I needn't have concerned myself. Automobile is vintage Wallace, right up there with Brass (one of my favorites) and maybe even close to the rarified air of the rightly revered Age of Steam. I've played it three times so far and liked each game more than the last. Wallace has been on an incredible roll over the last couple of years, but this might be his best game to appear over that time period.
The players are businessmen soon after the introduction of the horseless carriage in the U.S. The pioneer scientists and craftsmen have worked their magic and the public has decided it likes this new invention; now, it's time for the money men to see if this can be turned into a profitable and sustained industry. The object, as with all good business games, is to earn the most money.
Around the periphery of the board, there are spaces for about two dozen different car models, from the Duryea Motor Wagon, the world's first commercial automobile, all the way up to the Depression era Cadillac 452, listed more or less in the order of their introduction. Each model is in one of three different categories: economy, mid-priced, and luxury cars. The price for building a factory for each model is also listed.
Players will be building these factories and using them to produce cars. They then try to sell them, via two different channels: distributors and the general public. Each has its own maximum demand each turn. Overproduction can be costly, as can maintaining obsolete factories. The player best able to maneuver through this economic minefield will win the game.
The game consists of four turns, which each follows the same turn sequence. Forgive me for this rather dry description of each phase, but there's enough stuff going on that this is really the only way to explain the game. I'll try to keep my explanations short.
Each turn begins with the players secretly drawing demand tiles. There are 16 of these, equally distributed among the values 2, 3, 4, and 5. These are used to determine the public's demand for the different car categories. Different rules are used for each turn. For example, on turn 2, each player draws two tiles and each player's high tile will add to the demand for mid-priced cars, while their low tile will add to the demand for economy cars. Thus, each player will have a bit of information about what that turn's demand will be and may be able to use that data to help plan for the turn.
Next, in turn order, the players select a character to assist them on that turn. There are half a dozen of these characters, each of them automotive pioneers that give the player choosing them a special ability. For example, Ford gives you the option of buying an extra factory during your turn, while Howard lets you sell a couple of extra cars. Most of the characters also give the player additional R&D cubes - more about these later. In addition to the abilities, the characters chosen determine the player order for the rest of the turn. Each player must choose a different character. They serve a similar role as the actions in Age of Steam, although their effect on the game may be slightly less.
After this, the players take their actions, which is the meat of the turn. There are five actions to choose from and each player takes one action per round, for three rounds. The actions in brief are:
1. Build one or two factories on a single car model space. If this is a new car model, the player must spend some R&D cubes; the more advanced the model is with respect to the models that have already been built, the higher the cube cost.
2. Place up to 3 distributors, to assist with selling cars through the distributor channel.
3. Take 2 R&D cubes.
4. Close down the factories for one of your car models. For reasons which will become apparent, it is often necessary to shut down your older factories. In exchange for eliminating the factories, you get most of their cost back from the bank. In addition to saving on maintenance, this gives you a cash infusion, which might be useful when you take the fifth action:
5. Produce cars. When you take this action, you can pay to produce cars at each of your factories. Each car type has a manufacturing cost. You have some choice of how many cars to produce, but this is constrained by the number of factories in the model space. So, for example, if your mid-priced model has one factory, it must produce 1-3 cars, but with two factories, you must produce 4-7. You do have the option of not producing any cars for each of your models, but if you do manufacture any, the number must fall within the given limits. Thus, when building factories, you need to estimate how many cars of that model you're likely to sell. Planning is essential, just as with the car companies of today! (gulp!)
A common set of actions for a player might be to place some distributors, build a couple of factories, and then produce. But there are certainly other options. For example, you might build factories, produce, and then shut down another model's factories. Or even build twice and then produce. The position of your models in relation to the other players' is crucial, since the more advanced models get the chance to sell first. Also important is what the most advanced car model with constructed factories is, since this determines how many precious R&D cubes it will take to build even more advanced factories.
After everyone takes their three actions, you sell cars via the distributors. The distributors placed in this round and in previous rounds are allocated to one of the three car types through a simple procedure. There's a fixed number of slots per type per turn, so there's no guarantee that you'll be able to use all of yours. Each unallocated distributor represents someone not earning their salary, so you have to take a loss cube for each one. Loss cubes are your penalty for inefficiency and this won't be the last time they make an appearance - I'll get to how they're resolved in a bit. For each distributor you do allocate, you get to sell one car of that type for the full sales price.
Then comes the Executive Decisions phase. In turn order, each player can choose one of about half a dozen items, first come, first serve. These include a factory shutdown action (since you might not have wanted to devote one of your three actions to doing this), some Bonus Sales markers, and some Reduced Price markers. Bonus Sales markers cost R&D cubes and they allow you to sell an additional car of a specific model during each round of the next phase. Reduced Price markers, which are free, do the same thing, but you must sell every car of that model at a lower price. If you don't want to select any of the items, you pass; the order in which players pass is the order in which they will select characters next turn. The turns then continue and each player takes items until all the players have passed. The Executive Decisions resemble the developments in Wallace's Tinners' Trail, except that there are fewer of them and their selection is restricted to its own phase and not combined with the other actions.
Then, at long last, you get to sell your cars to the general public, which is where the bulk of your money will come from. First, the demand tiles are revealed and the demand for each car type is determined. Each car type is then resolved separately. The most advanced model of that type gets to sell first, followed by the next advanced model, and so on. Once you get to the least advanced model, continue again with the most advanced one until the cars run out or the demand limit is reached. For each round of this sequence, you can only sell one car of each of your models unless you placed markers in that model's space during the Executive Decisions phase. So these markers can have a huge effect on whose cars are sold. The full sales price for cars is about double their production cost; the reduced price gives you only about 50% profit. For every car you have left over, you have to take a loss cube. All leftover cars are then returned to the players with no compensation (more planning - sigh).
Finally, loss cubes are resolved. Each car model behind the most advanced one of that type will get loss cubes; the further from the head of the queue it is, the more cubes it gets. This is one of the reasons why it's so important to shut down older factories. You then have to pay a penalty for each loss cube you have. The cost is small at first, but it grows with each turn and, just as significantly, loss cubes accumulate from turn to turn. Fortunately, a couple of the characters let you discard some, making their management considerably easier.
It wouldn't be a Wallace game without loans, so players can take a loan at any time. Compared to some of Martin's other games, loans aren't too severe, with the interest rate each turn being a mere 10%. The big issues are 1) you can't pay them off until the end of the game and 2) you can only take two loans for the whole game. So don’t be afraid to extend yourself when the opportunity requires it, but be aware that there's a limit to how often you can do this.
The game ends after four turns. You get to sell all your factories back to the bank for full price. You also have to repay your loans, with an additional 20% thrown in just so you know you've been playing a Wallace game. Most money wins.
I think Automobile's big selling point will be that it's as deep and challenging as a game like Brass, but it's much more thematic and intuitive. It is involved, as this review shows, but the actions have logical, real world counterparts, which makes it considerably easier to learn and to play. It's a difficult combination to achieve, but Wallace pulls it off with style.
The heart of the game is estimating demand with respect to the different car models, but this is far from easy. It also tends to be a pretty dynamic set of decisions, as the actions of your opponents mean you must constantly adjust your expectations. You can get to the point where you have reasonable success in anticipating how the markets will position themselves, but there are sufficient choices that you'll probably never be able to turn this into a blueprint. That's quite all right, as you'll have the opportunity to adjust throughout the course of a turn. For example, even factories at the rear of the stack can be rescued by the liberal addition of Bonus Sale markers and/or Reduced Price markers. This, of course, may lead your opponents to make changes as well. During my games, some of my fellow players were bothered by this uncertainty, but I thought it was a brilliant and challenging feature.
One corollary of this is the game's replayability. The order of the different models is always the same, so the only difference from game to game is the demands that are generated each round. This will have some effect on the game, I'm sure, but probably not as much as, for example, the ore prices in Tinners' Trail. However, there's so many different ways in which the players can choose to play that I'm very hopeful that this won't begin to be a problem. Certainly, my three games all played out very differently, much to my delight.
In addition to the player actions, there are many other decisions to be made each turn, including the character choices, distributor play, when to shut down factories, and Executive Decisions, and few of them are obvious. It'll take a couple of turns to get these all straight in your mind, but then they'll turn into a consolidated whole and you'll be able to start thinking of your turns as a unit, rather than as a series of disconnected choices.
This is certainly a thinky game, but the fact that all the choices are interwoven between the players, with each player taking one action or decision at a time, means that things move relatively quickly. This not only separates the game into more bite-sized pieces, making it less stressful, but also considerably reduces downtime.
I'm at the stage where each turn of the game feels independent of the others, almost as if it's four separate games. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it gives players the opportunity to catch up (the loans mean that there isn't a "rich get richer" problem) and the game doesn't seem to suffer from this lack of connectedness. However, I can see more experienced players try to implement a game-wide strategy and anticipate how each turn will build upon the earlier ones.
The game's emphasis on efficiency is one of its distinguishing features and this is most evident with the loss cubes. However, beginning players should not be too fearful of these little square beasties. They are by no means equivalent to the begging cards in Agricola. Taking a bunch of them on, particularly in the early turns, can prove quite profitable, as long as you wind up managing them later. They give the game another interesting dimension and add to the already considerable number of decisions necessary to play well.
A number of early reviewers have suggested that Automobile is like a more complicated version of a 2002 game from Winsome called Locomotive Werks. I don't think I've played this game since the year it came out, so my memory may be fuzzy, but based on my recollections, I don't see this. There are some surface similarities in the basic concept (the obsolescence of older models), but the weight, the luck factor, the mechanics, and the feel of the two games are miles apart. Still, I'm definitely in the minority here, so I should probably try to play Locomotive Werks again some time (particularly since it's had a bit of a renaissance lately) to see if I still feel this way.
I played Automobile with three and four players and loved it with both numbers. I think the four-player game is a bit better, because the challenge was higher, but the three-player contest should be ideal for learning the game and I certainly wouldn't hesitate to play it with that number. I might want to wait to play with five until all the players have a little experience, but I see no reason why it wouldn't succeed with that number as well.
My early games weighed in at 2.5-3 hours. The listed duration is 2 hours, but many folks at the Gathering reported 90 minute games. So 2 hours is probably quite feasible once you gain some experience, which is fabulous for a game of this depth.
The copy I was playing with was a prototype, but I believe it utilized the final artwork. If so, it's another fine effort by Treefrog, and continues their break from the sometimes frumpy Warfrog standards. The Treefrog gameboards tend to be very functional and reasonably attractive and that's the case here as well. It's highlighted by some very nice pictures of vintage automobiles, courtesy of the game's artist, Mike Atkinson. It takes a few minutes to take in the layout of the board, but after a turn, you realize that everything is laid out very logically and all the important information is displayed. Hopefully, some player aids will be included in the final product that outline the player actions, although after one game, even that shouldn't be necessary. The rest of the all wooden components are nice as well, including some very cute car meeples and upper torso meeples for the distributors. My only complaint is that I would have liked a larger set of denominations for the paper money, but I realize that Wallace is trying to standardize the Treefrog components, so even this mild shortcoming is forgiven. It's the gameplay that will attract Wallace fans to this game, but its appearance will be a plus as well.
The last time I was this taken by my first plays of a game, it was by Wallace's own Brass a year and a half ago. It's an indicator of my high opinion of Automobile that I think it might even exceed that excellent game in my ratings, which would make it the best game I've played since the fabulous Through the Ages. It's deep, the luck factor is low, the theme is attractive and intuitively applied, the decisions are numerous and enjoyable, it's reasonably short, and replayability doesn't appear to be a problem. If you like business games in which you have to struggle against the system and against your fellow players, I urge you to check this out. It's scheduled to make its official public debut at the UK Games Expo in May and will then be available to Treefrog subscribers and the rest of the gaming world in June. Martin Wallace continues to live in the fast lane with his great collection of recent designs; if he keeps producing games like Automobile, I'll be happy to go along for the ride.
Finally, some acknowledgements:
To Ravindra Prasad, for creating the rules summary that made the game a breeze to teach (you can find it on the Geek);
To Patrick Korner, for coming up with the title of this review;
And to Martin Wallace, for kindly (and wisely, IMO) providing this game for all of us to play at the Gathering.
Last edited on 2009-04-20 12:53:39 CST (Total Number of Edits: 1)
Posted Mon Apr 20, 2009 8:44 am
