Characteristics of Games: Thunder Alley

Thunder Alley (TA), designed by Jeff and Carla Horger, is a positionally-oriented racing game with hand-management and great amounts of narrative.

(Originally posted on BoardGameGeek and G+.)

Number of Players

The game supports 2 to 7 players, controlling 6 to 3 cars each. TA has a hand-management aspect, where your hand size is linked to the number of cars per player – fewer players makes the game more about hand management (you control more cars, with more cards), and more players makes the game more about positional play and taking advantage of opponents’ moves (you control fewer cars, but the play area is a little more dense).

Playing Time

Laps take around an hour to play:

The track takes 12 to 21 cars, moving at 4 to 8 spaces per card.
Cars likely get to move twice or more per turn, pushing them to ~14 spaces around a 28-space track [Velodrome].
Each card takes about a minute or two to play.
The 12-car game is about 30-45 minutes per lap, while the 21-car game is about 45 minutes to an hour per lap, for moderate-speed players.
One event per turn takes about a minute or two to resolve, and pits take about a minute, longer with more players.

Most tracks suggest two laps, making it approximately a two hour game (barring events, etc.).

Heuristics

Heuristics (at least in early experience) revolve around positioning and hand management.

Try to form a line with as many of your own cars and as few other cars as possible.
Split up opponents’ lines when you can, take advantage of them otherwise.
Pay attention to permanent damage – either take one car out with it (if a long game) or spread it around (if you can finish without breaking too many cars).
Generally move your cars from back to front, unless you can cross the finish line.
Save your solo movement for late in the turn, to grab lap leader points.

Mechanics

Mechanically, you move each of your pieces once per turn, triggered by a card. TA’s twist is that each card can move multiple pieces, depending on the board position: a line of cars can move together with a “draft” card, or you can move everything behind (with “lead”) or ahead (with “pursuit”) – the fastest cards (“solo”) even move a car by itself. Cards also cause damage, generally scaled by how much movement they provide.

This dynamic of group movement and card-caused damage leads players to try for as much “free” movement as possible. If your car moves because of another car’s activation, that’s great! No damage, no card necessary, tons of benefit.

As most cards cause a single counter’s worth of damage, and three damage counters causes you to drastically reduce speed, most players will be pitting at least one or two cars around turn three or four. The pitting decision is complicated by being able to “free move” as described above (a damaged car in a good line could get loads of benefit out of their linked sibling cars) and the possibility of yellow flag events. Pitting your lead car to allow another of your own to take a lap leader token (tracked per-car) is also possible with fewer players, but on a dense track it seems like you likely won’t have first and second spot very often.

Aesthetics

Aesthetically, TA feels much more like being a race team manager than a driver. You sit in the pit, watching how the race evolves, radioing out commands to your team and receiving a stream of updates from them about car damage. You make difficult decisions about when to call someone in to pit and when to try to block up the lanes, while your professional drivers worry about how to take the corner optimally and how to get out of the way when someone muscles in. If you want the Formula Dé experience of pushing your luck shifting and slamming into the wall when you guess wrong, this is not the game for you.

The 50,000-foot view looks a ton like the Nascar races the game attempts to represent. Cars start clumped, spread out, and then re-clump. Events reflect realities of racing (damage from brushing the outside wall, rain slowly entering the area, damage piling up and causing more damage), and making a break for it is interesting and (surprisingly, for a thoughtful game) exciting.

Tom Vasel often complains about racing games that feel slow – where you spend a ton of time fiddling with the mechanics only to move a very small percentage of the track. TA mostly avoids this with group movement; cars generally move about half the track each turn, and card play stays quick with the right play group. The game is a bit of a puzzle, but with a bunch of cars on the track you can often plan ahead for your next play to keep it quick.

Possible Variants

There are campaign rules for running a season, but I don’t think they go far enough – it seems like there should be car and driver management, reflecting the team manager feel of the game. As it is, there’s enough narrative here to keep things interesting for a long time, and mechanics to keep it from getting too shallow.

I’ve played two games so far – a six player, one lap test run with all new players, and a two player, rain-ended run against one of the people I know who learns games the fastest. Both were interesting, but with very different feel. With only three cards (the first game), it seems like the luck of the draw could destroy you relatively easily, and I’m tempted to house-rule a fixed 7-card hand no matter how many players are out. It’d be interesting to hear if the designers tried that, and how it turned out.

The two-player game (I won 233 to 225) was great, and my opponent wanted to play again. They got hit hard by the events, mainly due to team bar draws, which we found funny only because the draw seemed fair. That game ended due to rain (both events drawn), which is statistically so unlikely (only two cards in the event deck) that I hadn’t expected it even after the first. My partner was curious if there were other effects from the first rain card, which might be interesting as a variant.

In all, Thunder Alley is a great race team manager game – it feels like Nascar and is just begging for campaign play. Highly recommended unless you want to make the driver’s choices (looking for the best line, shifting in the right place, avoiding getting hit).