Matthew BaileyGame 3 of the “Bailey Family Summer 2023 Board game Bonanza” is “Roller Coaster Rush”, played by myself, Katie, Jack (_8), and Toby (5).
After 2 solid games in a row, it was inevitable we were going to have one that doesn’t quite hit all (or any) of the right notes and sadly this is that game.
So the general idea of the game is to build a rollercoaster and then roll your marble down it and try and get it as far around your roller coaster as possible.
So you start the game by randomly getting 4-6 (depending on player count) blueprint cards and the corresponding track pieces. You then construct what you think will be the configuration that will get you furthest around the track. Different segments are worth more or fewer points. It quickly became apparent that due to physics there is essentially only 1 tactic and that is to put 1 or 2 hills at the most at the start and then hope you get loads of flat curvey pieces. If you get the one with double bumps essentially ignore it as I’m not convinced it’s doable.
You then have this weird system where you can on your turn either try and bid on other people’s things (which sorta works but doesn’t work well) or lock in your own pieces by bidding on them as well.
You also can try out your rollercoaster to earn more money to spend on bidding.
So you do the bidding and that goes on for way too long and just isn’t that fun or interesting and then once everyone has locked in their pieces you then do the final roll and try and get as far around your rollercoaster as possible.
It seems like this should be super fun but in reality, the auction bit is slow and dull and then putting your ball down your rollercoaster is anticlimactic as there only seems to be one way to build a rollercoaster that actually works at all.
Add to that the component quality is poor. The rollercoaster pieces are made of 1mm thin white vacuumed-formed HIPS plastic (essentially they are made of yoghurt pot material) and feel like they are going to break and crack with every touch. Some of them are also warped and do not sit flush. Finally, some of my money tokens had a dirty print smudge(see pics) on them before I had even popped them out of the board.
For an RRP of £40 (and you are gonna struggle to find it below 35 anywhere) I really can’t recommend this in any way… Even just constructing, even just as a toy, it sucks, as a marble run would be much much better…
Infact…
How is there, not a game that uses marble run pieces somehow!
