DETROIT is a lovely little two player game from Japan. You compete to build three cars. You share a factory floor, where some spaces are common while some are for you only. You have six game pieces, and you need to move them all through the assembly line, in the process combining the top and bottom pairs to form complete cars. Whoever does so first wins.
On your turn you roll four dice, and they determine how many steps you must move one of your pieces. The dice here don’t look like dice at all. They look like traffic cones. A cone which lies on its side shows one pip at the bottom, and that means one step. A cone that is standing upright means zero. You might move up to four steps, but if you are very unlucky, you might not move at all.
Each space on the board allows one piece only. If you move into a common space containing your opponent’s piece, you knock it off and it needs to restart. This is the key element of the game. Some of the common spaces are safe spaces. You are protected from being knocked off. Three of your pieces are top pieces, and the other three are bottom pieces. When you move a top piece to a space with your own bottom piece, you combine them to become a complete car. Thereafter you move the completed car as one piece. Now if your completed car gets knocked off by your opponent, it is taken apart and both pieces need to start over and get assembled again.
A big part of the game is managing risk and opportunities. When you have multiple pieces, you can maximise opportunities by positioning them such that no matter what you roll next turn, there is something useful you can do. The safe spaces are fun. Sometimes you choose to move a piece there even if it means leaving another piece vulnerable. Occupying a safe space blocks your opponent from using it, which means his pieces will be more vulnerable.
You cannot assemble a car by moving a bottom piece onto a top piece. This is an interesting challenge. If your opponent knocks off your bottom piece, and you now have a top piece far ahead of your other bottom pieces, it is a little stuck because it needs to wait for a bottom piece to catch up. You have to plan how to get your cars assembled as the pieces advance through the board.
This is the kind of game where the game components can sell the game. The good news is the gameplay is decent and meaningful too.
Although light, this game looks interesting, particularly since the odds of rolling a 1 vs. a 0 are not obvious from the shape of the dice.
ReplyDeleteFrom the game I played, I think the chances of rolling a 1 is higher than that of rolling a 0. With four dice, 0 is very very rare, but sometimes we do get a 4.
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