Steampunk Rally is a literal engine building game. You play as an inventor, racing around a track with your wacky machine, cobbling together parts and hoping not to lose too many on the way round. Every round you go through 4 phases: draft cards (machine parts and boost cards), vent your machine (getting rid of dice that are clogging up your engine), race (where your cards suddenly transform into an engine generating more dice, shielding (against the tough terrain), movement etc), and finally take damage (potentially losing your precious machine parts if you didn't have enough shielding)
When we backed the game I hoped the whole family would enjoy it, but what first drew me to it was thinking of my 13 year old son, <PERSON>, as it seemed to be the epitome of everything he enjoys about gaming, with a theme he could really get engaged in. He can be a very particular gamer, finding issues with all sorts of games, but we've now played 10 games, and he's declared Steampunk Rally his second favourite game of all time (no small accolade as he's played a ridiculous number with us). It's also gone down really well with the rest of the family, including working very well as a 2 player game for <PERSON> and I.
So what's so special?
Looks
The components are really lovely. The art on the machine cards cards is so well done – the way the separate cards come together seamlessly to make one killer machine always makes me smile. Some of the more esoteric machine parts allow for interesting flourishes– like the time machine and the Antigrav Device. The different inventors are also quirkily depicted. The Kickstarter edition came with beautiful cogs (<PERSON> would have been proud of the detailing) and lovely translucent dice, both of which I'd have probably felt the need to source myself if I'd bought a standard edition. I'm also particularly pleased with the look of the Hoverdrome track. 366
All together it's a very pleasing package.
The iconography in this game is also really well thought through – after I'd looked up once what something meant, the design made such sense I never needed to again. I can't actually remember our children having a single query as to what a card or space meant (which I guess means if there were any questions they were really few and far between).
The magic
So you put these cards together and it looks like a machine, but what really makes this special is how it manages to actually feel like a machine. You might start a race phase with just one die (red dice are heat, blue dice are steam, and yellow dice represent electricity), and suddenly your machine whirrs into life spewing out dice, shields, cogs and wonderful movement!
Here's how a typical mid-game moment goes: “I take my red 6 and put it here, giving me three blue dice, I roll those, and put the blue 6 into this part to gain 3 yellow dice... I put one of those yellow here to gain 1 movement. I put one of the other red dice in this spot which allows me to have two movement but take one damage... )
I swear I hear the hiss of steam, grinding of gears, and pshhhing of pistons while we all busily feed dice into our hungry machines.
Drafting twist
While the structure of the draft (take a hand of four, choose one to use, then pass on the rest) sounds very standard, it has something I've yet to encounter elsewhere, that we're finding very neat: the initial hands of each draft phase are made up of one card from each of four decks. Each of these decks (which have different coloured borders) has certain properties. Gold always generates movement, silver generates more dice, copper cards always have four valves (so are great for keeping your machine receptive to new parts),and finally there are black bordered Boost cards which have all manner of special benefits. Niftily the different decks can be handed in for different dice or cogs – so in your starting hand you always have the option of gaining 2 dice of any colour.
This doesn't mean each hand feels the same (there's still a huge amount of variety in each deck) but it does mean if you really need something you're not going to sigh with disappointment when you look at your cards at the start of the draft phase. It also means that you'll never have two identical cards in a hand (which seems to happen remarkably often in other drafting games) Most of the time the difficulty is in choosing which to keep, because they're all so nice – “Aaagh, I want them all!”
The only overhead is having to sort the cards into 4 piles at the end of each game, which is well worth what you gain. 755