Motor City: A Kanban Game

Welcome to Motor City, a board game where you can become an industrialist like Henry Ford in the golden age of the automobile industry. Competing for your manufacturing plant to become the most profitable.

Explore how the techniques adopted by Ford and Toyota revolutionized the way we think of production. Can you mange your production plant as effectively as they did?

The player accepts orders from customers, chooses which products to make and allocates resources and manages the plant to deliver cars to customers in the most effective way possible.

Each player manages a separate board representing a factory, the board is laid out as a Kanban board and the production is tracked as it moves across the board.

At the start of a shift a player may choose to review and accept an order, once accepted an order must be delivered and if the player fails to complete an order they will be penalized. Each shift all players may choose to source materials for their production, this is done by selecting vehicle cards from the available selection.

At the start of each hour within a shift one player rolls dice to determine the available production points for all players, all players get the same amount of production points.

Each player is allocated a quantity of Manufacturing, Assembly and Quality production points, based on dice roll, which they can allocate over the course of the hour. Unused production points are discarded. The player also has the option to trade production points of one type for another but at a 4:1 ratio to indicate the impact of repurposing machines.

The vehicle cards are pulled through the system and production points are allocated as they progress through the system.

The game ends after the last hour on Friday, or the 5th round. Ultimately the winner will be the one that manages the production most effectively to meet their customers’ needs. The player with who has earn the most money by filling orders is the winner.