From one race game to another. Fette Autos has been out a few years now. Designed by Heinrich Glumpler and published by Edition Erlkonig, the game uses cards to simulate the acceleration, braking and overtaking in a car race, using relative positions (similar to Knizia’s Formula Motor Racing) rather than movement around a track.
The game is played over 8 rounds, each round representing either a straight or curved section of the track. A player’s speed is shown by three cards laid in front of him. In each round, players firstly have to change one of these three cards as dictated by the track section they are negotiating. They also receive movement chips if the symbol on their cards then matches that on the track section. These chips are used later to assist braking or overtaking. Players then get the chance to change one of their cards for a better one from their hand to speed them up or slow them down depending on the speed limit for the track section. If their cards exceed the speed limit, they either have to pay chips to reduce their speed temporarily or execute emergency braking (they permanently lose a card from their hand and replace their highest speed cards with ones drawn from the deck until they fall within the speed limit). Finally, each player has the chance to overtake cars in front of them by adding chips to their current speed and comparing it with the speed and chips of the car in front. After 8 rounds, whoever is at the front is the winner.
In our game, we started off feeling our way. This wasn’t helped by the fact that I had got a rule wrong but it didn’t affect things too much. On the third round, the first straight appeared and I made a big move, coming up from fourth place to take the lead. However, I lost out in the next curve by not being able to brake sufficiently and had to execute emergency braking. John had to do likewise. Nige at this stage was pretty close to the back but was doing well at matching track section symbols and gaining lots of chips to help his overtaking manoeuvres. Things worked out really well for him and he was able to gradually move through the field and take to the front going into the final turn. Fortunately for him, he still had enough speed left to see off the challenge of Mark K and take the win. Well played. My car was obviously suffering mechanical problems at the end as I dropped back to fifth position even behind the neutral ‘Old Pro’ car.
I quite liked Fette Autos. Manipulating your hand to be able to get the right cards down to take chips seemed to be the key and Nige did this better than the rest of us. It was quite a nice different take on car racing and it would be interesting to see how it played with fewer players. Interestingly, you can even play it solo with 6 neutral cars. |