Sunday, May 16, 2010

Automobile


We had a mini game session on Friday night and Ed chose Automobile as the main game of the evening. If anyone knows Ed he likes his economic games and Automobile was a pretty good one. I have mixed reviews of Martin Wallace games, I appreciate the technical aspex of the game but I find them a little hard to get my head around. Brass lived on my shelf for ages till I managed to get it to the table. Perikles is still there.

Automobile is all about building car factories, recuiting sales people and producing cars and selling them. Its a balancing act of building as much as you think you can sell, with unsold cars loosing you money. I was suprised it only plays for 4 turns, and the game lasted about 2 hours. I suspected it to last a little bit longer.

I won the game, not sure how I managed it but I went for a high end approach, building as many high end cars as I could and making sure they were all sold. Mid range cars bulked up the rest of my production. It seemed to work as I had only a few loss cubes, mainly for having sales guys twiddling there thumbs.
I will be happy to play it again, now I know what to do its definately going to make a difference. Also I thing the next play may be a little bit more aggressive, we were all playing fairly and not trying to under cut each other.

We had a little more time after Automobile so I pulled out Dominion Seaside as the others haven't seen or played with the cards. It was a good game but I just couldn't get my money engine running. We managed to end the game with all the points cards being bought up. The last province card ended the game, never seen that before.
I had enough cards to beef up my hand each round but no where near enough money in it to actually buy anything. Lesson learnt.

The house now has an Ipod Touch so I need to spend some time on teh app store looking for those board game conversions. The only problem I can see is wrestling the thing out of my sons hands. I may have to add another one to a virtual basket sometime soon.