First Impressions of Steampunk Rally

A trial for a new article format: First Impressions. Not a review, just comments on our first play of a new game, with a sense of whether I’m excited for our next play or not! Let me know what you think about the article, and about the game if you’ve played it!


 

Last night we donned our bonnets, monocles and articulated servo harnesses for a game of Steampunk Rally, the new drafting – engine building – dice placement – resource gathering – racing game from Roxley Games, via Kickstarter. So I heard you like mechanisms?

In Steampunk Rally you’ll be building an engine out of the cards you draft, discarding those same cards for dice, using those dice to power the engine, which if everything sort of works (and often even if it doesn’t) you’ll be moving forward along the track.

I was certainly overwhelmed by the game to begin with, having no clue what I would want to add to my steampunk engine of chaos. But I was playing as Lise Meitner (an Austrian physicist who is credited for her work on radioactivity, including the discovery of nuclear fission) and she seems to like fire in this game, so fire is what I went for! Not sure I did a very good job of it but I bumbled through, and was still able to combo pieces very nicely to generate more dice (the core resource for activating the different parts of your machine). I’m not sure where all this energy was going mind, not to the wheels for sure!

Unfortunately my particular engine came a bit unstuck when it came up against the preponderance of rough terrain at the end of our course. Lesson learnt: look beyond the next 2-3 spaces! But there are many ways through, including dashing your machine to pieces if it lets you end the game (as Peter ably demonstrated!).

There are also some very funny, if unintentional, combos possible when the action cards start flying. In one turn Marc caused some mountains to appear under Peter. Ha! Peter says, that’s not going to affect me! Then I play an Electromagnet that pulls me forward and Peter back one space, staring up at the mountains he thought he’d avoided! You know, this game really is just Wacky Races, and we are all Professor Pat Pending!

All in all, much fun was had, and if I can just cross those mountains I’ll have you all next time!

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