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Street Illegal is a new racing car card game by Heinrich Glumpler, published by Z-Man Games.
Players: 1-7
Time: 30-60 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
Street Illegal was previously published as Fette Autos in a somewhat different form by Edition Erlkonig.
The Components
Street Illegal comes with:
- 117 play cards
- 7 driver mats
- 50 chips
- 1 rulebook
Cards: The cards are all full-size, full-color, and printed on medium-heavy cardstock. They include: 20 track cards, 90 tempo cards, and 7 driver cards.
The cards all make use of photographic (and probably Photohopped) pictures. The driver cards show cars, while the tempo and track cards show various roadways, often using blurring or time-lapse photography; I think they look quite attractive and evocative.
The cards also make use of some standard icons to show driving situations and speeds. This iconography is well done, except for the fact that the situation icons are pretty hard to read upside down (and to a lesser extent sideways) because various situations are mirror images of each other. As gaming host, I usually play games upside down, so I'm used to it, but this was a rare one where even just playing from sideways I had to look carefully to make sure I didn't make mistakes.
Beyond that, the icons make the cards easy to use.
Driver Mats: Solid cardboard mats which each depict one of the cars, with driver, and contain a rather thorough listing of what's done in each phase of the game. I think the listing is actually excessive, and won't be needed after your first few rounds of play, but who can complain about getting extra reference material?
Chips: 50 mini Poker chips, in red.
Rulebook: An 8-page, glossy, full-color rulebook, over half of which consists of fully illustrated examples, which make the game quite easy to learn as a result.
The theming on Street Illegal is also quite good. With different terrains and speed limits, and your constantly pushing past or getting passed by other cars, it really felt like you were racing!
On the whole I found the components for Street Illegal beautiful, easy to use, and fairly high quality. I wavered what Style score to give it, until I performed the "heft test" and reflected that you get a lot of stuff for just $25; it eked in a "5" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Street Illegal is to win a car race through a multitude of terrains.
Setup: A race track is constructed by shuffling the 20 track cards and laying down eight of them in order. This will determine the dynamics of the track, including road "situations" and speed limits.
The players each choose a car. Their cars are then shuffled and randomly placed to show the order of players at the start of the race. A race always involves 7 cars, and the additional spaces are filled out with "Old Pro"s, who are always at the head of the pack.
Each player is dealt 8 tempo cards, of which 3 are immediately laid out in front of them in a row. These determine the players total speed (by adding up the cards) and how they react to track condition (by which situation icons on the tempo cards match the current track card's situation icon).
Each player is also given three chips which are used for temporarily speeding up or slowing down.
Order of Play: The game is played out in 8 turns, one per track card. Each turn is split into 3 phases:
- Situation Phase
- Driving Phase
- Passing Phase
Each player will take their actions in each phase, either in race order or reverse race order. The Old Pros only have the potential to take actions in the Passing phase of the game.
 Situation Phase: The player responds to the current road conditions. There are 5 road situations: obstacle left, obstacle middle, obstacle right, uphill, and downhill. In position order each player draws one new card, then replaces one of his Tempo cards.
If the current track condition is obstacle left, right, or center, the player replaces his left, right, or center card (among his three face-up tempo cards), as appropriate, with the newly drawn card.
For uphill, the player discards the highest speed among the four tempo cards, while for downhill he discards the slowest speed. If this was one of his face-up tempo cards, he replaces it, but it could be the newly drawn card which is discarded.
Now the player looks at his three face-up tempo cards, and for each one whose icon matches the current track situation icon he takes two chips.
Driving Phase: The player adjusts his speed. This is again done in descending positional order.
First, the active player takes an action. This can be "drive", which means he replaces one of his face-up tempo cards with something from his hand, then redraws; or it can be "optimize" which means he discards one or more cards from his hand and replaces them; or it can be "pass". A player will often take advantage of drive to try and bring his speed into better correlation with the speed limit.
 Then the player must look at the current speed limit. If he's at it or under it, no problem. If he's over it he must discard sufficient chips (at -10 mph/chip) to temporarily bring his speed to the limit. (This is notably temporary, which means the player will be going faster by the time the Passing phase comes around.)
If the player can't manage to bring his speed down to the speed limit, then he must execute emergency braking. He loses one card permanently from his hand (representing car damage) then replaces his highest face-up tempo cards with randomly drawn cards until he hits the speed limit or less (sometimes, considerably less).
Passing Phase: Finally players can try and pass, starting with the rearmost vehicle.
To pass a car has to exceed the speed of the car in front of it. Remember, speed is based on the tempo cards that a player has in front of him, which means that someone running over the speed limit, who temporarily decreased their speed in the driving phase, may have an advantage here! The would-be passer and passee each secretly take a number of chips into their hands as a blind bid and reveal them simultaneously. Each of these chips increases theit speed by +10 mph. If the passer has a higher total, he now swaps places with the car in front of him!
If a passer succeeds, he also gets a chance to pass again, but he must first again check his speed limit. First, the pass cost him some time, so he must play a new card from his hand to replace one of his tempo cards, and reduce his total speed by at least 10 mph. Second, he must again pay chips (or make an emergency brake) if he is over the speed limit. Once these two things are done, he may now try and pass the next person in line.
When a person fails to pass or is passed he's done for that turn and the next person in line goes next, meaning that the pass actions move quickly up through the line.
Old Pros. Old Pros are a minor obstacle. They'll try and pass someone in front of them, and they can be passed. An Old Pro has a random speed equal to the sum of two tempo cards, plus a third if he's still under the speed limit. Old Pros will only pass one person max on a turn.
Winning the Game: The game ends at the end of the eighth track card. The player in the pole position wins.
Variants: There are some notable variants in the game, including a tactical starting position rule (which forces players who end up ahead to give up resources), solo play (which just says that you can play against 6 old pros), and better old pros (who just draw 3 cards instead of 2). I haven't played the tactical starting positions, but think that the starting positions can be unfair without them.
Relationships to Other Games
Heinrich Glumpler is a very original and innovative game designer. His games, including Feurio, Vulkan, and Dicke Damonen, often seem to be little puzzles with unique components & game systems, and sadly none of them had made it to the American shores until Z-Man's Street Illegal. (Glumpler's Technowitches will be his second US release in a month or two.)
Street Illegal is a racing card car game with elements of card management, resource management, blind bidding, and bluffing. There are a number of other racing card car games, though I've only reviewed the very American Cthulhu 500. This one really stands out because of its very solid game systems.
Street Illegal is also notable because it's another very successful European import by Z-Man games (though this time around they reprinted and repackaged the game, rather than just glomming onto a European print run). I continue to be very impressed with Z-Man's choices of games to import, which have included recent, popular games like Santiago and Primordial Soup, but also sleepers like Saboteur, and this game, which I hadn't heard anything about before the Z-Man release, but which have each been quite good.
The Game Design
At first Street Illegal looks a little clunky, with its multiple phases of play and its juggling in and out of cards. It's intimidating to learn as a result. However, you catch onto the game quite fast and after that it plays quickly and easily and reveals an intricate card management game.
The whole trick of Street Illegal is to react to the conditions of the road as best you can, but at the same time maintain good speed that keeps you moving up through the ranks. This means that you have to constantly be thinking about speed and icons a lot; it really keeps you on your toes, and gives you the feeling that you're really in control.
There is a fair amount of luck in the game, but at the same time it's somewhat controlled, since you can often plan a few rounds ahead if you can't do much useful in the current round, and likewise you have the opportunity to discard cards when you have a bad hand for the current track condition. If it weren't already obvious, that means there's a good mix of tactics and strategy.
I already mentioned the theming, but to reiterate, the theming is a really good match for the game system. It feels like you're driving a car through ever-changing conditions, and the game even catches a lot of the excitement of the track. There was much cheering and enjoyment as we pushed through our race course.
A few other brief comments:
Starting Order. The starting order can have a huge effect on gameplay, and can potentially be unfair. I haven't tried them, but I suspect the tactical starting order alternative rule takes care of this issue.
Single Player. The game does support 1-player play. (You just use six Old Pros.) I tried it out, and it's somewhat engagng, but you lose a lot of the excitement of the game because the blind bidding disappears. I didn't really think it was worth setting up the table for single-player play, but I'd probably be amused with a simple computer implementation of the same.
On the whole Street Illegal is a fairly serious and very well designed racing-car card game. I give it a high "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Street Illegal is a serious car-racing card game. There's the randomness that you'd expect in this type of game, but there are also a number of well-designed and intricate systems centering around card management, resource management, and blind bidding. This one is well worth checking out, especially since it's Heinrich Glumpler's first US distribution, and he's been doing fine and original work for a bit.
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