Game Preview/Review: Crash by Crash

By W. Eric Martin
October 19, 2008

Publisher: Czech Board Games
Designers: Ivan Dostál and Monika Dilli
Players: 2 or 4
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Release Date: Spiel 08
Languages: English, German or Czech
Price: €19
Links:

In Crash by Crash, players compete, either head-to-head or in teams of two, to both blast the opponent from the bumper car field and end up on the highest scoring positions of the gameboard. The playing area is created each game from 25 different tiles, with a bell being placed on any space marked with a star. Any time a player hits a star with one of their cars, play stops for a scoring round with each car scoring 0-3 points depending on the color of the space on which it sits.

On a turn, you take two actions from a list of four with duplicate actions being allowed. These actions are:

• Place a car on the gameboard. Initially you start with only four bumper cars of your color on the board. If you add a regular car, you bump the car adjacent to it 1-3 spaces depending on how many batteries you spend; if you add a magnetic car, then you attract any vehicles exactly two spaces away. Knock an opponent off the board, and you earn two points. Adding two cars in one turn knocks four points off your score.

• Play a card. Cards come in three flavors: blue cards that affect car placement, which must be played as your first action with the placement coming afterward; yellow cards that affect scoring, which must also be played first with your second action being used to cause a scoring round; and gray cards, which are simply played as an action.
  

• Move the operator. The operator of the bumper car ride has no allegiance, so you can use him to push people around, as can your opponent. The operator moves two squares for free and four scores for a cost of two points.

• Exchange two cards. You can discard two – not one, not three, but two – cards from your hand and draw two new ones.

First impression, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Playtest copy
Times played: Four, all with two players

My first two plays of Crash by Crash were somewhat bungled as the rules I received didn’t state that only four cars for each player start on the board, with seven more in reserve waiting to be airpdropped on the playing area. Instead, we started with a car on practically every tile, which hobbled our action possibilities since we couldn’t take action one for several turns. In fact, knocking off an opponent’s car seemed like a weak move in this circumstance since the player could then use it as a weapon against you.

Playing with the correct placement rules, as well as clarifications in the FAQ posted on the CBG website, not surprisingly revealed a much more interesting game. As with Leo Colovini games like Alexandros and Go West!, both players score when a bell is hit, so you’re constantly trying to bump opponents off the high-scoring cells and claim them for yourself.

Initially, the game was strangely non-intuitive as it was tough to work through all the implications of a car placement. This difficulty diminished in the next game as both players had a clearer move of what a good move might look like. You can get into tit-for-tat placements in which players face off on a peninsula: I place a car and shoot you off the edge; next turn, you can return the favor and return the board to almost the same position. The asymmetry of the board makes these series of actions less enticing, although determined players can be boring and repetitive.

One intuitive action that hasn’t gone away is the attempt to move pieces on the board directly. In a game about bumper cars, it’s odd that the cars don’t move on their own – instead moving only when pushed by the operator or hit by teleporting car – but that’s part of the challenge, I suppose. If you could simply drive onto a bell, the game would be simpler, in addition to losing the tension of allowing two car placements for a cost of four points. That double placement can swing the momentum to your favor, but is it worth the cost?

The cards provide useful twists on existing actions, allowing you to push two cars at once on a placement or move away from the car you hit. The alternate scoring card – which turns the 0-valued spaces into 2s and the 3-valued spaces into 1s – is a strong one, and the threat of seeing one played should encourage you to continually bump the opponent from the board as car disparity can lead to runaway scorings.

The removal of the tile with the bell after a scoring seems to be an attempt to prevent runaway games by disallowing a player to lock in points on that tile, but given the layout of the board, a player can set up strongholds elsewhere and try to ride those points to victory. Both of my latter games saw one player take the lead in the first third of play, then hold on to that lead throughout the game, with the final scorings being rushed as the leader had enough of a margin that those last points didn’t matter. Rather than suspect a runaway leader problem, however, I would suspect that the players didn’t know what they were doing. Multiple times throughout our games we would place a new car on the board, then pull it back once we saw how the resulting collision would look – and I’m normally pretty good at spatial games.  Having that competence challenged is a good thing from my point of view.

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