My ultimate creation hummed. It whirred and it gasped. It gurgled, whined, rattled, and roared. It was destroyed, it was repaired, it was restored, it was ground down. And finally, it moved.
Steampunk Rally is a board game by Roxley Games that puts you in the inventor’s seat of an improbable machine. You are adding parts and watching them get blasted away by the treacherous terrain of a racetrack with little in the way of safety precautions. Your machine is represented by cards laid flat, arranged and connected. You roll dice representing types of energy, steam, flame, electricity. These dice are placed into parts of your machine, which causes them to burp up rewards for you, such as more dice, or moving your machine.
I suppose I would classify Steampunk Rally as an Americanized Eurogame. It is definitely a game with little interactivity between players. There are some single-use cards that can be played to damage other players’ machines, but the racetrack itself provides the biggest obstacle. Pretty much every turn was spent with us poring over our contraptions, muttering to ourselves and shaking our heads and rolling our dice. And then we’d look up, and move our little standee a few places down the track. The thrill of a race!
It is a simple game at first, as you have only a few parts. and the racetrack seems to whiz by. But by the end of the game, I spent around fifteen minutes moving dice, moving counters up and down, spending the currency of the game (cogs), gaining it, and then, at last, screamed forward, sloughing off cards as though I was gaining speed by simply throwing machines behind me. The turn after that, I barely moved at all, as my creation was seizing and rattling under all of the dice I had packed into it.
Meanwhile, the person next to me had made a machine of only 6 parts, that converted red dice into blue dice and blue dice into movement, and moved the same speed every turn. Our third player made a device that functioned perfectly and never had any waste, but also didn’t really go anywhere. We were playing different characters, but our unique Inventor Abilities did basically similar things. Through the mechanic of drafting machine parts, we had access to basically similar cards. But we did three very disparate things with them, entirely unprompted. And the difference was more tangible than many “point salad” Eurogames. Many times playing Eurogames I feel more like an accountant than a Roman Merchant or whatever the game insists on calling me. But in Steampunk Rally, I felt like a Mad Scientist. And once I saw the other inventions at the table, I felt like an Artist, among other Artists. And that is beautiful to me.
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