Board Game: Race to Adventure!

In addition to watching The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T and getting very drunk yesterday, we played a board game.

The Game: Race to Adventure!
The Publisher: Evil Hat Games, but it has been scrubbed from their website
Time: 20 minutes once you get the hang of it
Players: Me, Michelle, Gus, Amanda

Game Play: Race to Adventure! is based on the Spirit of the Century RPG, at least as far as the set dressing goes. You pick a character, but it's just cosmetic, there's no functional difference between playing Mack Silver, Ace Pilot and Professor Khan, Gorilla with a Jet-Pack. 

Everyone gets a passport, and the object is to get all of the stamps and then get back to base. Getting the stamps is framed as going to [place] and having an adventure, but in practice it's down to collecting clues and/or having the right object with you. 

First thing's first: Deal out the cards into the map. The three on the left-hand side are Century Tower, your home base. The rest of them are the various exotic locales to which you travel: Atlantis, Brasil, Egypt, and so on. Each of them has a particular requirement for getting the stamp. For a couple of them, it's just "go there." For a few, you have to go there, use the map (on of the aforementioned trinkets) or the lightning gun. Several of the trinkets help you move: The jet-pack moves you one space diagonally, but it only has fuel for one charge and then you have to refuel at Century Tower. The zeppelin can move anywhere there's a mooring dock, but that's just one location and the Century Tower, so if you happen to deal that location next to the Tower (as we did our second game), it's kinda useless. And then there's the biplane. The plane moves you two spaces, but it lets everyone else move one space. 

So a turn starts with everyone going around and choosing which item they want, and if you're choosing first, sometimes the gamble you make is picking an item that would only be useful if someone else picks the plan so you can get to where you're going. Otherwise, you might get stuck somewhere for another turn, unable to have your adventure.

Mack Silver vs...the SLOTH CREATURE OF THE MACHU PICHU!

Opinions: We all liked this game more than we necessarily thought we would. It's not a terribly complex game, though there are some options. Each of the cards has a "shadowed" side, which changes the requirements slightly, and flipping those makes the game more challenging. Likewise, there's an expansion involving dinosaurs which we couldn't play because the rules aren't included (wtf, guys) and the QR code on the pamphlet takes you to a site that Evil Hat doesn't maintain anymore. (I did find the rules today after some digging.)

A lot of the competition comes from maximizing the use of your time, and paying attention to where other folks are and what they're doing so that you have a sense of what they might pick, how you can best block them from making progress, and what order to try and get your stamps done. It also, as I think about it, is a competitive game with no random element, which is actually kind of nice - at least if you get screwed it'll be your friends doing it and not random chance.

Keep? Yep