Horseless Carriage - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

foreign this year we want the best or nothing at all we don't want tradition we want to live in the present and the only history that's worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today you all know our first customer was a lunatic and the second had a death wish but they bought our brakeless bangers and there were a few accidents but the only mistake is the one from which we learn nothing this year customers demand safety in of course active safety features include rapid acceleration for safe overtaking I know it will be hard to add the new motor block section to the factory but before you say you cannot do something try it to every engineer every planner every mechanic and every salesperson in this great company I say if I can dream it you can do it this mission statement at the start of splotter's latest economic lumbering Beast of a game Horseless Carriage sold me on its premise in a way that only the creators have shut up and sit down favorite food chain magnate can you have to understand this game arrived on a wave of hype for me Dutch publisher splotter are famous for making games that are so ruthless and cruel they encourage a level of player creativity that isn't really seen anywhere else in board games the hulking capitalist machines that are as much problems to be solved as games to be played they provide a hot new itch that only they can scratch so I was excited for Horseless Carriage Without Really knowing what the game was other than that it was about designing the very first cars what possibilities what excitement to have a brand new splotter game that I know nothing about and when it arrived I poured over the rule book and neatly bagged up all the components and then just as quickly unbagged them for our first game and then ask second then our third and then our fourth and what a spread a full glutinous table of ideas for us to Feast upon what is this game where does it fit in the spotter Cannon and is it going to be fun in Horseless Carriage you are one of several historical car boys and girls who want to make quick bucks selling fresh whips over the course of the game you're trying to make as much money as possible and you do this by excelling at what I will describe as the two hemispheres of Horseless Carriage Horseless and no cars and money let's talk about that first half first each round you're going to be using your own personal Factory board to assemble cars cars that you'll birth from these Mainline tiles socketed into your factory board in order to sell that baby a main line needs to be next to a dealership the storefront of your factory now these main lines are currently set up to produce Bland featureless Motors you want to get an edge on the comp petition here if you're going to get the big bucks up on the market but don't know it don't look at that yet huh you want to get an edge on the competition right so maybe you make these cars a bit more exciting each round you'll get the chance to research Technologies one space for every research Department you've stuck in your factory beforehand the Technologies are spread across different categories range reliability speed safety and design each showing a series of car parts that you can find down here and once you've researched a tech you can socket that component right into your factory floor because you know maybe you want your car to have I don't know an engine simply plop that station down into your factory and connect it up to the main line with a little arrow showing that the engine is making cars on that Mainline go faster because you've not quite worked out how to make it more reliable or actually go far yet whenever you improve what your cars can do you're gonna put a little cube of that color on the dealership to show that that dealership is now selling cars that are say tier one speed and tier 2 reliable on accounts of the components connected up to it but you see this hatching this means that you need to connect this kind of part to the corresponding part of the main line and remember that main line still needs to connect to a dealership and everything needs to connect back to this loading Bay in the corner oh and maybe you want your car to have some design too so people buy it because of its looks that means you need to find space for this paint can to go and hey maybe you actually might want these features to go into your latest range of sports cars so you'll pop a main line down for those two yeah nice oh and maybe some marketing for your dealership so you can sell to more of the market wait no I told you not to look at that yet you'll immediately notice that there is just too much going on here even a very simple car is going to take up a lot of space space that you are incredibly Limited in you can't create a fully functioning excellent motor with this very small Factory you start with and so the game forces you to specialize Straight Out The Gate choose the niche in which you're going to get the edge on your opponents in and one of the things that's most immediately striking about Horseless carry is that all of this planning all of this building all of this organization it's all done mostly simultaneously mostly free form with players just taking the parts they want and slapping them down with no real restrictions on what you can build just where you can build it each round is punctuated with these long stretches of Silence where players hunker down and Tinker with what's on their personal boards it's quite lovely it's quite experimental and quite freeing Until you realize you have to glue everything down now and forever and this in real reality makes it so that every round of the game is a fresh new hell as you stare down at the spaghetti mess of a factory you've built swearing bloody murder at your past self for Designing such a deeply dysfunctional wreck and it's delightful [Music] so that's the first half of the game these phases here you're going to be researching technology that you're going to plug into a free form Factory of your making to create cars which are then going to sell in the second phase so let's talk about the market board this is the market board and each car represents a prospective buyer who might take a visit to your dealership and grab one of these newfangled Horseless carriages these buyers are contained inside of niches these squares and each Niche is part of a price bracket shown by this diagonal hatching and label with prices getting higher the further diagonally up you go in practice the way that the market board works is it shows players what buyers expect from their cars each year what new features they might want and more crucially what buyers are willing to pay for those new features for example this buyer wants to have a car that's at least tier 2 in safety and tier 2 in reliability because those are the techs that we care about this round shown by them being right next to the board here and here and for this esteemed motor these buyers will cough up four dollars but if you could make your car just a little bit a little bit fur you could access these customers here you'll pay six dollars each but can you make it work in your factory complicating this even more is the very unconventional but very clever way you represent your stake in this market each round players get given these weird plastic windows to physically capture areas of the market that they are interested in selling to each round but other players can overlap and pinch customers right out from under your nose and what's more if you have better marketing these windows get bigger and bigger and bigger to soak up more and more cash but because you can only ever sell to one Niche at a time it's gonna be a real fight for space and for turn order goodness me what a long teach and I haven't even explained all of the rules here there are eight phases in this game each nuanced and complicated in their own little ways eight entire phases with winding twisting Tech and grit to go through that frankly you'll probably be bored by me explaining but hopefully you can see the cut and thrust of this box design cars in your factory contending with the harsh realities of a gritty Tech Tree and the amount of space you actually have to work with and then sell those cars in this market which is ever shifting based on the whims of other players and before we get into more grit here splotter has made another very funny game every splotter game has incredibly dry but a systematic wit to it bus has its ridiculous time travel mechanic that has people thinking they're going to the pub after work but really getting shipped straight back in for another full day roads and boats features endless comedy stemming from its reality of nobody really owning anything right technically the concept of ownership isn't real and food chain magnate's apocalyptic approach to supply and demand models a reality that's so Grim it is farcical so this publisher somehow managed is to make the driest most spreadsheet looking games on the market sing at producing comedy and this time it's mostly comedy in failure every turn of this game is spent with your head in various stages of being in your hands as you are aghast at the horrible Factory that you've produced and you picture the Hideous cars coming off of its main line look Ma I've made a car that's just a painted chassis this one's real fast look at all those red arrows brakes but it's that balance on the giddy edge of total comedic failure that makes your victories in this game feel so sweet it feels like you've earned it by besting your opponents with Savage manipulations of the market it's this absolutely frightening combination of really lean and svelt tile laying puzzle with a messy player-driven economy that absolutely sings when everything is humming along nicely where this has to adapt to that and vice versa a friend of mine playing this game simply asked why can't you just cram five research departments straight into your factory and the answer is you can you can do that on round one that's how much Freedom you're afforded to build what you want but he then proceeded to do exactly this and then screamed for every single round of the game because it filled this Factory with buffins with no room to actually build any cars ding ding ding that's splotter that's it right there that's what excites me most maybe about this game it's seeing people's personal play Styles evolve on these boards in real time you know those pictures where they show spiders getting honked up on the hard stuff and the webs go all loopy when they have coffee that's this game you can pinpoint the exact moment that your friend pivoted their whole Factory towards paint when they realized that design is all anyone cares about this round you know fun trivia I quit caffeine like five days ago on account of it spiking my anxiety and you know it's great I feel Invincible the only problem is that I have to trick my body into thinking it's getting its caffeine hit by drinking multiple full pots of decaf a day you know it's actually pretty easy for me because this guy up here he's easily fooled the point here is that horse's Carriage still features that excellent trademark mix of planning versus pivoting I didn't really know in one game why I was leaving so much empty space in my factory until one round where suddenly the market shifted into an entirely different field that no one had really prepared for except for me I had a bunch of empty space and I could turn my whole Factory into doing something completely different so that I could pinch customers from under people's noses it's a classic splotter economic puzzle but laid on top of a ruthless and hellish and quite satisfying spatial puzzle so what's not to love here wow okay so sorry to bury the lead here but horses Carriage is not all roses it's not all peachy and it's probably better if I showed you why [Music] foreign this can't be that bad but to me personally it really is the amount of upkeep fiddliness and admin that's in this game slows it down so much there are so many bits and Bobs on this table that need to be restocked manipulated or avoided that if you are the one hosting the game you're going to be perpetually terrified by even an errant sleeve hovering over the table I know you might be thinking hey Tom this seems a little unfair aren't all of the spotter games this fiddly and annoying yes they totally are but not this bad I checked I played roads and boats food chain magnet and bus and the only one that comes close is roads and boats because that game is literally demented I'm just playing something is this like Settlers of Catan and we're like yeah yeah but in hell um but I do think this game has it worse because there's a level of fiddliness to the basic motions that bogs things down quite a lot like that simultaneous building phase where you just take whatever Parts you you need that sounds great it sounds simple it sounds quick right but you can look at other players boards and try and work out what they're doing which does slow the game down considerably when they're not quite done yet and maybe you want to change what you're doing based on what they're doing so really it's not that simultaneous at all and on top of that these components are always limited and they go to the person furthest up the engineering track in a tie so there are points in this game where you grab bits only to have someone else later decide that they'd quite like them actually it slows the game down Beyond enjoyable process and into boggy boredom when someone has their plans shot down with someone else's slight change of heart and when you expand your factory you expand at the end of your factory placement phase meaning you have to plan excruciatingly far ahead in a way that burns your brain and also slows the pace down even more but here's maybe the biggest departure from other splatters it's that so much much of the game happens down here rather than over here a Hallmark of previous spotter titles is that there's this centralized section of the board the space where everyone peers at where the action happens food chain magnate the Great Zimbabwe bus roads and boats all these games have this real concern with shared space with shared infrastructure the shared space in this game is this Market board over here and it only gets access towards the back half of the round in a way that affects how you play but never manages to feel as alive or Sparky as the shared geography in other splotter titles really whether this game is for you or not is how much you enjoy this puzzle right here and you know what's more you can torpedo your game state in this game in more Brazen ways than ever before this game could be deeply unsatisfying if played wrong and you won't know what wrong is until you've done it and that's really actually quite great listen I can complain all day about various aspects of Horseless Carriage being fiddly and Byzantine and complex but to lots of people those are selling points hell to me those are selling points to an extent I don't quite love this game as much as other games in the splatter Canon but you'll probably know by now if this is the thing for you if the fiddle to faff ratio is worth it for me I think the fiddle is absolutely worth it because I love this spatial puzzle it's ruthless and rewards careful planning as much as it does absolutely tanking those plans to make a quick Buck because everyone wants fast cars this year but the rest of my group didn't enjoy this puzzle they felt like it demanded too much of them too quickly and ultimately that the end results of the puzzle didn't really satisfy I think they'd rather something more directly interactive too especially from this publisher to them the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze and not for want of trying we played this game several times they were determined to really get along with it but there came a point in one of our most recent games where I sort of realized I was pushing my friends through this puzzle again a puzzle that they weren't necessarily having a great time with that was wearing on their patients a little bit which is to say like these games aren't for everyone duh who knew but this game more than the others this is a niche within a niche if you will a niche that you can sell to for four dollars around but ultimately I adore what this represents in the space it is just such a breath of fresh air it might not be perfect but I continue to be fascinated and interested and in compelled by the designs that splotter make I really I'm glad that they're out there making these incredibly strange unique boxes I was lucky enough to get sent a review copy of this game but if I hadn't been sent that I would have bought one and would I have been disappointed with my purchase maybe a smidge especially considering the cost and especially considering that I adore the other games so much that it's just an impossibly high bar to reach but would I have had a great time yes absolutely would I continue to enjoy this incredibly strange box yeah I would and would I have felt great that I supported one of the strangest small coolest weirdest Publishers out there in board games right now yeah I would and I cannot wait for what comes next and I would still jump at the chance to play horses Carriage with anyone especially people who are really into it so buy this game if you think you want one of the most brain burning planning puzzles on the market that's got a good chunk more interaction than what you'd find in most other tile laying games but what if you like the ideas of this game but are maybe put off by some of the criticisms in this video well first up I would always recommend other splotter titles food chain magnate continues to be absolutely incredible I love my plays of it and whilst complicated it is easier to grasp and far more interactive thus the Capstone re-release is really something albeit a little less strongly splutter and Roads and boats is so far off the deep end on every axis but is also deeply out of print but further afield a really strong alternative recommendation for me would be pipeline a brutal reactive capitalist puzzle that's less faff and maybe more fun because of it it all depends on your tolerance for that faff and your burning desire for bumpers free gameplay but pipeline has the puzzle and it has the economy with far fewer components very strong recommendation for this game always and that's the end of this here video on splotters Horseless Carriage if you enjoyed this video please consider backing us over on patreon where you'll get access to our monthly newsletter where we talk about all the cool games all the cool films all the cool TV all the cool music we've been indulging ourselves in recently and you get a sort of from the heart passionate little chat about something that we care about recently I did a big newsletter about Frost Haven and how hard it is to make a review you can check that out over on the patreon for as little as five bucks a month to support your favorite board game channel out there with a with the best what else have we got going on that you might care about well we've started Twitch streaming again and you can check us out on twitch.tv shut up and sit down where you can see me mostly goofing off doing nonsense here are some clips from some streams to tempt you in stick with me in that game if this doesn't make you feel something I don't know what will it okay just get him and that's it that's the end of the video you can go home now and I need to pack up this game um that's why I chose this big wide shot to show you how much game there is to back up and how long it's probably going to take me I hope you liked it I I think it's a fun angle okay bye

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 146,435

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Tom Brewster, Horseless Carriage, Splotter Spellen

Id: 7Zz57_vUnbM

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2023