UNDERSTOOD. RESTORING FRENCH (and Italian) BIAS.

The world's about to find out just how much of an Alpine, Matra, and pre-EV Venturi stan I can be.

FRANCE CAN MAKE GTs TOO, DAMN IT, AND— (devolves into French-language nonsense je te jure tu comprends pas.)

Anyway, what French cars do you like? Send me your suggestions!

Pictured: Close-up of my garage after the session ended (I was the session's loser)

Impressions immediately after the session ended

• The most important part is it's really fun. Even as the game's author knowing it inside and out, I was shocked at how chaotic things can get and how other players can make big leaps forward until the very last minute.
• We had a battle between my used Subaru Forester (Perf 8) and another player's new but unmodified Porsche Boxster (also Perf 8). The Porsche won, and my Subaru went straight to the junkyard (probably blew the headgaskets... lol) but the sheer ridiculousness of that battle was hilarious. (We did have a brief conversation about the Performance rating, and it's as I expected - some unexpected cars might have better ratings than some others, and that's OK; it's a board game, it is not meant to be a simulation)
• The Sard MC8 is terrifying. A modified Sard MC8 with 28 Perf dice, even more so.
• Three of us won - I was none of them. The highest-value garage was worth over 1.1 million Credits.
• Lots of little quality-of-life issues that need addressing.
• To the same token, we have too many events and too few cars. See the debrief.

Post-game research and debriefing

I identified two problems:

• Too many Circuit Events and too few eligible cars.
• Too few ways to refresh the dealerships.

During this playtest, we managed to draw three Minivan Mayhem cards in a row, but nobody had minivans/MPV cars to race and nobody wanted to use the special rules to order one from the deck, so we ended up discarding this, a lot. It immediately made me realize that because of the way I themed my car updates up to that point, the car roster has two giant issues:

• An enormous Japan bias (140 of 247 unique cars are Japanese)
• An equally huge 2000s bias (130 of 247 unique cars are 2000-2009 model years) followed by a substantial 90s bias (75 of 247 cars)

I can make as many hyper-specialized Special Events as I want, if there are no cars to play them, and no way to easily get them, they simply won't be played. I'll cut a couple of events and rework some others, then see where it gets us from here on out.

A third potential issue was the length of the game; the supposedly mid-length objective (build a 5-car garage with a total value of 500,000 Cr or more) took us 7 hours to complete. However, lots of things delayed us - learning the game, some of us had to learn to use Tabletop Simulator, some of us had to leave the table for a while, delaying the game... It's inconclusive. I'm chalking a lot of it up to player unfamiliarity, but if it turns out the objective is just too long

One other thing I also need to make clear; because it's objective-based, more than one player can 'win' a game of TGBS. In fact, the entire table can win. If you built the highest-value garage, it's for bragging rights. For the record, I was the only one who lost that day 😅

Planned changes

• Big change #1: Fixing the Circuit Events. I'll cut every Attribute-based and engine type-based event, then focus my car update efforts to make the rest of the events viable.
• Big change #2: More ways to refresh the dealerships. I'll introduce turn counters for the table, then force dealership changes at planned intervals. My current plan is a forced refresh of the Used Cars every turn ending in 5, and New Cars every turn ending in 0. So assuming we start the game on Turn 1, we'll see a Used refresh first and relatively quickly.
• Big change #3: I just plain need more cars. Specifically: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 2010s, Mid-engined cars, Rear-engined cars, Supercharged cars, Non-Japanese cars (especially European but more U.S. is also welcome).

And the smaller changes:

• A nice stack of notecards to write down the results of racing events as they happen. Has been the biggest time-saver I had to come up with on the fly during the playtest.
• Had to absolutely clarify that all value and Perf multipliers are additive. +20% and +20% together make +40% total, not +44% (as in. x1.2 x1.2 would), and so on. That said, I might need some plan to more easily calculate modifiers. Notecards and a good math sense will have to do for now but I noticed I had to fix car values and performances for other players a lot. This could be me not explaining it, this could be no easy way to do it. Either way, gotta find a way to fix it.
• All sides of the table get infinite bags of Pace Dice.
• Infinite bags of Upgrade and Problem tokens. No more cloning stacks of tokens.
• The digital bank cards I planned on using broke several times, so I had to use enlarged versions of the car value tags as money counters. This, obviously, won't do. I need a different solution for counting player money. One that preferably saves correctly...
• The add-on I picked to count car values does not save values between saving and loading boards. Obviously another issue to fix.
• Changing the effect of the Shiny (car wash) attribute; it boosts car value by +5% now, not +1%.
• Hell Tuned attribute now boosts Value too, not just Perf. Each level boosts value by +20%, same as the Perf. If you get all 10 levels, your car will get +200% Perf and +200% Value. So not only does it get you a Wangan Midnight monstrosity of horsepower, but it is also appropriately valuable. I think an 840-hp Subaru R2 should be worth a fair amount...

...wait until i start looking into the race cars

jesus fucking CHRIST is there a lot of A110 models and engines to keep track of, and every source contradicts one another on power, AND these cars lived through the period where we went from gross to net power measurements, AND i have to remember French sources use CV/PS and not brake horsepower...

...and that's on top of finding decent photos...

just, holy shit lmao

As it turns out, the old version of the card for this French GT I'm obsessed with had a complete, horrible mishmash of incorrect information. Pictured is the fixed card with correct picture and specifications. Here's a list of errors I had to fix:

• Wrong model year (1997 instead of the correct 1998)
• Wrong reference photo (pictured car was a silver 1997 300 Atlantique single-turbo model; virtually not different externally, but i'm nothing if not thorough... a shame, because I miss the old photo already, it was so good)
• Incorrect engine designation (used the single-turbo PRV instead of the correct, newer ES/L L7X twin turbo)
• Wrong power, torque, and weight (just ???? complete catastrophe here, i totally failed to realize what specs were from the biturbo and what was from the single-turbo. it shows I didn't pay as much attention building Series 1 as I did the rest of the cars.)

fortunately, overall Perf dice are the same so it's just a matter of getting the minor details right. unfortunately i had to redo the decks in TTS too, so that took a while i should be spending sleeping in my bed.

All specs should now be all correct as per the specs sheet i now have access to. France uses CV, which is equivalent to PS, and many French specs sites use kg.m instead of Nm. Either way, all that had to be converted to my units of choice (U.S. brake horsepower and pound-feet torque); 310 cv ~= 306 hp and 40.2 kg.m ~= 291 ft-lb. Ditto goes for the curb weight; 1279 kg becomes ~2820 lbs.

It should all be fixed and ready for whenever we playtest the tabletop simulator version of the game now.

okay time to go die in my bed now, tomorrow i shall resurrect

if we EVER need a 300 Atlantique with one turbo, even though it's statistically a clone of her bi-turbo sister, it's ready to go, i have everything right here complete with the (now correct) reference photo.