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.

Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory might just be one of the best games I’ve ever played. That said, I’m not sure I’d recommend it to most people.

Ooh, the drama and clickbaityness of an opening paragraph like that. Get me, being all cool and edgy. The next 1500ish words will hopefully explain what I mean and by the end of it you’ll know whether it’s a game you should be considering or not.

Pure class

Hegemony is a game about leading your class in society to victory. You play in an unnamed country known as The Nation where things are turbulent. Between the Working Class, the Middle Class, the Capitalists and The State you try to get the nation back on its feet, but with things swung in your favour, so that you prevail at the expense of others. That’s right, it’s a heavy political game, one that’s positively dripping in theme and packed to the brim with substance.

It’s here where you’re likely to find your first sticking point. If you don’t have a group that enjoys heavy, intricately linked games, you won’t have a good time with Hegemony. Even if you do have a group that likes nothing more than the cerebral gymnastics that a good Lacerda game demands, if they avoid politics like the plague, Hegemony can be a hard sell. I speak from experience. I’ve been there.

“Hey guys, I’ve got this amazing game. It’s a game about politics and economics where you play as different classes in a society and try to swing tax, foreign trade and the Labour Market in your favour. Guys… Guys??”

Politics as the theme for a game sounds dry even to folks who like their games drier than a mouthful of cream crackers. This is despite many of us loving negotiation, income planning and trying to sway shared resources in our favour. And that’s what Hegemony boils down to at a mechanical level, but it’s hidden beneath a layer that many people have a strong aversion to.

This game is one of the few where I’ll break my own rule of thumb which says “Never try to force a game on someone if they don’t seem interested”, because when you actually play Hegemony you understand just how electric and dynamic the game truly is.

Not all are created equal

As I stated at the outset, each player chooses a different part of this fictional society to represent. The capitalists want to make money. They open companies to produce goods which can be sold to make money. Who works in those companies though? Well, that’d be the working class, who also want to make sure that they have access to basic essentials like education and healthcare. The middle class sits between the two, seeking employment for its own workers, but also being able to open its own companies where the working class might like to ply their trade.

Sitting above all of this is the faceless State. They want to make money too, and what better way to do it than offering those needs that the working class has. Provided, of course, that the other classes aren’t competing in the private market to offer their own alternatives. Maybe offering tax breaks, or making healthcare and education free might force the working class to love you more, but at what cost?

See, when I explain it like that, you can see where the game lives. It lives and breathes in that competition. In the cracks between the classes, in the balance of what you want against what others need, and how you can best profit from it. Suffice to say then that Hegemony is a highly asymmetric game. In the same way that games like Root (read my review here) and COIN games like All Bridges Burning (another review here) have player roles which all play differently, Hegemony takes this concept and runs with it. If you play a game as the working class for example, you can’t expect to play as the capitalists in the next game without learning how to play all over again. The game’s structure remains the same, but your goals, your motivations, and your actions will be completely different.

Thus, hegemony is a game in which you invest. Not just in terms of the money you pay to buy the game, but in the time you spend learning each of the roles, and in the overall structure of the game. Players’ first games are an undertaking, and you can expect to spend the best part of an hour at least explaining it to someone going in blind. If you want to play a four-player game, clear your calendar for the next 4-5 hours. You’ll need it, I promise. I highly recommend – nay, insist – that you watch the Gaming Rules! tutorial and playthrough. Context truly is king in learning how to play, so you’ll understand the game much better by watching a tutorial.

Fabric

It’s incredible just how well the theme of the game is woven into it. Honestly, it’s just ridiculous. Given that the designers are Post-Grads in Politics and Economics, it shouldn’t be surprising (there’s a book included which explains this much better than me) but it is. Hegemony truly is the epitome of making an educational game fun. You’re playing a game and enjoying it, but the actions you’re taking, the policies you’re proposing and voting on, and the outcomes, all mirror real life. It’s modern society in microcosm, and it’s mind-blowing to me that this game even came into being.

There are little nods to modern games everywhere, which lacquers on some shiny fun to the dry structure that supports it. Take voting for example. At various points in the game, players have opportunities to add cubes of their faction’s colour to the voting bag. At the end of a round (unless immediately triggered) players vote on proposed changes to policy. The more cubes you have in the bag, the higher the likelihood of your colour being drawn and you getting the chance to choose how the vote goes. Then we’ve got cardplay too, not something you might expect to be in a political game. These represent different things happening out in the world, unexpected events, the unseen sucker punches the world likes to throw at society. Each faction has its own deck of cards which can be played for those events and actions on them, or discarded for standard actions.

What I love about Hegemony is how quickly that the assumption of a dry, dour theme evaporates. Once you’re a round into the game, you’ll be roleplaying, whether you expect to or not. I’ve watched the working class player shaking their fist at the middle class player. I’ve smugly sat giggling to myself when playing as the state while the puppets around the table danced to my tune. I’ve played as the capitalists and raked in money hand over fist while the other three squabbled over other things. There’s plenty of kill-the-king gameplay when a player starts stretching the lead and the rest of the table decide among themselves to do something about it. You find yourself so invested in the game that you don’t realise the hours passing, which is a good thing, as there are lots of hours in a game.

Final thoughts

Writing this review makes me want to go ‘Grrrr’ and shake my fists. I love Hegemony. I think it’s a masterpiece of a game. I want to play it more. I want other people to play it. Despite all of that, I can’t recommend it to a good number of the people reading this review. There’s a checklist of things you need to be able to tick before you pull the trigger. The easiest way to know would be to play someone else’s copy, but otherwise, you need to ask yourself these questions:

Does your group love heavy games?
Does your group like politics, or have enough apathy about it that you could talk them around?
Do you have 4-5 hours spare to play?
Do you mind re-learning a lot of the game each time you change factions?

If you can answer yes to all of those questions, then yes. A hundred times yes. You should buy Hegemony. You’ll love it. Considering how much game there is, the cost of around £60 is well worth it. You’d pay twice that for a Vital Lacerda game, and you’re talking about a comparable level of production quality, complexity, and future life in the box. The player aids are amazing, the rulebook does an exceptional job of breaking a complex game and theme down into digestible pieces. You can play it with fewer than four players, but it needs bots to play in place of missing people. Personally I wouldn’t play it with fewer than three, where the State is controlled by the game, but four players is where the game truly shines.

What about the rest of you? Am I saying definitely don’t even think about Hegemony? No, I’m not. I’m saying do some research. Watch the tutorial (or at least some of it) and playthrough I linked to above, read the rulebook, and watch other tutorials. Talk to people who’ve played the game. Even if you think it might be a convention game that you drag with you three or four times a year when Real Life gives you the time you need to play bigger games, you might still decide it’s worth it. Hegemony is an outstanding game, one I’ll hang on to for a very long time, even though there might be big gaps between plays.

You can buy Hegemony right now from my retail partner, Kienda. Click here to shop and remember to sign-up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% discount on your first purchase over £60.

Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory (2023)

Design: Vangelis Bagiartakis, Varnavas Timotheou
Publisher: Hegemonic Project Games
Art: Jakub Skop
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 200-300 mins

The post Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory Review appeared first on Punchboard.