Every
once in a while a game comes out that piques my interest…
Rocket
Race is one such game…
Announced
the week before Expo with a limited number of copies available and a fantastic
premise to those of us who love the concept of steampunk and the magnificent
inventions that it inspires in those that embrace it…
I have to
say that I did abuse organiser privilege to sneak in and grab a copy before the
trade halls opened, and that’s as well, because more than a third had been sold
before I got there just from people watching the game being played.
That
said, there’s a lot to be said when you keep production values this high. The box containing the game isn’t massive,
literally enough to house the rules, the cards, the counters, and the dice with
no space left over. There aren’t that
many cards, but there’s enough for up to a six player game (Four if you’re
using the advanced rules), and it’s easy to get going but still challenging.
The basic
concept is that you’re trying to build a rocket and get to the moon, to this
end you need a Steering Mechanism, a Propulsion Mechanism, and a Capsule. You
can also fit up to three accessories to the ship to improve the
reliability. All players start with ten
finance tokens and in turn, the player who won the previous round draws a card
from the deck and then all players take turns to bid on it. Highest Bid gets the card and the amount bid
gets put on the card to represent how long it will take to develop it. At the end of the turn, everyone takes one
finance token off everything that they’re developing that then allows them to
bid with that finance token again.
Sound
complex?
We
thought so in the beginning, but when you’ve got the first game out of the way,
you quickly get the idea that if you bid all ten tokens on the first thing that
came up, you won’t be able to bid in the next round, your finance will only be
one point in the turn after and so on, so the need for a particular part needs
to be countered by the spending power you have and more importantly the
spending power that you want to have in the round that follows. Tactical voting happens often, just because
you don’t want the bit, you don’t want the person next to you to get it for
nothing, and those who manage to make a lot of small bids find that their
finance replenishes far quicker than those who make a single large bid.
When you
have all three parts of the ship, you can announce that you’re going to launch
at the end of any turn, and then it’s a roll against the reliability of your
ship (two dice against the combined total of the three central components and
any components that are installed), with a roll under the total to succeed.
The dice
roll to get off the ground is the only random element of the game, with
everything else under the control of the players, there are other cards
available (that must also be bid upon) that can allow you to stall the launch
of another player, cause bits to fall off their ship, or (my favourite) allow
you to launch your completed but as yet unfinished spaceship whilst still
banging the nails in, in a bid to reach the stars before they do.
Of
course, the point of steampunk is that it’s all about style, and it’s here
where the game excels, the devices and contraptions listed on the cards all
have the hallmarks of the magnificent foolishness that permeates the Steampunk
Genre, and most people will find cards that perfectly match their personality
when putting their ship together. Personally
I found the idea of a hundred hungry mice steering a bullet shaped projectile that’s
powered by Volatile and highly unstable chemicals quite appealing, not very
reliable to be sure, but still…
The basic
game can be played with up to six, and takes up to ten minute once you’ve got
into the swing of it. The advanced game
introduces the idea of leagues of invention and the rivalry of different
factions which slows the game down slightly, but makes play a far more tactical
thing rather than just trying to bolt your ship together and throw it up.
The production
values are excellent, with full colour artwork, interesting text, and fully
laminated cards in each box, and while I’m not sure the price point of £15 will
hold for long once word of this gets around, it’s an excellent game and I think
that a larger version of it with more contraptions, gadgets, and rules will not
be long waited for.
