Automobile

A friend of mine opened the box of Automobile the last weekend, being a totally unkonwn game for me up to that moment. As i work in automotive industry i was gladly interested on the game and so we started a game for 4 players.

I have to say that the art on the game is quite nice, and completely ok with real history, as you will be playing with important personalities of the start of the automotive industry (Henry Ford of course) and the models you will manufacture and sell are also real ones.

Also the game is quite quick to play, as it is only 4 round, with three actions for each player in a round. But soon enough you will be facing hard decisions according to the strategy you want to develop. The target, of course selling your models in bigger quantity than your oponent or at least with higher profit, according to the market demand. Yo start only with an amount of money to invest, and the winner would be the one who has more money and the end of the game.

Each turn you will choose a personality to play with, which will give you some special bonus for the round and also will mark your play order. After choosing players start to take their actions one by one, which could be:
Develop a new car model, opening new factories for it
Increasing your manufacturing capacity on one model, building more factories and/or automatice one of your factories to lower down your cost for manufacturing that model
Close the manufacturing of one model and so closing those factories
Send sellers to offer your models at the market
Manufacture cars on your factories (of course)

On last stage after your three actions will be made, in which you will have to take corporative decisions, which could be:
Again closing one of your models manufacturing
Make commercials to improve your sellings on one model
Lower the selling price of one of your models to increase the number sold.

After your actions then the selling of the manufactured cars start, and here the strategy of the game is very nice and innovative. Cars are splitted in three categories: cheap cars, medium cars and luxury cards. First your will put your sellers at work and start to earn money for each car sold, but be carefull: it could happen that not all the sellers are able to do it, and in that case you will start to have loses.

After the sellers, the cars are sold by the market demand, which changes every turn and you only know a little part of it at the begining of the turn. In the starting turn there is only demand for medium cars, on next turns there will be also for cheap and luxury, evolving up to the known point: cheap cars will have a higher demand but less profit, while luxury cars will have lower demand bur higher price. And then, newer models will be sold preferently to the old ones, where it has to be explained also that the older your models the more loses you will take each turn (and that is the reason you will be wanting to stop old models manufacturing joined to that you will recover most of the investment made so you can have the money back for new investments)

Briefing, i feel it is a great economy game, which some innovative mechanics that in this case are fantastic to get the feeling of the automotive market. Normally i like economy games but dislike that the theme could be anyone other and have the same game experience, but in this case the demand/sellers/market/model made me feel like a big CEO of the automotive industry.

I guess that your first game, and your first turn, would be quite stressful as you will have lot of decisions to take from the very begining, but quite quickly you will get into the mechanics.

So a great game to play for the economics guys!