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The gist of the game is simple: Six mopeds are racing, and you're placing bets on which ones will come in first, second, and third after three laps around the track. Each round you reveal cards from the deck, with mopeds moving according to fixed rules, sometimes being bumped to a longer outer lane, sometimes being blocked and having their movement card wasted. Each player secretly drafts one of the revealed cards in the round, and only the discards — the cards not chosen — will be used for future movement.
Thus, the more you invest in a color, the less likely it is to move. It's a great set-up, with players sometimes hanging themselves because collectively they've stripped the deck of a color, thereby stranding the moped on the track. The design is a great way to model how individual "smart" decisions can lead to collective "dumb" results.
The moped movement is random, yet fixed through the first two-thirds of the game, with player choices not mattering just as you have no choice of what to do in Candy Land — yet the outcome of the race, the final one-third of the game, is completely under the collective control of all players. That hard turn fascinates me, especially since I prefer games in which you're directly affecting what happens to opponents rather than trying to manipulate a game system in a more efficient manner.
That said, I discovered only after I posted this video that I've played ten times on a review copy from 2F-Spiele with the wrong rules, despite me reading the short rulebook at least three times. (I've been goofing rules more frequently and consequently feeling much older in a relatively short time.) We have been placing discarded cards in a separate discard pile, then when the deck runs out, we shuffle them and play from that new deck. The rules actually state that the last player in the round places the discards on the bottom of the deck in the order of their choice. If you watch the video, keep that in mind. Now I'll need to play more with the correct rules to see how that affects things, but I dig the game, so I'm okay with that.
Anyway, if you watch the video, please keep my discard goof in mind, but the overall thoughts on the game still hold up.
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