A copy of Super Dice Battle was provided by the designer for the purposes of review
Super Smash Bros is a pretty integral part of my teenage years. Many hours were consumed duking it among my friends, be it on the N64, GameCube, or Wii. So when Super Battle Dice was pitched as an homage to Super Smash Bros, I was instantly intrigued. For what it’s worth, I’ve always been a Link main, and I’ve never been a “Final Destination, no items” type of player. I revel in the chaos the items bring.
If I’m being honest, 90% of the reason I keep the items on is specifically for the Home Run Bat. Hearing that sound when the bat cracks the opposing players, it makes my toes curl with joy.
-AHEM-, I’ve gotten off-topic. In Super Dice Battle, players take control of one of the four asymmetric characters, and engage in real time combo building. Using D8’s, you roll your dice, then you can commit one of those die results to one of your combos. Then, keep rolling your dice! When someone completes an attack combo, they shout out “COMBO!” to stop everyone else from rolling. They designate a target, roll the Combo dice to determine damage, the target has a chance to resolve a defense combo, if they have one queued up, then, play continues.
Super Dice Battle offers two victory conditions. Either, the first player to KO 3 other players, wins the duel. Or, in a stock battle, the last player standing, is the overall winner. And for those of you who abhor real time games (I don’t get it, but you do you), there is a slow mode where instead of rolling all your dice as fast as you can, players roll once, all commit together, then roll again once everyone is ready.
With games taking 5 to 10 minutes per brawl, Super Dice Battle is an easy game to play back to back. The frantic dice rolling has all players constantly engaged, and the tension grows with each passing second as the dice clatter over and over. You’ll see your opponent’s dice pools getting smaller and smaller as they assign the dice to their combos, until they’re rolling one die over and over again, trying to get a specific result.
Which is perhaps one of the main frustrations with Super Dice Battle. Your dice pool is limited to 4 dice. Most of the light combos only require two dice, with a third being used to augment the combo a little. Heavy combos require 3 dice, while the support and defense combos need 1 or 2 dice each. You can work towards building multiple combos at once, or socking away one of your dice on your defense skill, but you’ll find yourself stuck rolling one die over and over, trying to get a specific result.
But you don’t have to live so cautiously. Neglect your defenses and focus all your attention on the heavy attack combo to really sock it to your opponents. After all, no risk no reward, right?
However you choose to fight, the first person to complete an offensive combo shouts “COMBO!” and grabs the combo die, a large white die with a bunch of pips. Everyone has a moment to breathe while they commit their final roll, and then the attacking player designates their target, and rolls the combo die to determine how much damage they’re dishing out to their opponent. If your target has a defensive combo, they can trigger that, but once damage has been dealt, you make sure the target hasn’t exceeded its damage threshold, and the game continues.
The combo dice can range anywhere from devastating to ineffectual, depending on the result you roll and the combo you chose. Some combos will add damage for the spiked pips, while others, won’t.
Super dice battle seeks to emulate a real time fighting game using dice, but it feels like it’s running up against the limitations of the medium. It’s not uncommon for multiple players to have a defensive combo, then just take pot shots at each other until something changes. Sometimes in a larger player count game, there would be a cascade effect. One player would attack another, then before that player could reset their defensive combo, the other two would pile on, as it was the most efficient use of their dice. The restrictive dice pool ensures players can’t have all their combos filled at the same time, but it also results in players rolling a single die over and over and over, trying to hit a specific result.
I always recommend playing the real-time mode, as the turn based mode feels wrong for a game seeking to emulate a frantic brawl. On the subject of the frantic brawl, the COMBO call, which initiates the damage step, feels like a jarring halt. You go from rolling and evaluating as quickly as possible, to a still moment where you evaluate all your opponents situations, and then select your target based on a carefully calculated decision. The frantic feeling is lost at this moment, but thankfully everyone is back to rolling again soon enough. The asymmetric player abilities are both a boon and a bane. I love changing my characters and how different each one feels to pilot. But having wildly different abilities slows down that damage step as players squint to read what each other player can do, or how they can react or counter the incoming attack. The rulebook does tease more characters coming in the future, so look forward to that!
Part of me wishes there was more to Super Dice Battle. For a game seeking to emulate Smash Bros, I’d love it if there were some environmental obstacles to overcome, or items to give specific combos a bit of extra punch. But for every element you try to add, the bloat and complexity increases exponentially, and I’m not sure if it would result in a better game at the end of the day.
Super Dice Battle does manage to capture some of that chaotic, competitive energy that made late-night Smash sessions so memorable. But it also occasionally manages to get in its own way. The small dice pools and abrupt pauses can undercut the momentum it’s trying to build. Still, for a quick, rowdy filler that thrives on tension, Super Dice Battle manages to deliver plenty of rambunctious fun, provided you don’t mind a bit of die-rolling repetition in your game.
Those first 6 words of the rulebook set the stage for Last Will, designed by Vladamir Suchy and published by CGE in 2011. Taking the plot of 1985’s Bewsters Millions, your uncle, who has amassed a great fortune, realized on his deathbed that he never got to enjoy the fruits of his effort. So he’s provided each of his descendants a small sum, and challenged each one to live lavishly, as whomever is the best at spending money will inherit the rest of his fortune, and win the game.
All players start with the same amount of money, and each round, take turns choosing which initiative they want to claim. The earlier in turn order you want to go, the less cards, errand boys, and actions you’ll have to spend. But in a game about being the most efficient at blowing your cash, going first and getting the perfect card can be worth having less actions.
The cards you draw can be anything from companions and staff, whom you’ll want to accompany you on your events so you can rack up a bigger bill, to real estate that costs a fortune to maintain, or, can fall into disrepair forcing you to sell it at a loss, to one time events, to persistent events that you’ll be able to use round after round to drain your bank account.
The errands to choose from mostly consist of cards, including the more powerful event cards that are not in the regular decks, but also allows you to put your thumb on the scale of the real estate market, making some types of real estate more expensive to buy in a round, while making others less desirable, so they’ll sell for even less than their already bottoming price.
Beyond the errand boys, your player board and cards have will have a bunch of scarlet badges market with an A, to indicate that doing something costs you an action. Buying and selling houses, activating events, and hiring staff all take time, and therefore, cost an action. Again, the winner is the player who runs out of money first and declares bankruptcy. An important aspect to Last Will is that you cannot declare bankruptcy if you own an asset. While maintaining those houses may have been a great way to drain your cash reserves, you’ll need to sell the house and drain the proceeds from the sale if you want to claim victory here.
Last Will has a sense of levity that permeates the entire production. The art on the cards is whimsical and absurd. How much extra do you think you’d have to spend to bring your horse to the theatre? Well, in Last Will, the answer is £3. That sense of levity can fool players into a false sense of security, there are plenty of difficult decisions you’ll need to make in respect to timing and giving up actions to go earlier in the round.
The reverse scoring method also sounds simple, but it surprisingly breaks your brain in different ways. After hundreds of euro games, I’m conditioned to try and achieve the most amount of actions for the least amount of money. This was most confusing in the real estate market, when I couldn’t figure out if I wanted Farms to be more or less valuable for the round in which I wanted to offload my real estate investments.
There’s a fascinating pivot point in Last Will. The best way to lose money is via real estate, either by letting it depreciate round after round, or just by paying the obscene upkeep. But the houses that drain the most of your money also retain their value, and when you run out of cash, but still have a house, you can find yourself in a weird pinch. You don’t have the money to do anything, but you’re still a ways away from being bankrupt, and selling that house may mean dismantling your cash reduction engine, giving players who haven’t invested in real estate a chance to catch up.
Last Will‘s action selection mechanism looks fairly simple, considering the games that Vladimir Suchy has designed, but it’s finely tuned and considered. Every space on the row is a trade-off in some way. It’s finely balanced and a tight decision at the start of each round. Suchy is flexing his design muscle here and it shows.
I struggle to find criticisms for Last Will. The production is modest, I suppose. There’s no fancy components or action selection wheels with cubes falling through holes like in Shipyardor Praga Caput Regni, but those things aren’t needed here. The charm of Last Will is in the premise, the tight action economy and the inversion of everything I’ve been taught to expect from a Euro game over the last 10 years. It’s funny, clever, and surprisingly thinky, and just a joy to play. For me, it’s an easy recommendation.
I suppose I should state my experience with the extended Dorfromantik universe upfront. I’ve played the video game for about 2 hours, but I have not played the first board game. Dorfromantik: The Duel is the two player competitive follow-up to the 2023 Spiel des Jahres winning board game. Designed by Michael Palm and Lukas Zach with art by Paul Riebe, and published by Pegasus Spiele in 2023, this version of the game was perhaps the game that most people were expecting when sitting down to play Dorfromantik.
You see, in the original game, players cooperatively build a single landscape, discussing tile placements to try and earn the most points while satisfying various tasks spread out across the land. In Dorfromantik: The Duel, each player is building their own landscape, and competing against the other one to earn the most points.
The game starts with one player laying all of their landscape and task tiles face up on the table where both players can see them. The other player shuffles their tiles, and is the drawer. Before every tile is drawn, players need to assess how many tasks they both have on the go. If either landscape has less than 3 tasks, then a task tile must be drawn. The drawer draws a tile, and the other player needs to find the matching tile, then both players build out their landscapes. The task tiles also have the drawing player revealing a random task number, which the players need to match a certain number of terrain tiles together to complete the task.
The tiles can contain plain pastures, yellow fields, green forests, and townships. Matching the terrain types is not necessary for general placement, but the tasks do require a certain number of each terrain type to be adjacent. Some tiles also contain flags, which will earn you 1 point per tile of the matching terrain, assuming you manage to close it off before the end of the game. There are also river and train tracks, which cannot just end against a terrain type, but can be placed in such a way that you could have multiple train or streams dotting your landscape.
Players continue flipping tiles in Dorfromantik: The Duel, until the landscape tiles run out. The score is the sum of the tasks you completed, plus the length of your longest train and river, and the points each of your flags earns you. The player who has the most points at the end of the game is crowned the winner.
I’m starting to really rebel against the trend of “cozy games”. These are games that endeavour to make you feel cozy and unchallenged throughout the play time. There is absolutely no grit in Dorfromantik: The Duel, nothing to really make you care about the landscape you’re building. The tasks are there, but they’re easy to complete. Without restrictions on non-matching landscapes, a la CarcassonneorIsle of Skye, every tile placement feels pretty arbitrary.
My biggest gripe with the game has to do with how much of a table hog it is. With one player displaying their 80 tiles, it takes up half my table. Then both players need to slowly build up their landscape, each one sprawling in each direction, eventually either running off the table, or into the other player’s village (and sometimes both).
Another annoyance I had come up, was trying to find the tile that the drawer had picked. It’s annoying enough that I’m sifting through my tiles, trying to find the one tile that has two field spots and one forest spot amongst all the tiles that have fields and forests, but it’s another that the villages have different coloured roofs between the two players, making it surprisingly tricky to always find the matching tile. I realize that last part is a minor thing to complain about, but it still made me feel frustrated. I personally believe the tiles should be numbered, like in Karuba, that would at the very least assist the non-drawing player in finding their tile quickly.
Those gripes aside, Dorfromantik: The Duel is undeniably pleasant. The art is charming, the turns are breezy, and there’s never a sense of pressure. You won’t agonize over a tile placement, and for some players, that’s exactly the appeal. It’s a game that asks very little of you, other than to sit back, relax, and build a countryside for half an hour.
But for me, that’s where it falls flat. I want games that push me, that reward clever planning and punish sloppy mistakes. I want tension in my decisions, a sense that the landscape I’m building matters. Dorfromantik: The Duel offers almost none of that. It’s easygoing to the point of being forgettable. It’s a cozy diversion rather than a compelling contest. And while I can see its value as a low-stakes, charming board game, I’ll be looking elsewhere when I want a duel worth remembering.
This review is based on the Board Game Arena implementation.
If I had a nickel for every time a board game about making board games came out, I’d have 2 nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s odd that it happened twice in such a short time frame. The first to hit crowdfunding was Tabletop Incin March of 2024. That game was originally called Meeple Inc, but had to change their name after receiving a cease and desist letter from Hans Im Gluck claiming they own the rights to the term Meeple. I’m not sure how that case ever really shook out, but it felt like a pretty ridiculous claim to make.
But this post is about The Game Makers. Unlike Tabletop Inc, The Game Makers reached out to hundreds of board game publishers and secured the rights to use their games assets in their own game about making games. The theme here is that you are a board game publisher, and you spend your actions sending forklifts all over your warehouse collecting the resources needed to make these games. Wood, plastics, cardboard, dice, you name it. But what makes The Game Makers feel magical for the hobbyist board gamer is that every card is a real life game. Almost certainly your favourite game is included (although a healthy amount are being locked behind a Kickstarter Exclusive paywall), and the love you feel for your favourite game is certainly going to give you good vibes towards this one, as well.
There is no denying there’s a thrill when you flip over a card and recognize the box art. Perhaps for even just a moment you’ll be transported to some of your favourite gaming moments, playing that game with your loved ones 10 years ago. Maybe you’ll see games you haven’t thought of in years, the games that brought you into the hobby! The Game Makers is billing itself as a celebration of the industry itself. A homage stitched together from hundreds of real, licensed games whose box covers show up on the cards you draw and manufacture.
And that effort, the hundreds of contracts that publisher Bezier games had to draft and get signed, is the magic that sets The Game Makers apart from any other mid-weight economic Euro game. You’re not just collecting cubes of different colours to complete recipes. You’re not sifting through abstract icons and terms, you’re cataloguing and building your own collection, offering flashes of nostalgia at every turn.
The game mechanics itself, designed by Ben Rosset, who also designed Fromage and Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, features a massive rondel, ringed with resources and opportunities. Your workers are miniature forklifts that you’ll shuttle around the wheel. Wherever you choose to land them, they’ll scoop up resources: wood, cardboard, plastic, dice, or cards. Every resource pulls double duty, they’re all used to build the cards that will ultimately earn you points to win the game, but they can all also be used to improve your factory, or increase your marketing. The cards can be either the game you’re trying to build, or a resource to pay to build a different game.
This is where The Game Makers shines. Every turn brings a little agony. Do I try to complete this beloved game and put it on my shelf, or break it down for parts to chase something else? You need to make that choice for every resource, each time you take something, you’re pulled in two directions.
Not only do you have to decide how to use each of the resources, but each resource has 3 levels to it. Obtaining the higher level resources requires you to send your forklifts further around the rondel, meaning it’ll take more turns until you get to use that worker again. It’s a great puzzle that kept me engaged for the entire play.
All that said, some decisions beg to be questioned. The production looks enormous, plastic forklifts, oversized plastic rondel, piles of manufactured wood and plastic bits, the Kickstarter itself boasts “over 700 premium components”, and the irony is hard to ignore when the game itself includes a “Go Green” scoring path of planting trees to make your factory more environmentally conscious. It sure looks spectacular in the advertising photos, but it also feels like a game that could have done more with less.
And commenting on the epic scale of the production swings me around to the price. I don’t usually comment on the cost of a game unless it’s particularly noteworthy. A copy of The Game Makers will set you back $208CAD ($150USD). The complete edition costs an eye watering $277CAD ($199USD). I know I won’t pony up that kind of cash for any game, no matter how charming the theme may be.
I guess the theme brings up another question. The diary of its creation reveals a story of passion: hundreds of publishers collaborating, big and small, to make this tribute to the hobby possible. But at the table, it doesn’t always feel like a love letter to board gaming. Instead, it comes across more of a love letter to board game manufacturing. The model of a game as “components in a box plus a shelf-scoring bonus” is satisfying when you can get synergies, and I can’t think of a better way to incorporate all these different games, but it reduces all of these games to abstractions of their raw components. If you think of Carcassonne as Sunday afternoons with family, reducing it to “level 3 tiles and level 2 wooden bits” feels flat. The abstraction works mechanically, but emotionally, it doesn’t land.
As a simulation as a board game producer, it’s quite flat. There’s no currency, so all the resources are free, You don’t need to grapple with the questions of how many of each game to print, or faff about with distribution, find prototypes, liaise with designers, respond to community feed back, nothing. I’m not saying that I need an event that says “you massively underestimated how many copies of Wingspanyou’ll need, now the public is accusing you of artificially keeping supply low to drive hype and demand”, but considering this is called “a love letter to board games”, it is a bit disappointing that no other aspect of the board gaming hobby is represented here.
Gameplay-wise, Ben Rosset pedigree has already proven himself to be a competent designer, and The Game Makers is another star on his hat. Deceptively simple turns, resource gathering that makes you struggle with your decisions, and simultaneous play that keeps the flow moving, it all works really well. The Game Makers is approachable, despite its table presence, it’s a pretty great design! But I do suspect that the core gameplay loop will feel repetitive after the initial wonder seeing your favourite games on the cards wears off.
And for me, that was the main draw of The Game Makers. The first thrill of drawing a card and seeing your favourite games. I’ll confess that in my plays I’ve been swayed more by wanting to build my favourite games, than by building the games that would score me the post points. The Game Makers is a great design, it’s clever and playful. But with that price tag, it’s obvious it’s not for me.
The more I played The Game Makers, the more I felt the theme was less a love-letter, and more a self indulgent testament to unchecked consumerism. This is a game for that board game fan who has hundreds of games, dozens of which are still in their shrinkwrap and are unplayed. For that enthusiast who goes to board game conventions and buys the 30 hottest games, because they can’t stomach the FOMO of waiting a few months for wider distribution. It’s a game for those who are willing to drop $300 on a Kickstarter, even while they have 8 projects outstanding. And that’s not the kind of board gamer that I am.
I do think The Game Makers will be an exciting toy for hobbyists who want to see their shelves reflected back at them in cardboard form. I can’t deny that every card flip is a dopamine hit, nor will I deny that the core gameplay loop is pretty solid. Just don’t expect The Game Makers to be truly representative of the hobby that you’ve put so much time and money into, nor does it tell the personal story of why these games matter. I do enjoy the game, I’ll happily play it again, and will probably rope my friends into playing it on BGA in the future. But I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone pony up that much cash for any board game, let alone this one.
My Island was the hotly anticipated 2023 follow-up to 2020’s eminently popular My City, both games designed by Reiner Knizia and published by KOSMOS. This review was 2 years in the making, as my first game of My Island was on October 28th, 2023, and the final game was August 9th, 2025. There were some significant gaps in time between games, which probably tells you how this review is going to end.
Just like in My City, My Island is played over 24 games, broken into 8 chapters. Each game introduces new rules that twist the game in different and interesting ways. The gameplay itself is similar, every player has the same pieces available to them. Each turn, a card is flipped, and all players need to fit the piece depicted on the card into their personal player board. My Island features a series of hexagon tiles that need to be placed in a dominos style; each tile you put down needs to have at least one hexagon touching another hexagon of the same type.
The tiles come in 2, 3, and 4 hexagon shapes, with the same element rarely doubled within a single tile. At the start of the campaign, you can only place your tiles on the beach, but as the campaign goes on, you gain the ability to adventure deeper into the jungle. Where you put your tile is up to you, within the placement rules, but efficiency is the name of the game. Clusters and connections score you points, while awkward gaps and poor planning come back to bite you.
My Island is 8 chapters long, each chapter broken into 3 episodes each. Every chapter brings in a new twist, perhaps some new pieces, or something gets placed on your player board, while each episode within the chapter offers a small change on the chapter quirk. Sometimes these twists add tension, but other times it’s just confusing, especially when a rule changes a rule from a previous chapter, but the rulebook says “all rules from previous chapters apply”. It didn’t help that each chapter would introduce 3 or 4 new rules, then each episode in that chapter would twist only one or two of those rules, making it really difficult to keep in your mind what still scored and what didn’t. In the end, we just ended up using the chapter scoring summary as our definitive list of what rules still apply.
As the list of rules grew, so did the opportunities to earn points. As I said, you have to place tiles ‘dominos style’. By that, I mean when you place a tile, at least one of the hexagons on the tile needs to touch another hexagon of the same type that’s already on the board. Then by the middle of the game, My Island is asking you to make clusters of 5 hexagons of the same type, along with green paths snaking through your island, all while trying to have houses on the beaches. Further still, you’re asked to have clusters of 8 tiles or more, while also surrounding certain objects with a specific colour, and have 4 different tiles around another thing, and have a path from the water to the centre of the board.
My City was a breezy, cozy experience. Games took 15 minutes, and while you were always chasing optimal tile placements, you were never really shutting yourself off from most of the scoring opportunities. My Island reminds me more of Calico. There are so many competing objectives and scoring opportunities, that every time you place a tile, you are progressing one of those opportunities, but closing the door on three others. I can’t tell you how many times we would put down our second or third tile in the game, and there would be a chorus of “oh no, I’ve already ruined everything” around the table. By the back half of the campaign, each game took in excess of 40 minutes, which is A LOT when you’re ostensively playing a ‘light’ tile laying game.
Something else to mention, with My City, it was easy to complete a whole chapter in 45 minutes. It was a great game to pull out after we finished whatever mid-weight euro was the main event for the evening. But with every game of My Island hitting 40 minutes, we would go months between single plays. We’d forget what rule episode 7 introduced, and how episode 8 twisted it, making it even more challenging to return to.
It’s kind of impossible to not compare My Island to My City, but that’s the path you choose when you create a spiritual sequel with a nearly identical title and gameplay mechanics. You’re going to get compared. My City was full of charm and whimsy. When someone won, it was good cheer all around, you could see how you could have done better, but hey, that was the luck of the draw. In My Island, my head was constantly in my hands, I was always trying to snap off a single hexagon so I could just finish that one damn cluster. I was stymied by the card draws, and quickly fell behind in victory points.
In the last two chapters of the campaign, you’re tasked with building 3 buildings, and filling up a portal track. In Chapter 7, you aren’t told what these elements do, just that you should probably do them. In the last chapter it’s revealed that each of those buildings you don’t build will cost you 2 victory points per stage you don’t complete. And the overall winner is whomever has the portal track filled up the most, then subtract the victory points you’ve accumulated throughout the entire campaign. When I play a legacy game, I’m always the person whos trying to complete the objectives first, even to the detriment of winning each individual game, so by chapter 8, I had already completed all 3 buildings. My opponents were a little taken aback, but in the end, it all came out in the wash. We all finished all 3 buildings, and all finished the portal tracks. But I can see that being really jarring for someone if they had completely neglected the buildings that weren’t fully explained in the previous chapter.
My Island was good, but not as great as My City. In My City I was excited to start every chapter, to unlock new polyomino tiles, to have some asymmetric tiles depending on who won a specific episode. In My Island, the most asymmetric you’ll get is that you’ll get to put a little sticker on some of your tiles that makes on hex count for 2 of the specific type. Not very exciting. I don’t know if the lack of excitement comes from the bar being set so high in My City, but regardless, I didn’t feel like My Island had as many unique and interesting ideas as the game that came before it. If you’re a die hard fan of My City and are thirsting for more Knizia tile laying puzzles, you’ll probably enjoy My Island. But for most people, I suspect they’ll find themselves missing the joy and simplicity of the game where it all began.
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.
