First con of the year for me over at Bucklow Hill, south of Manchester saw me with a game of Prague prearranged, part of the Battles of the Age of Reason (BAR) series from Clash of Arms. I hadn’t played BAR for a while but I’ve always loved the series and having not managed to get much wargaming in over the last few years I was looking forward to a meaty game.
Thursday
By the time I got there Thursday morning I had an absolutely streaming cold but luckily I still felt fairly ok. Although my nose would stop running eventually the cold continued to get worse. How brave am I?
I grabbed the other two that were there, Tom and Richard, and introduced them to a new game, Automobiles. This is a race game, but also a deck building game, without cards. You’re no doubt confused by now but to explain you buy cubes that allow you to move on the track, white grey and black cubes move you on the progressively longer white, grey and black spaces, or take an action of some type, eg remove wear from your discarded cubes, move faster if you’re lower down the track, take wear to move faster etc. The coloured cues actions are shown by cards, and there’s one chosen from a selection for each colour so the game is different each time. Any cubes you don’t use in a turn can be taken as credit towards buying more cubes, hence the deck building aspect. I think this is a very original and exciting variant on the deck building genre. Not only do you have to think about what cubes/cards you wish to put in your bag/deck, but positioning on the track becomes very important. For example in a game I played this week, one of my fellow players ended up stuck when she was only able to reach the white part of the track due to another player blocking her, but she had no white cubes. And this was two spaces before the end of the track on the last lap! Highly recommended.
The revised edition of this wacky 2-player sci-fi game is out now.