“Steampunk Rally” (2015) is a dice-heavy racing game where players play as various famous inventors while trying to construct a machine to get across the finish line. It was designed by Orin Bishop with art by Lisa Cossette and David Forest, published by Roxley, Games Factory Publishing, and MYBG Co., Ltd. (depending on year and format). It’s also notable for having a double-sided tiled board that can be rearranged to have hundreds of thousands of possible combinations, making it a slightly different game each time you play it, and an entire lack of individual turns. Additionally, given each of the sixteen playable inventors has a different base machine and ability set, there’s a wide variety of strategies.
Each player starts with a custom cockpit card which lets them generate one of a few different resources each round – for instance, Marie Curie can generate either a red (heat) die, one point of defense, or two cogs – and a custom engine card which usually uses dice-based generation – and Ada Lovelace has a Steam Turbine which rolls blue (steam) dice, and can generate movement based on this. There are a couple notable exceptions, such as George Washington Carver’s Leguminous Lygodium, which also generates automatically each round. The main trade-off here is that it’s possible a dice-based resource may not generate at all, but has the potential to generate many times, whereas an automatic resource only generates once each round.
At the start of each round, each player “drafts” aka draws four cards: a steam machine part, a heat machine part, an electrical machine part, and a boost card. Machine cards can be played to expand your racing machine and are divided by what source of energy powers them; boost cards are instant bonuses that take effect when played. Players keep one of these, then pass the rest to the player next to them, face down. Each player then reveals what card they chose, and either builds it (if it’s a machine part), stashes it (if it’s a boost card), or sells it for a certain cost, depending on the card. Rinse and repeat until all cards from the draft have been built, stashed, or sold.
During the race phase of a round, you roll dice and activate machine parts. Blue dice can activate steam parts, red dice can activate heat parts, and yellow dice activate electrical parts. Machine parts have various functions, including regular motion, “damage-free motion,” dice generation, and defense generation. After everyone activates their machines, people move across the board. For mechanical purposes, this happens simultaneously, meaning if multiple people cross the finish line in the same round, the winner is the person furthest beyond it. While moving, some spaces you move over or land on may be difficult terrain that causes damage or have other negative effects, which is where defense comes in; if your defense is not sufficient to protect against this damage, you instead lose pieces of your machine. The aforementioned damage-free motion mitigates this issue. Cogs can be used to change dice rolls, and any dice not generated or used during this phase are lost.
There are a couple other phases to the game, and a lot more nuance in how you do all of this, but this gives a general idea. You go through a card draft to build your machine and gain advantages and roll a lot of dice to activate machines and generate everything else. It’s admittedly deceptively difficult given that it can effectively be simplified to that one sentence, and requires a lot of strategy, but it’s conceptually easy to understand and not unlike any number of other games out there. It also has some genuinely impressive art, particularly in how all the machine parts are uniquely designed but also smoothly connect to one another, and it really commits to the steampunk genre as more than just window dressing. Overall, I think it’s a very well-designed game that adds interesting complexity to racing board games.
My one major criticism is also the source of this article’s title. There are a lot of ways you can get dice: cockpit generation, selling boost or machine part cards in exchange for dice, rolling dice for generation through machine activation, and from boost cards directly. Sometimes, even spaces on a board can make it possible to gain dice. There is also a lot of incentive to do so. The more dice you have, the faster you can move and the more you can defend yourself from damage. However, every game I’ve played we’ve reached the point where we just ran out of dice. At least in the edition I played, there weren’t any rules for how to handle this situation. There were contingencies for most situations and recommendations for how to rule conflicts, but this was a major blind spot. Additionally, because the dice are color coded and the colors have mechanical relevancy, you can’t easily supplement them with your own. You need to use the game’s dice. This is a major issue even when playing with 3 or 4 people, and this game is made for up to 8. It really does not have enough pieces to play it correctly
Who would I recommend this game for? This is for people who enjoy steampunk and wanted to find a game that matches steampunk theming but can play generally. It’s for people who wanted more complexity and strategy for racing games. It’s probably a good option for someone’s first genuinely complicated indie game – it isn’t as overwhelming as many, but it is outside the realm of games that can make a reasonably mainstream distribution. Despite its Board Games Geek rating of 10+, I’m not sure it is a good family game (though admittedly the art is extremely family friendly, so with the right kid it might work well), but it is a good game for teens as well as adults. I would not recommend it for groups of more than four, though. Maybe 5 or 6 could work depending on your group and what house rules you use, but out of the box, it’s not the large group game its 8-player rating suggests.