Charioteer

I have some heavy baggage from the Circus Maximus years: more free time, poorer judgement, and no desire to go back. Charioteer promised a much simpler version of the occasion, so I backed it gladly. It delivers that promise. Nobody has to turn a game night into a committee meeting about chariot racing.

At heart, this is a relaxed hand-management game. You hold cards, match their symbols, and use that to move your chariot along the race. There is a faint Texas Hold’Em flavour in weighing what your hand might yield, but the whole thing stays clean and direct.

It teaches in five minutes, and a race with five players comes in under an hour. There is some strategy here, not pure yolo, although a leader can get a rather comfortable runway; this is not Thunder Alley with chariots, but something much simpler. The rulebook also performs the curious feat of making a simple game look harder than it is.

As an end-of-evening game, in the Space Base sort of slot, it does its job with quiet good humour. But for a GMT title at this price, I wanted a little more: asymmetry, campaign rules, an event deck, something to give it added weight. It is an honest, pleasant closer, but for GMT and its price it feels like a game that has left too many seats empty in the grandstand.