I got a chance to play Wallace's latest last night. (I was just nervous about buying it unseen...)
Despite having read Larry's review, little information had stuck. Hearing the rules didn't help, but there's actually a fairly simple system --
The board shows a track of car types ... each space has a factory cost and indicates whether the model is a luxury car, cheap car, or standard. A space will have a factory (or not) and some number of cars (zero up, although it's rare for a space to end up with double digits). At the end of the turn, there will be some demand revealed for each type (luxury, cheap, standard) of car, and you'll start from the most advanced space, take a car and place it in the demand box of the appropriate type, and then go to the next space. Once you get to the end of the track, you loop back. Some spaces will have marketing tokens, which mean they sell 2 (or more) cars instead of one, each time they hit.
Unsold cars don't earn any money (of course), but also generate a "Loss" cube for the owner, which represents unexpected costs. That's actually a nice little mechanism ... if you sell what you produce, you are assumed to cover routine costs.
After selling, then each factory generates a bit of loss, depending on how old it is. (The best factory of each type produces no loss, other factories produce 1 loss for each better factory of that class). Loss cubes inflict a cost at the end of each turn.
Once you know that, the rest of the game is pretty easy. Apart from book-keeping, you have 3 rounds of actions, and the basic actions are:
- Open a factory (which takes money and possibly R&D points)
- Close a factory (to recoup most of the investment, and also get to discard some loss cubes)
- Produce cars
- Get some R&D
- Place some distributors (which provide another way to sell cars).
The rest of the game is similar to lots of Wallace — each player picks a special privilege (like an Age of Steam Role) which also determines player order, you have some loans, and the economy is fairly ruthless. No care-bear profits for you. You start with $2000 and may be worth $4 or $5 thousand at the end of the game. In fact, the basic business mechanism reminds me of train-rusting from 18xx. You build a factory, use it to earn a bit of profit, and then dump it and build another.
Automobile almost feels like a black-and-white caricature of a Wallace game. It's a minimalist distillation. You build infrastructure, compete to fulfill demand, and suffer from realistic cost issues. It's a Noh play (compared to Wallace's normal Kabuki, or an Ameritrashy Opera). The gameplay wears a mask, you bring the enjoyment (or not) by appreciating the details. Which is not to say that the mechanics are minimal, there are plenty of interlocking subsystems.
You have 12 actions (4 turns, 3 actions each) and need four "Produce cars" actions, roughly that many "Open factories" action. Varying too much from that is a quick route to bankruptcy. There are a few ways to get bonus actions (and producing cars gives you a range of options, as does building factories), but this is a tightly constrained game. There's nothing as free-form as Age of Steam's tile laying, for example.
You win or lose in the details. Do you produce 5 cars or 7 cars? Build a luxury factory or produce more sedans? When (not if) do you close your first factory? Do you select Ford (with his free factory expansion), Howard (who can sell ice to Esikimos, and plenty of cars), or Chrysler (who can keep costs down)? You win or lose on the small variations.
I'm looking forward to playing a few more times. It may be that the static setup leads to formulaic play. But I appreciate the system of business development and decay.
(Update: I just realized I never updated my thoughts about Brass, but I much prefer Automobile. It's a model of clarity, by comparison).