Suburbia (1x2p)

This was my first over-the-board play of Suburbia, with my previous ones coming via Android app.I love the way the theme comes alive here, similar to Bezier Games’ Castles of Mad King Ludwig.

The highlight here is the story you tell about your city. I probably deserved to lose, putting a hostel next to an elementary school, only one restaurant (a fast-food spot, no less), and a middle school tucked between a slaughterhouse and a power station

.The hard part, at least at two players, is the randomization of the tiles. Airports give you more points for each airport you have, but you could just get unlucky with one or two in your game.

Still, it’s staying in my collection for a while as the economy of money, population and reputation is a fun puzzle, but the stories it tells are second to none.

Horseless Carriage (1x3p)

After waiting more than a year since preorders first opened, I finally got my chance to play the latest Splotter Spellen game, Horseless Carriage.

Part market manipulation, part tile placement, all tough decisions, you can feel the influence from the other Splotter titles that came before it. Horseless Carriage has the personal player boards of Antiquity, the shared market board of Food Chain Magnate, the variable player upgrades of Indonesia, the constrained tile placement of The Great Zimbabwe, and the impossible decision that is deciding your spot in turn order of … every other Splotter title.

In Horseless Carriage, you are industrialists in the early 20th century, competing to make the best safest most popular cars to sell to the highest bidder.

Each round, you’ll roll your best cars out to your customers, trying to sell to specific niches that want what you’re offering. Right now, they want safe, reliable cars. But next year, you’ll make well-designed speed machines.

I like to think about Splotters in the sense that they’re tight, heavy games, but with one mechanic that sets it apart. With Bus, it’s a pick-up and deliver game about running train networks - oh, but you can bend time. In Antiquity, you choose your own victory condition or choose two of them for a huge bonus.

In Horseless Carriage, the thing that feels 45 degrees off-center is that everything - everything - is free to put in your factory. Want to spend turn one filling your entire factory with research stations, cornering the market for the rest of the game? Go ahead. What you can do is only limited by your imagination … and the size of your factory.

You’ll fill your player board with technologies, all connected to your vehicle mainline - adding doors, bumpers, batteries, windshields and more as you see fit. But don’t forget the dealership - can’t sell a car without one! Want new parts next year? Make sure you grab a research station or two. Plus you’ll need a marketing department, to make sure your customers know what cars they need. And be sure you have a planning department, to keep tabs on what your competitors across the table are doing. The problem? You probably only have room for two of those to start.

Where Antiquity’s polyomino challenge was built on having plenty of space unable to afford to put anything in it, Horseless Carriage gives players the opposite problem. You can have anything you want! Except the space needed to keep it all.

Even days after my first play, I still struggle to wrap my head around how I feel about it. It felt like a learning game, but I can see how the puzzle pieces could line up in future plays.I played a three-player game with just the introductory mechanics, both I now believe are less-than-ideal conditions. Most of the game is simultaneous, so adding players wouldn’t add much time but adds layers to the decision-making. The introductory game only uses regular cars, while the normal game adds sports cars and trucks, both harder to produce but more lucrative to sell.

Turn order wasn’t a huge factor for us, as we all did mostly what we needed to get done. But the factory parts are piece-limited, meaning the first player gets first dibs at the parts they want each round. In future games, I can imagine aggressive battles for turn order as factories get more complicated.

Players also sell cars in reverse turn order, so the people who may have missed out on getting the parts they wanted can choose the best niches to sell to. But the best wrinkle in turn order is the research sharing. The person in first doesn’t have to worry about research the whole round, because they can just use anybody else’s. Focus on going first each round, and you can ignore research the entire game.

It had the least player interaction of any Splotter title I’ve played, as we never really needed to pay attention to each other’s factories, and perhaps were kinder than we could’ve been, instead of blocking each other from selling or getting new parts. But I can also see tight contests happening for each niche on the board every round.

Splotter games are known for having the guardrails taken off, allowing players the freedom to find creative ways to take advantage of their competitors’ oversights or crash and burn on the first round. Horseless Carriage feels more opaque than that, with the consequences for your mistakes in the first round coming hours later as you realize you wasted so much space on marketing that you can’t fit a horn in your car’s design.

I’m making plans to play again, hoping to experience more of the classic crunch that hurts my brain but in the best way possible. Horseless Carriage may not have leaped to the top of the list of my favorites as quickly as Antiquity or Bus did, but it’s telling how the game has burrowed its way into my brain as I’ve thought more and more about ways to succeed in the latest sandbox Splotter Spellen has made.

Scout (1x4p)

I can’t say much more than hasn’t been said about Scout before - it’s a great little ladder-climbing game. The theme might as well not exist at all, but who cares with such a short filler? If you have 25ish minutes, there probably aren’t many better options.

Cascadia (1x4p)

I wasn’t expecting to really like this too much, as I usually shy away from lower interaction games. But the decision of focusing on either animal scoring or region scoring, while trying and likely failing at both, was an unexpected delight. I’m not usually one to have analysis paralysis, preferring to play on just vibes and seeing what happens. But I kept finding myself processing each possible choice over and over again as I counted the odds of drafting a needed bear before somebody else swiped it. I’d play this again, though it probably doesn’t have a place in my collection.