Chariots At MOAB

This weekend just gone was the annual MOAB show up in Sydney. I always make an effort to get up there for at least one day. This year I even had a shopping list!

I went up on the Saturday because Victor had invited me to have a go at a chariot-racing game he's developing. Called 'Ludi Circenses' it uses the racing pack/relative positions concept that you see in THW's Charioteer, combined with an action dice system similar to that in 'Song of Blades and Heroes'. I should say that the mechanisms are not lifted wholesale; they are very much their own thing.

Here's the race underway. The game is for four players, each running two chariots. The teams are the classic Reds, Blues, Greens and Whites of antiquity.

The track has three active lanes; an inside lane on the left, a middle lane and an outside lane. There is also an area to the right called the outer lanes, which is where the 'pit crew' lives and where any chariots that drop off the back of the board go until they can be brought back into the main race. You can see one such chariot in this picture.

The race is run over seven laps, with each lap consisting of three straight sections, a corner, three more straights and a final corner. 

On the corners each chariot simply tests against a hazard number to see if they take stress or damage on their chariots. The level of hazard is determined by how many adjacent chariots you have, being in the dust-cloud of a chariot in front of you, whether you are on the inside track (the most dangerous) and how much stress you have put the chariot under.

In each straight section one chariot will act, based on coloured dice drawn from a bag. Each player has eleven dice in the bag, so with 42 straights in the game you can be sure of getting at least 9 actions in the game, maybe 10 and, for at least two players, 11 actions. Charioteers can use crowd support to get bonus actions if they are popular.

When a chariot acts you roll one, two or three dice with roman numerals on them. Each 'I' symbol gives you an action. Two or more 'V' symbols give you an action but also fatigue the horses. So a roll of 'III', 'IV' and 'V' will give you four actions for the I's and one further action for the V's plus a fatigue.

Actions can be used to move (which is easier the closer to the inside you are), change lanes or attack or overtake other chariots. 

I noted earlier that each team has a pit-crew. These are the mounted Hortartors, who can guide a chariot and negate the effects of dust, and the unlucky Sparsors. These latter are slaves whose job it is to throw water on the axles of the chariots or on the horses in order to cool them down. The wooden axles of chariots would get hot during a race, to the level where they would smoke. In the game a chariot accumulates heat each time it acts. A team can use actions to deploy the Sparsor to cool a chariot down. 

You can see both a Sparsor and Hortator in action here.

Using a Sparsor is an action. If the target chariot is in the outer lane then they can do their job unimpeded. But if they have to cross lanes there is chance that they will be run over. In this picture the green Sparsor has got lucky...

... but he was not so lucky a couple of turns later! Splat!

Anyway, the final straight is the key one; a chariot wins if they are in one of the front three paces of the track. That Blue chariot is mine, looking like a dead cert.

But here's a Red chariot coming up on the inside. 

An overview of the finish. We were both using crowd support at this stage. It was very exciting.

Pipped at the post! In the event of multiple chariots being at the front at the end a chariot in the middle lane has priority. However other factors can affect the finish. Red's horse team were better finisher's than mine, which gave them a bonus and made the result a tie. In that case the tie-break is unused skill counters (which are assigned at the start of teh race). I had one. Red's chariot had ... two. So Red won on the narrowest of tie-breaks; I finished well but Red's better horses and more skillful charioteer just squeaked ahead in a 1st century AD photo-finish.

I was gutted.

The also-rans. On the back wall you can see the dice that have been pulled from the bag, neatly grouped by straights and laps.

This game is tremendous fun, with lots of period chrome and things to manage. As a chariot races it slowly degrades, and the game is very much about managing heat, damage and stress, whilst ensuring that your opponents accumulate some. We didn't have any crashes, although one of the white chariots had taken a couple of corners badly and was close to falling apart. Sadly he failed to amuse us by actually doing so.

And what of the shopping? I bought a few bits for a Turnip 28 force I have on my painting table (I have one unit painted and another couple mostly assembled), as well as some more Grim Fantasy figures for use with Palaeo Diet. And I picked up two boardgames. The first is a solitaire WWII game, 'Field Commander: Rommel', which allows you to play the great man in three campaigns (France 1940, Western Desert and D-Day) against a game-controlled Allied force. I've tried the France 1940 campaign a couple of times and it's a tough nut to crack. Those Somuas just keep comin. The other game is 'Evolution: New World' which is an excellent card-based game about adapting animals to environments whilst fending off other player's predators. I got it for $15 and it seems to be a full kickstarter set with not only the basic game but two expansions as well. Quite a bargain. We've played it three or four times already this week, and we love it. It lacks the silly animal builds of Quirks, but does have a charm all of its own*.

*My wife and I both studied life-sciences at university, so as a theme it's very much our thing.