Motor City Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Motor City, a roll and write board game published by 25th Century Games. In Motor City, players are making muscle cards in a factory.

Currently, one of my favorite series of games is the steady stream of solid roll-and-writes designed by Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback. If you’ve paid attention to our Quest Lists, you might have noticed that I tend to drop these games in from time to time. A year ago, Three Sisters was my favorite game of the first half of 2022 and it also served as my entry for the recent best roll-and-write list. Motor City was my most anticipated game for 2023. Did it live up to expectations or have Ridback finally crashed and burned?

Motor City is a roll-and-write from Motor City Gameworks and 25th Century Games, designed by Riddle, Pinchback, and Adam Hill, for 1-5 players and plays in about 45 minutes.

Much like earlier games in the series, Motor City has players drafting dice and using them to perform actions in various sections of their two-player sheets. The dice this time have custom faces corresponding to the different departments where you’ll be checking off boxes to advance along tracks. At setup, you’ll be able to choose a test car from one of three available testing tracks and an engineer from the six engineering tracks. When the dice are rolled, they’ll be sorted and placed onto a blueprint board that is divided into the four major departments. Players will draft dice until each has chosen two and carried out all associated actions.

When taking a die, players will first gain a printed bonus from the blueprint space that the die occupied. Then, they can choose to take the action on the die face, use the die to upgrade that action, or mark a space on the research track. Lastly,