No limits gaming
AUTOBAHN
Designer: Fabio Lopiano & Nestore Mangone | Publisher: Alley Cat Games
Swallow that mouthful of tea and make sure you’re sitting down before reading on: it’s time to see who can make the biggest contribution to modernising haulage infrastructure in post-war Germany! If your skull hasn’t been blown wide open by a surge of raw adrenaline, you may just ready to learn about Autobahn.
You and up to three friends – or even three enemies, if you’re especially persuasive – are going to be working together to lay great veins of smooth macadam up and down the length of Germany, connecting cities to trading hubs across Europe. As the roads grow into a sleek web, you’re going to send out your fleet of trucks, like busy spiders, carrying goods to your neighbours in Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands. And just like spiders, sometimes the drivers of those trucks will need to wee, so you can build service stations along each route, easing their journeys and earning yourself a welcome few Deutschmarks in the process.
Autobahn is a game about interdependent systems, and when you start, even if you’re an avid Eurogame player, it might not be immediately apparent why you’re doing what you’re doing. If you like, you can spend some money to build some road. Great, now these cities are connected and their respective values increase. But they’re not your cities. And these aren’t your roads. Sure, that was a lovely, civic-minded act on your part, but how do you earn points?
And here, in this apparent ambiguity, is where the fig-like juiciness of Autobahn’s sweet centre finally reveals itself. Every time you build or upgrade a stretch of motorway, you get to place one of your managers in the company of the matching colour. They sit on that company’s board, and, at the end of each era, you earn a share of that company’s profits proportionate to how many you have.
But other players can invest in that road network too, and since there’s only so many managers a company can have, eventually an incoming manager will bump the oldest out. But they’re not sacked – no, they’re kicked upstairs, promoted to senior management. This, finally, is how you earn points. All your promoted employees score you points at the end of the game, but by unlocking specific upgrades on your player board, you’re able to promote them further along specific tracks, where they’ll earn you extra points for – for example – every service station you built, or for how much money you end the game with. No matter how well you contribute by delivering goods and constructing roads, you won’t score anything unless you’ve got execs in the right board rooms.
Autobahn has a lot to take in on a first playthrough – you perform actions by choosing from a hand of cards, only the action isn’t on the card, it’s on your player board, and it’s the colour of your card that matters. Only some cards have additional actions on, and you can upgrade both the cards and the action spaces you assign them to. Then you can upgrade your player board, there’s a whole pick-up-and-deliver thing going on with your trucks, there’s an entirely separate advancement track you can ascend to get extra bonuses… it’s by no means intuitive.
But it’s really good. When it clicks, and some of the slightly abstracted mechanics start to make sense, you realise that every move matters. Every decision your opponents make alters the transport ecosystem, denying some opportunities while opening up others. There’s a continual sense of progress, of plans coming to fruition, and yes, of agony as someone nabs that plum service station spot.
The result is a game that feels deep and alive without – once you twig how the gears mesh – doesn’t feel overwhelming. Moving some of the screen-printed trucks can feel a little fiddly and the small player boards and cards don’t always serve your turnto-turn quality of life, but these are nitpicks. Autobahn is fun, nuanced, and has an epic historical arc. Not bad for a game about motorways.
TIM CLARE
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ Board
◗2 Administration boards
◗4 Player boards
◗6 Delivery boards
◗69 Cards
◗289 Tokens
◗100 Employee tokens
◗32 Petrol station tokens
◗8 Trucks
◗4 Development trackers
◗16 Goods tokens
◗ Solo board
◗8 Solo mode cards
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED CONCORDIA...
Do you like the card-based action system of Concordia? There’s a bit of that in Autobahn. Do you like connecting hubs of industry and piggybacking off other players’ work in Brass? Autobahn has that in spades. Also you can deliver washing machines to Amsterdam, an experience offered by neither.