Last night myself and a few others opened up a copy of Mayfair’s Automobile. Now, I know anytime I open up a Mayfair product I’m going to enjoy it. I mean, Settlers anyone? The box says 120 minutes for game length so I figured we were in for a long night with the learning process.

The premise of the game is that you are brought back into the era when cars were first being built. You sell, build, and advertise in hopes of making the big money. The player at the end of the game with the most money is declared the winner.

The game is played in four turns which I enjoyed. I have played many other games that were similar with a set limit of turns. However, I did not expect each turn to be comprised of 9 different phases, and a few of those phases to be broken down into different actions.

First turn started off with us selecting our characters for the turn (Ford, Sloan, Kettering, Chrysler, Howard, and Durant) Mitch building a factory on a mass-production tile, myself building on a premium class tile, and Kim, Becky, and Donaven building mid-range factories for our first action. We all built cars on our factories for the second action. And our third actions were varied with some placing salesmen and some gathering R & D cubes. At the end of the turn Becky, Kim, and Donaven all scored points but Mitch and I both took losses because what we didn’t realize was that only mid-range cars were scored on first turn… oops.. my bad.

The rest of the game continued with me trying my hand at only premium cars and everyone else diversifying. The only problem we had was when we mixed up the demand tile rules and the guys got got hosed yet again.

Overall the game is very well put together even though at first glance it is very daunting. The rules are very clear once you read them through and the only time we really referenced the book after we played a couple of turns was to see what each character did. I highly recommend checking out this game. Just make sure you aren’t playing with a friend who is out to get you!

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