Knights of the Cardboard Castle

For personal reasons, I’m back living in Kuala Lumpur for a while, which explains why I was able to show up at a recent session of the so-called Midah group. The main game we played was Martin Wallace’s Automobile, a game that I’ve previously expressed some interest in. Hiew’s copy is the first edition of the game which was released only in very limited quantities, but judging from the photos on BGG, the newer, mass-market edition looks much snazzier and attractive. We played it with five players, guaranteeing  a very hotly competitive marketplace for cars. My thoughts:

• Han commented early on about how few actions each player has in the game, despite the appearance of complexity and multitude of options visible on the board. The game is played over a fixed four rounds and during each round each player has only three main actions. Since every player must take car production as an action every turn, that leaves only a total of eight actions for a player to make his or her mark on the game.
• In addition to the main actions, each player has to choose a character at the beginning of the round and may pick from the available executive decisions at the end of the round. The characters are of course all luminaries from the history of automobile manufacturing in the U.S. and the choice determines not only player order but also special abilities ranging from free R&D cubes to the ability to immediately build a factory without using a main action. For our game however, players tended to grab Howard, who guarantees you the sale of two cars, whenever he’s available.
• Similarly, for the executive decisions, players seemed to grab the promotions whenever they can. Basically the first three players in turn order will always grab the three available advertisement slots as the cost in R&D cubes is almost negligible. The factory closure one is nice as an additional action but there doesn’t seem to be much competition for that action. Similarly, grabbing the discount option is up to the judgment of individual players but it’s pretty much always available to whoever wants it. I don’t want to sound too snobby, but having no-brainer decisions like this in a game doesn’t feel good to me.
• Shan and I obviously messed up by not going early for the distributor network and basically have Hiew and Han a free pass on that score. I also messed up by not having factories that produced all three classes of cars and therefore greatly restricted my available options.
• I commented that viewing two of the demand tiles per player doesn’t feel like a meaningful amount of information in a five-player game. After checking out BGG, I find that I’m not alone in that assessment.
• The losses cubes mechanic makes it feel very much like a Martin Wallace game to me. At least you do have good options for getting rid of them. Plus you can take out loans in this game too.

After playing it, I don’t feel like Automobile is much of a business simulation after all. It feels like more of a game of chicken where drivers race to the edge of a cliff. Here, players loudly proclaim that they’re going crank up their factories to maximum production to scare off other players or boldly fill the distributor pool with salesmen and dare others to add to it. Even at the beginning players jostle to not be the first player to commit to building a factory in other to piggyback off of the efforts of other players. Of course, you don’t want to be that player who is so reckless that he ends up falling into the ravine. So, not quite I expected when I first read about it, but a very compelling game all the same.