Jaunty Jalopies is a board game in which the board is constructed from cards played each turn. The somewhat flimsy 12"x9"x1" cardboard box contains four pages of rules (one of which is taken up with a guide to '20s slang, which is just filler material since no effort is made to use the slang in the rules or on the cards, so no-one's likely to see this section unless they distractedly read the back of the rules sheet when it's another player's turn), six 8.5"x5.5" racer character sheets (describing the personality and special abilities of each of the drivers the players can choose from, as well as including a turn sequence summary), a deck of 5 Fiendish Plot cards (if you can agree with the makers of this game to call five cards a "deck"), another deck of 58 other cards, and eight plastic tokens (two for each of the up to four players in the game).
The tokens are generic board game pieces, and provide the only colour in the game, as all the cards are in black & white, made to resemble stills from silent movies along with the white-on-black text cards that carried dialogue in the movies (the white-on-black being a bit harder to read upside-down than black-on-white text). All the artwork on racer character sheets and on the cards are photographs of actors dressed in period clothes, antique cars, scenes of roadways, or period props. The cards themselves are on simple glossy, square-cut cardstock, making them hard to shuffle, and ensuring that they won't hold up to frequent use as well as round-cornered laminated playing cards do.
To set up, each player selects a character (each of whom has a special ability: Luigi Rigatoni, the Italian race car driver, draws an extra card each turn; Otto Von Klank, the German sergeant driving a halftrack, has reduced penalties when traversing rough roads; Fifi Le Boom, French silent movie star, can use Personality cards to negate any cards played against her), decides whether to play that character as a Hero, a Neutral, or a Villain ( Heroes gain bonus cards for aiding other drivers affected by mishaps or sub-plots, Villains gain fiendish plot cards for successfully playing mishaps, and Neutrals have an easier time wriggling out of sub-plots) with one of the plastic tokens used to mark this alignment choice.
Play is pretty simple. Each turn a player chooses to either play as many cards as he'd like from his hand and then draw cards from the deck when his turn is done, or rest, allowing him to remove one mishap played against him and draw an extra two cards during his draw phase. There are various kinds of cards. The most basic are roads, which can be played to form the course the drivers race on, with different qualities of roads (back or country road, or main highway) costing different amounts of discarded other cards to enter. The length of the course varies with the number of players, from 8 road sections in a two-player game to 12 for four players. The first racer to enter the final road section wins.
Then there are two terrain cards (Icy or Steep Roads) that add to the cost of entering a road section.
There's one driving card (Short Cut) that allows a car to advance two road sections without pay penalties.
There are mishaps (e.g., Balding Tires or Low on Gas) with various effects.
There are equipment cards (e.g., Road Map or Bailing Wire) that reduce road penalties or negate mishaps.
There are sub-plots, some related to driving (e.g., Wrong Turn or Bridge Washed Out), and some to the racing experience (e.g., Arrested or Radio Interview), or to the image of the races (e.g., Romantic Interlude), that stop a driver until he can play the right cards to counter the sub-plots. There are personality cards (e.g., Simply Charming and Witty Conversation) that counter sub-plots.
There are special cards (e.g., Bit of Luck or Dapper Attire) that have special affects, especially Valuable Experience, which moves a racer to the front of the course after completion of a delaying sub-plot.
And then there are the fiendish plot cards (e.g., Blow Up Bridge, Hire Thugs, Paint Fake Tunnel), that only Villains have access to.
The instructions on the cards are mostly self-explanatory; the only reason to refer back to the rules is to determine which cards can be played in which phases.
Play is simple, relatively fast, and not particularly exciting. That last can be attributed to the small number of cards in the game: when the plain road sections are removed, the remainder of the card deck is just too small to have a wide-enough selection of different cards to be interesting, especially when the deck is exhausted and the discards have to be shuffled and reused. Of the 38 non-road cards, only 24 are unique (e.g., of the six personality cards, five of them are Simply Charming), meaning players pretty quickly get repeats of cards they've already played, at which point a card like Something In The Trunk ceases to have any flavour and becomes just "a card that negates a mishap." And the endless possibilities presented by the category "fiendish plots" really isn't captured well by a total of five cards, even if there aren't any duplicates in that deck.
Jaunty Jalopies is an amusing and simple enough game to play once or twice, but it loses its appeal quickly. With the low production values, $25 should have provided maybe twice as many regular cards, and three or four times as many fiendish plots. And it couldn't have been that difficult or expensive to find little plastic cars of some sort at the same game piece supply store that provided the plastic pawns and chips, even if Otto Van Klank's halftrack would have been misrepresented.
(A semi-expansion, Jaunty Jalopies 2, came out recently. It supposedly can be played as a standalone game, or the two games can be combined, giving you enough tokens to have six players, adding sidekicks to the drivers, and one assumes helping a bit with the cards problem. Unfortunately, I haven't seen or played the expansion, and sight-unseen I'm not about to recommend that someone pay another $25 to fix the problems in the game the first $25 bought.)
