Tips automobiles

1-Minute Strategy Read

Focus your first several turns sculpting the content of your bag. This means adding cubes you want, and removing ones you don’t.

Which cubes are most desirable depends on the situation (several situations are discussed below). In general, look for the most desirable cubes among the blue and green cubes.

Buy enough purple cubes to keep wear under control. If you don’t know how many that is, buy 3. (You’ll get a feel for how many your situation calls for with experience.) Remember drafting can help you manage wear.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking a cube that could sometimes be helpful is automatically desirable. Remember each time you draw a mediocre cube, it could be preventing you from drawing a more desirable cube. (For example, yellow cubes often bog down one’s bag more than they help.) Remove undesirable cubes as you can.

Card Set Strategies

How to shape one's bag varies greatly based on the card set, track/racing season, and driver (if used). Your game's card set may not be listed below, but understanding strategies for various card sets will likely help you develop a strategy tailored to your specific card set.

First Game Card Set (Manager, Suspension, Crew Chief, Hybrid Engine, Gearbox)

Hybrid Engine is very powerful, so buy them during your setup turn and on your standard turns. If your opponents are experienced, Hybrid Engines will be bought until they are depleted. If your opponents are not experienced, you may be the only one buying them while others are racing. In this case, keep buying engine cubes either until they are depleted, or until opponents are about 1 lap up on you. White cubes, however, are not useful either for buying cubes, or for moving when compared to Hybrid Engine. So when a yellow cube is not useful for its buying power, use it to remove a white cube. In a base 2-player game, experienced players may spend their first 7 (or so) turns sculpting their bag (mostly buying blue and purple cubes, and removing white cubes) before moving on their 8th turn. (Using a driver from the expansion may shorten this time, as drivers can increase purchasing power.)

What about the other cubes? Gearbox can be powerful, but it can undermine Hybrid Engine. Adding Gearboxes to your bag makes your bag less dense with Hybrid Engines, which will be a problem if you don't draw enough Hybrid Engines to be playable (that is, more than is in any other players' discard pile). The same reasoning goes for Suspension, so be cautious about buying these cubes. However, Crew Chief does not suffer from this downside, because when played, it replaces itself with a cube from the bag. Just be sure to play Hybrid Engines if Crew Chief might re-bag your discard cubes and make Hybrid Engine unplayable.

Rev’d Up (Car Chief, Aerodynamics, Crew Chief, Hybrid Engine, Boost)

As is typically the case when Hybrid Engine is available, buy as many as you can. You’ll probably want your share of Crew Chiefs. Crew Chief should make Aerodynamics unnecessary.

Consider pursuing one of the following (you probably can’t pursue both):

• buy Boosts to help you add Hybrid Engines to your Active pile. However, be aware that sometimes Boosts can work against you. For example, Boost may cause you to restock your bag, including bagging discarded Hybrid Engines that are needed to make your Active pile Hybrid Engines playable.
• buy so many Crew Chiefs that some opponents can’t get their share to keep wear under control. However, because Crew Chief is so effective, be aware your opponents may only need a few Crew Chiefs.

Rinse & Repeat (Factory Support, Burnout, Pit Mechanic, Internal Combustion, Overdrive)

This card set offers may desirable options. Some experienced players will load up on Burnout; others will load up on Overdrive; many will buy a combination of both. But nearly all experienced players will try to get their share of Internal Combustion. Internal Combustion is powerful because it lets you trade a less powerful cube for 3 more powerful cubes from your discards, which lets the player get even more use out of Burnout and Overdrive.

Note, however, that these highly desirable cubes (Burnout, Internal Combustion, Overdrive) all add wear, and Pit Mechanic is limited in its ability to remove wear. This means you will want to get enough Pit Mechanics to keep wear under control, and it means you'll want to draft in situations where moving further is not worth the additional wear.

Cube Analysis

Boost

Be very clear about how Boost helps. In normal situations, its advantage is that it gives you 1 cube up on your opponents, not 3.

Why only 1? Boost needs to draw 1 just to replace itself and pull its own weight. But it also lets opponents draw 1, so it needs to draw another to keep up with opponents. Finally, it needs to draw a 3rd cube just to give any advantage at all.

Still, being up a cube can be very helpful. But you’ll taken on 3 wear to do this. You’re also running through your bag faster, which is undesirable in some situations.

So, how desirable Boost is (or whether it’s even desirable at all) depends on other factors (primarily the other cards, and one’s driver if used).

Crew Chief

Crew Chief is the most forgiving cube in terms of removing wear. Even so, experienced players can still let wear get out of control even when they have access to Crew Chief. So be careful to buy enough before they are bought out. In fact, consider buying so many that your opponents can’t buy enough for themselves. Because Crew Chief replaces itself with a non-wear, it will not dilute your Active pile as a non-productive cube (discounting edge cases, such as situations where you don’t want to trigger a restocking of your bag).

Crew Chief limitations:

• if the cubes remaining in your bag are all wear, or if your bag is empty, Crew Chief will be incapable of removing any wear.

• Crew Chief can’t remove anything other than wear.

Hybrid Engine

This is a powerful cube. It does carry a risk that it will be unplayable when an opponent has more in their discard than you have on your board. But if you avoid that risk by not buying it, an opponent who took that risk will likely dominate you. Therefore, buy it, and buy as many as you can to minimize the risk that it will be unplayable.

Also resist adding much in the way of other cubes to your bag. If you water down your bag too much with other cubes, you’ll draw fewer blues on average, and increase the chance that they won’t be playable. Even if they are playable, you’d rather have more blues to play than fewer.