Steampunk Rally sees you build a steampunk car as you rally.
Can you keep it together?
Steampunk Rally is a strategy game that incorporates steampunk as more than just a bit of chrome.
Steampunk Rally is a straight-up race game where you’re building your car as you go. Everyone starts with a very similar set-up of 2 cards, one with an ability.
The game is played over a few phases. The first involves drafting.
Drafting
There are 4 piles of cards, you draw one from each pile, pick one to play and pass the rest to the next player.
These are parts you can add to your car or abilities you can use or save for later. You can also discard the card for dice of the relevant colour for cogs… there are used later.
Vent
Next is the Vent phase… This is where you use cogs to reduce the value of the dice you have assigned to the parts on your car… Why would you do that? Well, this is related to the next part so I’ll go into more detail then.
Race
In the Race phase, you roll your dice and assign them to the parts on your car. Most parts require the right colour dice and the value of those dice will determine what happens.
Maybe a part lets you move 2 spaces if you play a 3… so you play a 6 and can move 2 spaces… But those dice aren’t removed so that space is taken up now and so it can’t be activated again until the dice are removed. This is where ‘Venting’ helps, reducing the value of the dice until eventually, you can remove them.
When you move certain terrain deals damage and some abilities on the car can heal it. You use a dial to mark your damage. You will lose a card from your Vehicle for each damage you have on the dial, then your damage goes back to 0.
If this would cause you to lose all the cards on your car you restart back at a checkpoint…
Steampunk Rally Summary
It’s a nice game but too many bits going on for me… Drafting, dice placement, multi-use cards and racing are all things I like, but not in the same game apparently.
I’d rather play Jamaica, Titan Race and especially Race Formula 90.
It’s not bad, I enjoyed it, it’s just a bit fiddly.
Jesta ThaRogue