Chariots At MOAB (Again)

Last year I headed up to MOAB to help Victor playtest a chariot-racing game he is working on. THis year I did it again.

You can read about the game in that link above or, at least, the version of it that we were playing last year. Victor has made a few changes since then, the biggest of which is that a lot of tests are now made on two dice, with adjustments upgrading or downgrading what type of dice you roll.

After sorting out our teams, what skills they'd have and what types of horses, we diced for initial positions off the start line. I'm Red. The ones at the back.

Frank with the Blue team got a good start, but the game does depend on your colour coming out of the initiative bag on the straight sections, and Blue just didn't appear for the first couple of laps.

I got some early moves and used my better chariot to come up and cause trouble. Alistair, with Green, had slipped his fast controllable horse teams into the inside lane and was planning on racing from there.  I rammed him, causing some damage which I hoped would cause him issues later.

I also brought on my Hortator to guide mt chariots through the dust, but he didn't really need to do much. Beside him you can see my Spartator as well. His job was to throw water onto the chariots or teams to cool them down. He risked being run down by other chariots. Mine was.

You can see two Spartators in action here and, in the background, the grid showing what dice have been drawn so far.

Craig brought one of his White team chariots to the fore. My second Red chariot was starting to drop back. I would have to spend some actions to keep it properly in the race.

A view from the rear. You can see Green doggedly holding the inside lane. No chariots had been lost, so it was hard for the rear-markers to find spaces to try and break into.

The grid, showing that we'd completed four of the seven laps.

Green made their run for the front. The middle lane is the best lane when it comes to adjudicating finishes, so getting to the front of it is a good place to be.

With one and a bit laps to go I got a couple of opportunities and used them to bring my second chariot - the one that had been running a safe race in the rear - down the inside track, and to then cut across in front of Blue.

I was then able to cut back to the inside lane, but couldn't get the actions to use that position to push in front of Green. However I was in a  decent finishing position, with a horse team that was fast on the finish.

Craig pulled into the outside lane as we finished the final straight. All three lead positions were occupied, so it would be a photo-finish. This involved a dice-off, with the modifiers to types of dice rolled being based on teh traits of teh horse teams, how blown they were and which lane the chariot was in. Alistair was strong in teh centre rolling 2D12s, I was rolling D10s on teh inside and Craig D6s on teh outside.

And yet it was Craig's 8 that beat my 6 and Alistair's 7 to give the White team and unexpected win. I had to be content with third place. 

There was plenty of discussion afterwards of things that could be changed. We felt that chariots didn't really seem that vulnerable; we expected a a couple of crashes but in fact every chariot finished. We considered some changes to increase the damage chariots took for certain things. The multiple dice types worked OK, but possibly slowed the game down, firstly because we didn't have enough of them so we were passing them around to each other but also because you couldn't roll the dice and then see if you needed to work out the modifiers afterwards (sometimes you know you've passed or failed without having to do the calculations). With varying dice types you need to do the calculations in order to determine what you're actually rolling. We also considered rules for bringing back the Spartator if he got killed on the assumption that a team would probably have a few of them on hand.

Anyway, it was a fun game with an spectacularly close finish.

As ever I hit what was left of the Bring & Buy (Monday at MOAB is pretty quiet) and picked up yet another boardgame.

'On The Origin Of Species' is from the same publisher that does 'First in Flight' - they seem to specialise in games with a science education theme - and is, oddly enough, not about evolution, despite the name. It is, however, about the groundwork of Darwin's magnum opus, with the players taking the part of naturalists discovering and documenting species in the Galapagos Islands. The art-work is lovely, but I haven't had chance to play it through yet. I'm hoping to fit in a game one evening this week.