Dice Rolling

In 2015 teams of inventors first donned goggles and took up their welding torches in card-drafting, dice-rolling race game, for 2 – 8 players, Steampunk Rally. Then Orin Bishop looked upon this complicated box of delights and cried “more!” And so, in early 2020 a Kickstarter launched for Steampunk Rally Fusion.

SRF takes all the gameplay of the original and adds new courses, new types of dice, new inventors, new vehicle parts, new boosts, event decks, crowd challenges, and a solo mode. Due to how I backed, this review covers Steampunk Rally Fusion – Atomic Edition, which neatly puts both versions of the game in the same box for an absolutely huge experience.

Initially the contents can be a little overwhelming. There’s gold silver and bronze parts, as well as boosts for both editions, a staggering number of inventors, and enough dice to square up to a copy of Chip Theory Games’ Too Many Bones (including the new fusion dice which are beautiful 2 colour d6 numbered 4-9). However, once you’ve got through your first few turns, it will all come clear.

The aim of the game is to race along a modular track and make it as far over the finish line as possible. Along the way you will be adding various parts to your vehicle to propel you onward, damage your opponents, or generate resources to help you do that other stuff.

Players start by picking an inventor and taking their associated starting vehicle part. They then arrange them so that valve symbols on each card are matched up. All parts that are attached to these wild machines must include an unbroken line of valves going back to the cockpit. Luckily you can rearrange these mechanical monstrosities on the fly (or roll, or hover).

Each round sees players draw a card from each of the three parts decks and one from the boost deck. They then take a card and pass their hand on to the next player. Bronze parts have valves one all four sides so are mostly about expansion; silver parts help you gain and multiply dice, as well as converting dice to different types; finally the gold parts are mostly about movement. It is a race after all.

When drafting cards, players can either attach them to their craft or sell them off to gain dice or cogs. Meanwhile boost cards can also be sold or kept secret, to be used later for benefits such as extra cogs or damage to opponents.

With the draft down players can get moving (there’s another phase but I’ll come back to that). Time to roll all those dice you’ve generated and start placing them around your vehicle to get moving, raise shields, or make attacks. Here cogs can be spent to either raise the value of a die by one or reroll it.

Most machine parts will give you some reward based on the value of the die or dice you add. For example, inserting blue dice with a total value of 15 into a part which grants one forward motion for every five points will grant you three movement.

Some things to consider though. There are some areas of terrain that will damage you if you’re unable to raise enough shielding or move smoothly. For each point of damage you fail to defend against during the race phase, you’ll have to remove a part of your machine. If your final part explodes, you’ll be sent to the space behind the player in last place and have to start your vehicle from scratch.

With the race phase over and damage done it’s time to wipe down your engine (ooh-er) and get ready for the next round. All unused dice are put back in the supply and damage counters are reset. However all spent dice stay in place. Sadly this means you’re going to have to find a way to clear them out if you want to use that part again. This is where the vent phase comes in.

Following the drafting phase, players can spend a cog to remove two pips of value from any die (or split the points across two dice). Once they reach 0 it can be removed and the slot can be freed up to use again.

Eventually someone will cross the finish line. However, this isn’t about who finished first, it’s who got furthest over. As such a final round is played out and whoever is furthest over the line at the end of that round is crowned the winner. Although it’s probably like golden goggles instead of an actual crown, because, you know, steampunk.

Well, that’s it, race over, nothing more to see.

But wait, there’s still more stuff in this dang box. Check out optional extras like secret projects. At any time during the race phase you can add a run of dice in any colour to add a point to your total for each die spent this way. There are powerful bonuses for activating your secret at 4, 8, or 12 points. However, you only get one shot, so if you use it early on with only 4 points, there will be no chance to get use of the full 12 point bonus.

There’s trap effects and a special effect deck for some spaces on the Machu Picchu track. On the Mars course there’s canals which require either two movement from the same vehicle part or one smooth movement, as well as tripod cards which affect all players on red track spaces. There’s a solo mode where you’re aiming for a high score to beat in future games. Lastly there’s challenges such as crowd pleasing spaces and various locales to trade cogs for dice and vice versa.

For a fairly standard sized board game box, Steampunk Rally Fusion – Atomic Edition packs a huge amount inside. That said, for the right price either edition on its own would be plenty to be getting on with.

The manual is clear in describing each phase of the game. However I did find it a little difficult to make decisions as to what I should be taking or selling on my first few drafts as fitting all the information from the manual into actual play proved difficult. That said. After playing a practice round, everyone found it clicked and we were able to start over with a proper understanding.

On the subject of learning, there is an official video on Roxley’s YouTube channel, however the over the top acting and voices made it quite difficult for me to follow. Your mileage may vary (especially if your vehicle explodes on the way).

Steampunk Rally Fusion – Atomic Edition is a really fun game with so much in the box that no two games will ever be the same. It’s fun to look at the ridiculousness of your creation laid out before you and the fact you’re never completely out means that there’s always a chance to make a comeback.

Pros:

The consistency of card art means all the parts flow together in really fun ways
Great fun
The fusion dice are so pretty

Cons:

Found some blemishes on a couple of the normal dice
Initial learning curve can be a little overwhelming
The vac tray takes up a lot of space that could have been better used as components can feel squeezed in after initial box setup.

Final Score: 7/10

9th of April 2021

My Dear Tatos,

I write in haste to warn you. A tome has come into my possession by means of our mutual orange friend. At first I perused with deep interest, but the more I read, the more I found my grip on reality slipping from me. Indeed as I read a passage aloud to my nearest companion, she found herself overcome and fell into a dark, comatose state and did not rouse for many minutes after I had ceased, such was the confusion in these pages. Its words spoke so much of what was not contained within the box of eldritch symbols, with which it had been acquired. It spoke of horrors yet to come. Horrors that would twist our current thinking. Thus did it seek to ruin our minds and defeat our mortal bodies. I warn you to make yourself safe and not engage with these artifacts, lest you possess the strength of gods to survive this mental anguish.

Yours in peril,

Jane

Cthulhu Wars: Duel is an asymmetric, area control game, from Petersen Games, for two players which takes about half an hour. It’s a game that wants you to know that while it does attempt to be an affordable, streamlined version of the half ton of glorious coloured plastic that was Cthulhu Wars, there will be expansions. Rather than explain the game you’ve purchased Duel’s manual is a cosmic nightmare of clarifications, citations and explanations for Great Old Ones who aren’t even out yet.

Why bother just letting you know about the game in front of you and moving on when you can drive your players to their own special Lovecraftian loss of reality. Why put in an example of a rule that is always true if this box is all you own, when you could throw in a paragraph about how this other Old One (you don’t know them, they don’t go to school here. They’re from… er… Canada, but don’t, like, check or anything because they’re shy… probably) can totally do things differently.

When I looked on YouTube for information on how to play, most of what I found was people telling me what the game isn’t. It’s not Cthulhu Wars. People seem to love telling you how it’s similar to or different from the beast that spawned it, but don’t seem to care if you’re coming in fresh (because CW is a ridiculously decadent plastic fest (as many good Kickstarter games are) and you can’t afford it or justify the shelf space).

I spent 2 hours reading the manual and it’s full of unnecessary bullshit that caused me to really struggle with what is actually a very simple game. So simple in fact that I would recommend you start with the reference sheet on the back of the manual as well as your player mat, and only use the manual itself for clarifications and picture examples of what things are called.

CW:D takes place in four phases and as many rounds as necessary (4-5 seems to be the average). First up the Action Phase: if you’ve got power, spend it to move, fight, open gates, deploy or capture cultists. Then comes the Gather Power Phase where you’re awarded power based on how many cultists you have on the board, any opposing cultists you’ve captured, how many gates you control, and any gates that are currently abandoned on the board. Next you decide who the first player is, based on who has the most power now. And finally it’s the Doom Phase where you can perform a ritual for some power to generate more Doom and a token with a secret amount of Doom.

The winner is whoever has the highest Doom score and the game end is triggered either when someone goes over 30 Doom or when so many rituals have been completed that you move to Instant Death.

That’s it, two short paragraphs and you’ve got the gist of the game. What else is there? Well, there’s player mats, spell books, cardboard standees of your various horrors plus discs to represent your cultists, and a map board to shuffle your units around on.

When you realise that the world wraps around horizontally (like Asteroids), you’ll understand how little space there actually is to claim, but claim it you must if you’re to gain the power you need to bring about your preferred version of the end of the world.

On your player board you’ll see a clear explanation of your various units, including summoning costs, attack power (number of dice to roll for them) and any special abilities. On the right side of the board are 6 slots with various conditions that must be met. Once you meet one of these you can select one of your spell books to activate into that slot, to give you an advantage for the rest of the game. The order you choose them is entirely up to you and gives you some nice strategizing to do as the game goes on.

One nice rubber-banding technique is that if you run out of power before your opponent, you can push up the decay counter by one space. This means that they’ll have to pay whatever the current decay cost is before taking any further actions, which is a great way of stopping one player absolutely running away with things early on.

Apart from the abysmal manual, the other massive downfall of this game is its combat. Combat power is based on the type and number of each unit you have on the battlefield. Different units have higher combat scores, meaning you can roll more dice. There’s no rerolls, nothing that can mitigate a bad roll, you just get your number, roll that many dice, and work out if you’ve actually done anything to your opponent. A six is a kill, four or five is pain, everything else is worthless.

Once both players have rolled, You can assign your opponent’s damage to your units as you see fit. With kills returning units to your pool (to summon again) and pain causing units to flee to a safe, adjacent space, but leaving them alive. While it’s simple and clean, it’s a type of randomness I detest in area control and war games because a few bad rolls will absolutely ruin you.

While I had an okay time with Cthulhu Wars: Duel, I felt it could have done with a more concise rulebook, and some way to mitigate the randomness of dice rolling. Whatever else it is, it’s short, so ultimately not very offensive (apart from how it’s based on Lovecraft and no matter how the current fan community tries to pronounce certain words these days, they were intended to be racist as heck, so there’s that.

Stoned Monkey Radio

Stoned Monkey Radio

Going For Goldberg – Steampunk Rally Fusion

Pros:

Cons:

Final Score: 7/10

A Wretched Tome – Cthulhu Wars: Duel

Pros:

Cons:

Final Score: 6/10