Already slightly outdated, coming from the year 2023, the board game Horseless Carriage from renowned Dutch publisher Splotter Spellen recently caught my attention, and I wanted to talk a little about it and my first impressions.
On opening the box, it was evident that this was another of their large and cardboard-filled games, yet I knew, though this was the first Splotter game I have played, that all of it had a purpose. There were more than 1000 punchout cardboard components, a board, 45 plastic frames, and over a hundred wooden pieces. It seems like a lot, and it was, though bagging it all up was only half as fun as tetrising it all back into the box.
Many people either love or criticize the art design of Splotter Games, deeming it “too simple for such an expensive game” or “just right, the game didn’t need any more.” On Horseless Carriage, I feel that I am of the second opinion, with the clipart-style illustrations on the chits (small cardboard tokens) and the retro fonts/designs on the manual and board giving the game a definite vibe and reinforcing its retro theme.
Speaking of theme, what is Horseless Carriage all about? What do you do inside this great hulking machine? Well, you are building and selling cars, but not exactly. You are building a car factory, which in turn produces cars that you sell to customers. The way that you build the factory is, much like putting the game back into its box, tetris, but not quite. There is an array of parts that your cars need / customers want, such as engines, wheels, and paint, and the kicker is that, in order to put anything into your factory, you simply plop it into an empty space. Done. No in-game currencies, no bankruptcy, none of that. You want to have it, you can take it! Only mind that it doesn’t cover up a loading bay (a gray area on your factory floor tile that cannot be obstructed), overlap with any other tile, stick out of the edge, or fail to touch either another tile or a loading bay. Oh, and you probably want to connect it to the center of your factory, so that it actually does something, which you then want to connect to a dealership, so that you can, you know, actually sell the cars you’re producing.
On BGG, this game has a weight rating of 4.26 of 5, but I disagree with this. Another game I have played, Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory, is a 4.23 of 5, and Horseless Carriage is significantly more straightforward and easier to grasp in concept, though much, much harder in strategy. The game itself is quite simple, with each round (usually of seven) being split up into a number of play phases and admin phases, wherein all decisions are quick but very high-stakes.
In addition, the luck factor of Horseless Carriage is almost zero, with most of the randomness being determined in setup and all other luck being negligible, leaving no permanent traces and giving nobody a significant advantage. Besides the (sometimes) brain-burning, almost abstract strategy of the factory building, the other hemisphere of the game is the Market Board, on which the players can manipulate turn order, sell cars, track their scores, and denote the rounds of the game. On the main market board, there is a large section which is split up into an 8×8 grid, with each square (a niche) belonging to one of 4 quadrants, and on each axis, a set of specifications that any customer in that niche demands from the cars you sell to them. You select which niche you are selling to by placing one of the plastic frames that are in your color over it. Also, the frames (windows) can overlap, giving you the opportunity to sell a car that your opponent was eyeing up but couldn’t sell this round, even though it was in their plastic window.
In addition to the market grid, there are the research tracks which allow you to place new departments into your factory, the turn order track which determines if you have access to other players’ research or alternatively, if you get to sell first, and the victory point track which is simply how much money you’ve accumulated from selling cars, and the Gantt track which is used for manipulating turn order in the first place.
On the whole, Horseless Carriage surprised me quite a bit. I was very excited going into it, and it gave me even more than I expected. The between-turn downtime is very low, the in-game decisions don’t take up that much time, the sales turn orders and research turn orders are perfectly balanced, and the broader spatial puzzle of building your factory is thoroughly appealing. This, combined with the very low luck factor, creates an experience that I have only ever witnessed in abstract strategy games, like Go or Mancala, but with an added theme. My assumption about the tons of components was correct! Basically every single one is used throughout the game in a variety of combinations, and of course there are a bunch as the maximum player count is five rather than the standard four. The game also struck me as very fair, with any advantages gained by a player being earned by the player, and not by drawing a card or rolling some dice.
The lack of in-game economy also gives it a distinct feel, as players don’t have to worry about getting the part, but simply about placing it.
On the whole, I was very pleased with Horseless Carriage, and am excited to play more of it and probe deeper into its systems.
