Horseless Carriage

it’s nigh on impossible to critique such a game after just one play but I think it’s fair to say that Horseless Carriage has all the hallmarks of a Splotter game: Heavy on Strategy; Heavy on Planning; Not rules heavy but difficult to get your head round the concepts and ideas; A big learning curve; and certainly a table hog with lots of fiddly components and not much care for the practicality of playing on your dining room table. Yet for all this, I’d say Horseless Carriage is a little more forgiving than other Splotter games where usually you can mess your first turn up so badly that you can’t hope to compete for the rest of the game

It's enjoyable although I am not yet convinced it will end up being as good as other Splotters but they all take a while before I get out of the ‘incompetent’ phase. After perhaps 5 or 6 games I may get to understand the underlying concepts and how the various mechanisms impact each other well enough by which point I may like to think of myself as ‘competent’ but I am yet to get past that point with any Splotter

TBD

New game design ideas (very rare, nowadays), high interaction, tricky gameplay.

Another fascinating Splotter! Very crunchy, very deep, very difficult to parse all of the rules in your first go. Short of the leader screwing up, I don't see any catch up mechanism. It seems like 90% of the game is in the factory construction phase - which, to be honest, is kind of annoying. It's simultaneous play, but it's LONG simultaneous play. I see some overtones of Food Chain Magnate - players produce the demand and the sales, there's a tech tree of sorts, and physical arrangement of pieces is vastly important. That being said, I prefer FCM. The arrangement piece overshadows everything else in HC, and it's not why I play a crunchy, economic Splotter title.

A fun enough game, and inarguably well done, but not my preference when it comes to Splotters.

After 10 games:

• The best splotter to play at 5 players
• very original, as usual
• deep, or actually "wide" economic and spatial optimisation puzzle.
• somehow a U turn from TGZ and FCM: needs more players, more time, has less broad appeal, is less "thematic friendly". Heavier maybe.
• interaction is meaningful / not missing a common map
• a bit less "fun" than FCM and less "glamorous" than indonesia. A bit drier, but has something unique going on in it.
• doesn't work much for me at 3p

Eric: 6.5 Greg: 8.5

https://boardgamegeek.com/video/429822/horseless-carriage/piece-action-game-review-34-horseless-carriage