This is the latest game from Splotter Spiel, who gave us Roads and Boats in 1999. This game also packs in the bits but, with a far smaller box, your back isn't going to get damaged by lifting it. The game theme is about racing down a newly built road by car, while avoiding hazards. The road is created from a set of tiles and extended at the beginning of each player's turn. The tiles of each road consist of a mixture of plain (no effect) and hazards and the player who first reaches the end of the road wins the game.

Each player begins with a hand of 9 movement cards, which are used to determine how many tiles (2-10) the player intends to travel down the road. These cards also show how many tiles the player may place, the number of lane changes allowed and what the player will lose if the car collides with a hazard. Since each player receives a set of these cards at the beginning, the rule is that no player can play the same card.

Most of the tiles are blank and there are 7 special cards. Some tiles slow you down, others make you skid sideways, and some others cause you to lose movement cards from your hand. The joker tile can swap with another tile and a patrol tile allows the recovery of a movement card. The other main hazards are the other cars and the sides of the road. When you collide with these or one of the hazard tiles, the loss of movement cards is aimed at restricting your options. This suggests that the game can become tight and a player with fewer options presumably is less likely to win.

In the games I have played so far, the repair tile has been frequently used, so the potentially catastrophic loss when using a high movement card (the 10-movement card has the potential to lose 4 movement cards) was not so critical.

The planning of the game is fine, as you have a set of movement tiles displayed in front of you and so can see what options each player has got. After deciding on the movement card to play, each player adds track in increasing order of the movement cards. This allows you to plan a route for you to follow, so those players with higher movement cards may find it difficult to avoid some of the hazards in the road. Since their cards bear higher risks, they may have to collide with a hazard and surrender movement cards.

The rules suggest a game length of 30 minutes per metre, and with 50 tiles per metre, a lot of action can take place. I found the game to work pretty well and the rules were clear. The hundreds of tiles are made from sturdy enough cardboard, and the general presentation is neat and unfussy. If you are a player who likes this type of variation in your board games, try this out. For me, this was a reasonable game, but not one that got me terribly excited. It is not expensive and at Essen 2000 I paid DM35.