slippy player boards feel cheap, and the game’s resources are all just cardboard chits. I’d have been just as happy with cardboard layers for the pyramids if it meant a double-layer player board. Talking of building pyramids, that takes me onto one of the biggest disconnects I found with the game and the setting.

Euros aren’t exactly renowned for having a tight theme, but we accept that some themes are pasted-on. In Zapotec though, the game never tells you who you’re meant to be, as a player. I’m not sure if I represent a tribe, a noble, royalty, or whatever. I thought I’d maybe just glossed over it when I read the rules, so I went back and checked, and sure enough, it never actually tells you. Of course, it doesn’t really matter, but it makes that part of the teach where you start with “In this game we’re xxxxx and we’re trying to be the best at xxxxxx”, impossible.

Gone too soon

I have an odd relationship with Fabio Lopiano. More accurately, I have an odd relationship with his games. I really enjoy playing his designs, and I’m sure it’s intentional, but they often feel like they end prematurely. It’s like you get to that point where your engine is finely tuned and just about to reward you with untold loot, aaaand the game ends. I’m trying to think of an analogy that’s not as rude as the one which immediately comes to mind. The man’s a massive tease!

There are only five rounds in the entire game, which turns it into an efficiency race. Zapotec isn’t a game where you can really min-max, because of the nature of buildings and resources, and the way they combine. It pits everyone in a race to build pyramids, move up the sacrifice track, and complete any rituals (shared objectives) on display.

That all feels at odds with the usual Board&Dice Euro games, which offer up a veritable point salad, with lots of tracks to climb, and a feeling of not being able to do all of the things, so focus on a few. If you come into Zapotec expecting that, you might be disappointed. This is a much tighter puzzle of a game, with laser-sharp focus on direct competition for the few things on offer.

Final thoughts

I could have handled this review differently and steered away from comparisons from the rest of the Board&Dice stable. Each game deserves critique on its own merits, after all. There’s an expectation though, built on the back of the reputation of the T series (you can read reviews of Teotihuacan and Tawantinsuyu here, and here respectively), and a good review should tell you whether you can expect to enjoy a game or not.

Here’s the thing. Zapotec is a good game. It’s a really good game. I really like Fabio’s games, and Zapotec sits just under Merv and just above Ragusa for me. It’s just a slightly different direction for Board&Dice, and I like that they’re making games with different designers. Zapotec is a tight, clever puzzle, and the satisfaction you’ll get from generating loads of stuff from your carefully planned player board is fantastic. The solo mode is really good, and very easy to run.

Zapotec is a great option if you’ve found the T games too heavy, and too complicated. It’s bang in the middle of middleweight in terms of complexity, and because it only has five rounds, you’ll easily have time to setup, play, and pack away in a ninety-minute session. I don’t really like the disjointed feeling of the plastic pyramid pieces and wooden buildings and markers, and I wish the player boards didn’t feel as cheap as they do. However, for a game that costs under £30 (+ shipping) at the time of writing, Zapotec is a bargain, and a very easy recommendation for me to make.

Review copy kindly provided by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Zapotec is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Zapotec (2022)

Designer: Fabio Lopiano
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Zbigniew Umgelter, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60 mins

The post Zapotec Review appeared first on Punchboard.