Passing Through Petra

EvEvanstar3,5

This is a race game, where you want to be the first to place the cubes from your player board onto spaces along the different circular tracks in the game, or onto your special objective cards. You collect tiles into the bottom line of your player board, which push in from the left, pushing out tiles on the right. Pushed out tiles to to the top of your board in columns matching the color of the tile. When you take the trade action, you multiply your tiles in one column at the top of your board, with tiles from the bottom line that match the color the top is looking for. Then you gain movement steps along the wheel track matching the top color. Each rotation of the wheel drops a cube, and often unlocks a special feature to add to your board. As spaces for cubes fill up, new spaces become available further along the wheel, meaning that it's harder to place cubes later in the game than earlier. The game has really next to zero player interaction. Everyone works their own engine and hopes for the best. They made the decision to make each player board slightly different so that my red guys want to trade with a different color than your red guys, which makes having a sense of what my opponents is about to do more difficult than it probably should be. It's not a bad game, but It's just not for me. I'm not a huge fan of race games generally, and I like having even a little more bit of player interaction than what I can get here. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ☆ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment