Steampunk Rally
2-8
13+
45
Finally! A true steampunk game featuring 108 dice, tons of famous inventors, and unique dice-placement & card-drafting mechanics.
Steampunk Rally is a racing boardgame that incorporates steampunk as more than just a bit of chrome. Using a unique dice-placement mechanic, players take on the roles of famous inventors like Nikola Tesla and Marie Curie constructing fantastical contraptions that make use of steam, heat and electricity in an attempt to win a no-holds-barred race through the Swiss Alps!
Thousands of viable card combos add tons of depth and replayability, and simultaneous resolution keeps the action fast and furious.
images © Roxley Game Laboratory
User Reviews (6)
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- Themes
Racing, Steampunk - Mechanics
Card Drafting, Dice Building, Simultaneous Action Selection, Worker Placement - Designers
Orin Bishop - Game Families
Kickstarter - Official Game Site
🔍 Steampunk Rally - Rulebook
🔍 See official rulebook - Price (MSRP)
$49.00
First I must say I love steampunk themes and this is a great game with this thematic. We have to choice a famous inventor among Albert Einstein to Nicola Tesla and you’re ready to start a race to define who is the best inventor.
2 to 8 players and about 60 or more minutes to play. Is easy to teach and a new player will understand all on 8 minutes, however the game have a developed strategic to get the goal and a lot of interaction (synergy) among the different parts
How to Play
They are four phases:
Draft: to make you Invention and built your machine with more parts or discard and gain resources, dices or cog. There are 4 different kind of cards; Golden, for movement; Silver, for generate more dices, cogs or shield; Cooper, with four connections; and finally Black, boosters a kind of abilities. When you build you have to join the new part with a valve connection. Also you can rearrange any part of your Machine
Vent: that is the most difficult to understand and the begging because in the first round don’t have vent. So I will explain with the race phase.
Race: You’ll roll every dice gained in the draft to active Machine part of your invention. And every dice you use it’ll remain in your machine, and you can’t use it, for that is the vent phase (in the next round) you use the cogs to reduce the dice value and remove the dices, a cog reduce in two.
Damage: the race track isn’t smooth, there are terrain with obstacles that will damage your machine for every negative point you must destroy a part.
Final Thoughts
Well I really love this game, all the parts made a beautiful game as much as components as funny experience game. And now I waiting for an expansion. I recommend play with 3 or 4, maybe 5, more of that take more time and you’ll lack of dices.
Edit: I must add after play the table is a mess with three kind of dices, red, blue, yellow and four kind of card and cogs for everywhere, put all into the box, take a litle time.
Overview:
This is a fun race game with a Steampunk theme, which has to be said fits perfectly for this game. Think Wacky Races and you will get the idea of the essential core of the game
Utilising Card Drafting and dice players build fantastic inventions and race them across one of two different variable courses.
Components:
I will start by pointing out that I have the Kickstarter version, though the main difference other than some additional box art is that the dice are translucent and it comes with metal cogs.
The artwork is absolutely spot on fitting the theme and looks fantastic overall, the cardboard components are of good quality as are the cards, though they are a tad on the thin side, which are also really well designed. The only negative really are the Standee’s for the player pieces which understandably are a bit small but the main problem is the colours are very similar so easy for players to move the wrong piece. I generally now advise players to focus on the picture.
Gameplay
I wont go into a full rule description as the full rules are available on BoardGameGeek. The game is really relatively easy to teach, though players usually need to follow the advise in the rulebook to play the first couple of race phases in turn order rather than simultaneous in order for everyone to help each other work through their machines. The game is played in various phases, most of which are played simultaneously except when boost cards are played then it is done in turn order.
Draft: Each player is given a card from each of the four different decks and from that hand they place a card into their machine, discard a card for Dice or Cogs or keep a boost card hidden for later use.
Vent: Each Dice used on a previous turn can be reduced by 2 pips by spending a cog or two dice reduced by 1 pip. If all the pips are removed then the dice is removed back to stock freeing up the machine part to be re-activated.
Race: All dice collected in the draft phase or help over on storage cards are now rolled and can then be placed on parts to activate them.
Damage: During the previous phases as shields and damage are generated they are added/removed from the tracker. Any damage recorded during the previous phases is now applied by removing the number of parts of you machine equal to the red number on the players dial. If shields had been generated and not used up these are kept for future turns.
End of Turn: Unused dice are returned to stock and lightbulbs reset and the order of play marker is flipped.
After the initial learning rounds the pace of these phases picks up as people get the idea of what is going on and the end game usually comes quicker than you expect. There is a lot going on here with plenty of scope to plan and use strategy in order to win. There is a degree of luck, there are dice after all, but the cogs provide a means to mitigate this and it helps provide a little bit of chaos which seems fitting to the theme as well as the race aspect. I enjoy playing this game immensely and each time is different thanks to the 16 different inventors with their unique machines as well as the vast array of machine parts. There has been some errata on a card and rules so worth keeping a weather eye on their website and others but otherwise this for me comes very close to the perfectly designed game and will see plenty of plays over the coming years. The simultaneous Race phase gives that feeling of being in a race and adds to the overall atmosphere of the game.
The other very satisfying thing is as you build your machine and power it with the dice it feels like you are running a machine. You can get that great feeling of achievement when you find your carefully constructed machine has a nice flow as you start to power the various components, especially when you get combo’s of parts working to create extended abilities or motion in the race. I can feel my face beaming as I type this thinking back on the fun I have putting these machines together.
Summary
Great game and worthy of a place in my collection, it does have some niggly bits but nothing that truly detracts from the gameplay. This is almost a perfect 10 game for me so well done Roxley
Based on 3 plays.
The game is great fun. The theme is dripping as you put together a steampunk invention, power that steampunk invention, and decompress/vent the invention after it has been powered so that it may be powered again. I am ordinarily not a fan of race games but this one really shines – it is a clever drafting/ tableau building game brilliantly overlayed on a steampunk racing theme.
The way machine parts interact and can be activated by or mitigated by dice is brilliant – the give and take between the difficulty in “venting” a high (but powerful) dice roll versus the ease of venting a low (but often less powerful) dice roll is genius.
The game presents difficult and interesting choices: for example do you build a large invention that can handle the terrain and generate the power it needs, do you build a machine with expendable parts so that when you take damage you will simply plan on rebuilding, do you make boost cards which provide a one time benefit to you (and perhaps a detriment to others) a dominant part of your strategy?
Could be potential balance issues: 1) Thomas Edison won all 3 games and is the only inventor that lets you get two dice. 2) Smooth motion is very powerful and highly sought after(because you ignore ALL negative terrain effects) but it is not always available to every player- even if they are trying to incorporate it into their strategy. Also some of the boost cards can be downright nasty.
Pros
Well themed
Fantastic artwork
Drafting is an unusual mechanic in a racing game – this adds to the fun.
Cons
Not easy to learn. I’ll put it this way, the first time I played the owner was the only guy at the table who knew the rules. One guy dropped out after 2 rounds as he was really struggling, one guy had a lightbulb moment in the round before last, and after the game was over I realized the guy who knew how to play had build his machine against the rules and the entire thing was invalid.
Overall.
A solid 7. It’s good fun once you know what you’re doing, but don’t be surprised if getting there takes you a while.
Overall there are some nice things in this game. Production quality is high (I played a KS copy with the stretch goals) the gear tokens were a nice touch. Game has a nice looking race track with interesting variations.
In general though the dice mechanic was a not very intuitive. With having to reduce numbers, and canceling dice out. Iconography caused me to constantly be going back to the rules to make sure I knew what the symbols meant.
Overall, enjoyable but complicated. Will play again, but wont chase it down to ensure it happens.
I love, love, LOVE this game! It’s one of the few that I rarely win, but still love every time I play it. It’s never the same game twice, and unlike games like Risk you don’t HAVE to deceive and sabotage other people to win; so you can keep your friends. There a few cards that are a little imbalanced imo, but you learn to play around them. Also, the game runs with simultaneous turns, meaning if you have dishonest friends, this game will suck.
The actual game is rather hard to learn at first compared to most games. However, I’ve found that letting people run through a few test rounds gets beginners up running quickly.
What I love most is the ability to modify the game. My friends and I often extend the end of the racetrack, or start with two cockpits just to change things up. The game has so many different options, you’re forced to constantly test out various strategies. Add the ability to modify the game and you’ve got endless replays!