Horseless Carriage

Horseless Carriage

Horseless Carriage is unlike any other game I’ve played recently – it’s a beast of a strategy game that left my brain both exhausted and intrigued. You’re basically thrown into the dawn of the automobile era, trying to design cars in your factory that match what customers think they want (speed? safety? style? a bit of everything?). The core of the game is this intense spatial puzzle where you’re laying out tiles in your factory to add features to your cars. I actually loved tinkering with that puzzle and seeing my cars improve each round, and the competitive side of selling cars to a shared market added a spicy economic race between players. However, I have to emphasize: this game is punishing. In our first play, I made a placement mistake early on that basically crippled my strategy, and in true Splotter fashion, there’s no mercy – I knew I was out, but the game kept going for hours. So, it’s the kind of game that demands you learn through failure and come back better next time. It also has a lot of little rules and fiddly bits (tiny tiles everywhere, and lots of phases to each round). The theme is cool in concept, but once we were playing, it turned into a pure brain puzzle and I kind of forgot about the theme entirely. Some absolutely love the depth and brutality, others bounce off hard. I’m somewhat in the middle – I respect it and want to try again, but it’s definitely an acquired taste. For me, Horseless Carriage is about a 7/10 after my initial plays, with potential to rise if I invest the time to master it.