Automobiles: Racing Season feels like a Monkey’s Paw type of expansion. It’s something you thought you really wanted, but when it comes to fruition, you’re left with regrets. You see, this expansion adds 3 more maps, and a Grand Prix mode where you carry over your cubes from race to race, plus individual player powers and in-between race abilities in the form of sponsors.

Now, I’ve already covered Automobiles in-depth (in fact, Automobiles was one of the first reviews I ever wrote), but for those who need it, here’s a quick rundown: Automobiles is a bag building racing game. Each turn, players pull cubes from their bags, and use those cubes to propel their cars around the track. The white, greys, and black cubes are straightforward and present in every race, they move you one space on their associated colour. The colourful dice have variable powers that you set at the start of the race, and do vary pretty wildly, offering some nice replayability, as a different set of cards will make your race feel quite different. The base game also came with 2 different maps for a bit more variety from game to game.

The new tracks and action cards that Automobiles: Racing Season adds can be folded into the base game with no concern for complexity or bloat. Even the driver cards are fairly simple in execution, now each player gets a player power at the start of the race they can use ones per turn. The real meat of the expansion comes in the season campaign.

The season campaign has players carrying over their bag of cubes from one race to another to see who can score the most points over a series of races. Players still pick a driver at the start of the racing season, but once the driver and action cards have been decided, they’re locked in place for the duration of the season. In between races, players can pick a sponsor to help modify their bag of cubes before going onto the next race. Some will prioritize removing wear cubes, while others will let you remove some and add others.

It sounds like everything I wanted in an expansion, but the more I’ve played it, the more frustrated I’ve felt with this set-up. Some of the player powers, specifically the ones that just let players draw extra cubes, feel a lot more helpful than others. Having the action cards being locked for the whole season make sense, but it rips the variability away from the game in general. If one player gets ahead in the first few races, it can be quite challenging to catch up to them.

Perhaps the worst part of all, is the limited nature of the cubes. I’ve found that more often than not, by the end of the first or second race, the majority of the cubes have already been bought, making it quite impossible to modify your racing strategy for future races. You’re stuck with the bag you’ve built, hope it works for all races. This also nerfs the between race sponsers, as the ones that give you a chance to get more cubes are simply less helpful than the ones that will clear the wear out of your bag.

I’ve been playing a lot of Automobiles on Board Game Arena lately, playing a season with each of the recommended action card sets, and some of them are really not geared toward this style of play. In one season, the purple cubes had the ability to remove up to 3 cubes, then add one back in. As I said before, every cube was purchased, aside from the useless yellow and the brown wear cubes, so each purple cube is taking 3 wear out and adding one back in. Near the end of the fourth race, all of our cars had more wear than would have been possible in a physical game, and ensuring that each car could only move one or two spaces each round.

I’m not quite sure how I’d recommend fixing this experience. Locking the action cards and carrying over your bag from race to race makes sense, and it should create a sense of momentum, but in reality, it just saps the variability away, making the 3rd, 4th, and 5th race in the season a dull experience of just running the bag you’ve built and trying to come in first. The mid-game sponsors are comparatively boring, and the driver cards are unbalanced, making it feel a little unfair for one player to hold the best one for 5 races in a row.

Perhaps most importantly, racing games have come a long way in the past 10 years. Restoration Games released Downforce in 2017, which gives players the ability to control all the cars with betting being the way for players to win, Thunder Road: Vandetta is ostensibly a race, albeit a violent one, and a race that ends with one car standing more often than a car passing the finish line. 2022’s Heat: Pedal to the Metal garnered a ton of praise the year it released, and one that I keep meaning to go back to. All of these games do a better job of instilling the feeling of a race, the feeling of momentum, and the excitement of that nail-biting finish

Automobiles: Racing Season ultimately feels like it’s a lap too long. The new tracks and action cards are excellent additions and easily worth mixing into the base game. But once you step into the marquee Season mode, the excitement sputters out. What should feel like a grand championship instead drags into a grind, where you’re stuck with the same bag for race after race, and your ability to modify it is totally diminished.

Automobiles remains a clever and underrated racing game that I’ll happily keep returning to, but the Racing Season expansion doesn’t add fuel to the engine. It’s the kind of expansion that sounds thrilling on paper, but when the rubber hits the road, it only makes me want to pack the new maps and action cards into the base box, and leave the rest behind.