inconsequential ruminations

Five came along to our regular games night for the first time in months, so we narrowly missed out on a game of Agricola with Chris’ stunningly improved set – more on that in another post. Instead I press-ganged everyone into playing Breaking Away. When they saw the poor quality of the components there were a few mutterings of “this isn’t going to be another Black Vienna is it?”, but I managed to supress the mutiny. Luckily this experiment worked out really well.

A luck free race game based on cycling. Players control a team of 4 cyclists. For each cyclist the player chooses one of his available movement allowances and moves that many squares. Once all cyclists have moved the expended movement allowances are replaced with new ones calculated according to the cyclist’s position in the peloton; being at the back of a group brings a high replacement value, being at the front a low one.
Sprint points are earned by being among the first 8 to cross the sprint lines so there is always a trade-off between slipstreaming (“drafting”) the other riders in order to build up high movement allowances and making a break for the front to be the first to cross the finish line.

Although there are no random elements in the game, there is plenty of chaos. You cannot really plan what you do entirely, but that makes it perfect for a light-hearted evening. This competes well with Hare and Tortoise – another no-luck racing game. Do not be put off by the awful components and having to write. This is a very clever game and should be far more popular than it is. Unfortunately the website of Fiendish Games is down right now, as it is only available from the publisher, but you may be able to get in touch with the designer, John Harrington offline. This game deserves the quality components of a Fantasy Flight or Days of Wonder game.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 23:15 and is filed under boardgames.