23rd Jan 2025 - Kraftwagen: Age Of Engineering

• Recent games

Kraftwagen, I think, is the German equivalent of "Horseless Carriage". Literally, I mean: as a game it's completely different.

The designer, Mattias Cramer, was better known to Dave-E and me as the creator of Weimar - the half war-game, half political game set in Germany between the wars. Again, Kraftwagen is nothing like that: the main similarity it has with Weimar is the indulgent production quality, all thick wooden pieces and recessed boards and so forth. Given that the two games are from different publishers, I guess we attribute this preference to the designer.

Paul is a big fan of this game, and none of the rest of us had ever played it before. So Paul would naturally be expected to win comfortably. If you're not confident of whether he actually did or not, or if you think you'd enjoy hearing how he got on, read on...

Thematically, this is a game about building cars, selling cars and racing cars; and advancing your car tech with the help of the usual cohort of American car pioneers... Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, Charles Kettering, plus a number of others that don't also pop up in Automobile, such as David Dunbar "Dave" Buick, and the excellently-named Ransom Eli Olds, of Oldsmobile fame.

Mechanically, it's basically a rondel game like Shipyard, where the most sought-after actions effectively become more costly, and the less sought-after can be cheaper or even free. In this case, that comes in terms of turn order and number of turns. You can choose any action, but you have to advance round the roundel to it, and the player at the back of the line always takes the next turn. So advancing too far in one go can cost you several subsequent turns. You score victory points mainly by two ways: selling cars and winning Grand Prix races. The more you focus on one, the harder it is to achieve the other.

All of which combines to mean that, more than almost any other game I can remember, the best strategy in this game is to "do something different from what everyone else is doing." If you do the same as someone else, you're competing for the same set of actions as them, and also divvying up the same set of VPs with them. It soon became apparent that Ian and I were both doing luxury cars, and were set to be vying for last place, unless Paul and Dave-E could be persuaded to take points of each other in the same way.

In his rules run-through, Paul had mentioned some ways in which "the game" (ie. the other players) could screw you over. And so his chosen strategy was to inflict such things on the rest of us before we could do it to him. It sort of worked, in that he certainly screwed me over, by jumping almost all the way round the rondel in one go, primarily to cost me a lot of points in the first scoring round. But then he missed a lot of turns in the second round, waiting for us all to catch him up on the rondel. As mentioned, there are basically two ways to actually score points in the game, neither of which is screwing people over.

So as we approached the end of the last round, Paul found himself under threat from Ian and me in the fight for last place. And then, just to complete the set, he made a mistake and screwed himself over in the final sales phase. Ian wasn't quite able to catch him, but I was - which soothed the psychological wounds that he had inflicted earlier.

And meanwhile... Dave (as they say in the car races) won by miles. I'd like to say that his strategy of building a fast racing car is the way to win, but I think that was only the case because no-one else was doing it. Still, left the rest of us looking pretty foolish (especially Paul 🙂).

Anyway - this is definitely my kind of game. Rules simple enough, everything visible to everyone, the challenge to outmanoeuvre everyone else in the same situation as you. And it was quick - easily played in 2 hours. Would definitely like to play this again. Ideally with 3 people who all think the same as one another...

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