Steampunk Rally

To set up Steampunk Rally, first arrange the main track tiles, choosing the Swiss Alps side for your first game, and randomly placing the five middle tiles. Next, create separate pools for cogs and the three types of dice (red heat, yellow electricity, blue steam), ensuring they are within reach of all players. Separate the machine part and boost cards by their border color (gold, silver, copper for machine parts; black for boost cards), shuffle each stack, and then draw one card from each stack to create a discard pile, placing the remaining stacks face down. Flip the play direction token to determine the passing direction for cards and place it between two players. Each player then chooses an inventor and takes their corresponding cockpit and machine cards, pawn, damage gauge, and lightbulb token. Place your inventor pawn on the start space of the track. Construct your initial invention by arranging your two machine cards, ensuring their circular valves are connected. Ready your lightbulb token by placing it green side face up. Finally, set your damage gauge to zero.

The objective of Steampunk Rally is to be declared the greatest inventor of all time by having your pawn be the furthest past the finish line at the end of the final round. Players must strategically build and drive their contraptions through the Swiss Alps, managing resources and damage, to outpace their opponents and claim victory.

Each round in Steampunk Rally consists of four phases: Draft, Vent, Race, and Damage. In the Draft phase, players draw one card from each stack to form a hand of four cards. They then choose one card to play face down and pass the remaining cards to the next player in the direction indicated by the play direction token. This process repeats until all cards are played or discarded. In the Vent phase, players can spend cogs to reduce pip values on dice in their invention, or play boost cards specifically designated for this phase. The Race phase involves rolling all dice in a player's dice pool. Players can spend cogs to re-roll dice or add one pip to a die. They then place dice on their machine parts to activate race effects, performing one machine part action at a time. If a machine part has an 'X' symbol, the pip value doesn't matter; otherwise, the total pips placed are divided by a number on the card to determine the number of times the action is performed. Boost cards can also be played during this phase unless they specify otherwise. Finally, the Damage phase requires players to check their damage gauge. If it's zero or positive, nothing happens. If it's negative, players lose machine part cards for each number below zero. If discarding the cockpit is required, the invention explodes.

Scoring in Steampunk Rally is straightforward: the player whose pawn has advanced the furthest past the finish line at the end of the final round is declared the winner. There are no additional victory points or complex scoring calculations; it's purely a race to see who can cover the most ground by the game's conclusion.

The game concludes after the Damage phase of the round in which at least one player's pawn crosses the finish line. Once this condition is met, all players complete the current round, and then the player whose pawn is furthest beyond the finish line is declared the winner. If an invention explodes, the player moves their pawn one space behind the last-place player, discards all but their inventor cards, and resets their damage gauge to zero.