Over the last couple of nights I’ve been reading through the rules and boning up on Automobile. It’s a relatively heavy game (for me) that pits players in the early days of the automobile business in an endeavor to make the most money buy building the right number of factories in the right locations, hiring the right number of salesmen and allocating them to the right models, manufacturing the right type and right number of cars to meet demand, and knowing when to cut your losses and shut down older plants. The game is ruthless to risky players that end up outproducing demand or underproducing with too many salesmen as well as those that play overly cautious. The winner will be the player that plays just risky enough. It’s difficult to get a good feel of the game playing a few solo turns since some of the information is supposed to be hidden (i.e. total demand) but I can see that I’ll like the game once I get a chance to introduce it to my group.
Automobile is designed by Martin Wallace and seats 3-5 players. The listed play time is 2 hours so I’m sure that in my group, that first game will drag out to about 3. I am however, looking forward to it.