There’s something off about Autobahn, the heavy Eurogame by Fabio Lopiano and Nestore Mangone. The game wears its inspirations on its sleeve, both the historical, bound up in the division and eventual reunification of post-war Germany, and the mechanical, based on the interlocking incentives of other route-building games. It’s a game with a lot on its mind. Perhaps too much. Its gaze is larger than its stomach.

Getting an early start.

When it comes to discussing games as hefty and far-reaching as Autobahn, it’s useful to begin by compartmentalizing its various aspects, to render them bite-sized rather than wrestling the whole mouthful down at once. In this case, there are three broad themes at play.

The first is the route-building. Here the routes are set in stone, at least in terms of their final furnishings. Already the country has been given its initial route, a major artery running from head to toe — or perhaps shoulder to knee, since there are portions that remain untouched — with potential future veins coursing to every extremity of this body logistic. The process of making a route is less a matter of selecting where to go than one of choosing where to go first, with nary a loop or oxbow in sight. Autobahn offers some guidance in this regard. Its principal carrot is a route card, selected via draft at the game’s outset, linking two distant locales. There are significant prizes to be had in first connecting these destinations and then fine-tuning those connections until the path from point A to point B is smooth and uneventful for motorists.

So you go to work. Many of Autobahn’s primary actions have to do with this process of bridging and spanning. The central action system is exactly the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from Lopiano’s previous work, an understated but fascinating system that forces players to confront tough priorities and extreme limitations. Everybody begins with an identical hand of color-coded cards. By playing a card to an action, you enact that action along the corresponding color’s route. A purple card played to the construction action becomes a new motorway; a red card played to the service station action becomes a new stop along a longer stretch of highway. After only two or three actions, a conundrum rears its head. With only a few cards remaining in your hand, is it better to waste a turn scooping up what you’ve already used, or keep pressing onward, upgrading motorways and making upgrades and loading trucks even if their benefits aren’t imminent? That’s the question at the heart of the game’s logistics.

Half of the question, anyway. The other part is the trucks. Not content to simply build the autobahn, Autobahn also puts you in charge of a fleet of trucks trying to deliver goods — chemicals, appliances, automobiles, and eventually pharmaceuticals — to neighboring countries. This process is inseparable from the task of construction, since you can’t very well deliver goods along a route that has yet to be built. It’s also inseparable from the action-selection system. Every turn, you’re allowed to move your trucks along roadways, but only if the card you played matches the color of the road it’s currently squatting on. The result is a herky-jerky style of movement, more like forcing crunchy peanut butter through the game’s arteries than blood. It isn’t uncommon to see a truck stranded along the road, waiting for its owner to retrieve the black card so it can trundle toward its final destination once more.

The card system is the highlight of the game.

It’s an awkward combination, but it works well enough. To some degree, it’s a compromise that functions like a remediation of the periodic shipping intervals of the 18xx series, letting clever card play dictate whether you emphasize construction or movement. It also gives service stations more to do than sit around looking pretty. Passing any service station awards its owner some benefit. More so when it’s your own station. That the vast majority of service stations will only be visited once or twice per game, while the two located along that starting central route see constant traffic… well, that’s only the first of the game’s niggling problems.

One doesn’t need to pick too deeply to find other examples. There’s the upgrade system — two upgrade systems, actually — which affect which actions grant periodic bonuses, as well as how many times you can assign cards to specific actions, but which never feel like upgrades so much as unlocks of the capabilities a logistics and construction company ought to be have access to from the start. There’s the iconography, repetitive and non-distinct even for the usual pictographs that pass for Eurogame mumbo-jumbo. There are the tiny tokens, so easy to lose or send flying with a sneeze, which may as well have been wooden cubes. There are the route cards — the other route cards — necessary for delivering the right goods to the proper destinations, but which require so much cross-referencing that you might as well learn a trade in double bookkeeping rather than play a board game. There’s so much to do in Autobahn that everything sloshes together.

That in itself isn’t a problem. Heavy Eurogames often delight in wading through slosh. The trouble is that most of this slosh doesn’t matter. The game’s final component is the corporate structure behind the autobahn. Every route has an individual board of directors. These are somewhat analogous to holding stocks in any number of train game companies, to such a degree that the end of each era sees them paying out funds (read: dividends) according to the development of that route. What sets them apart is that they’re hardly exclusive; anyone can join a board simply by building or upgrading a motorway of that color. Since each board’s slots are limited, it isn’t long before members are bumped out. Except this is a good thing, see. Rather than being forced into retirement, former board members are bumped upstairs, where they occupy the lobby of an ill-defined German autobahn industry. Now they function as scoring tokens, moving further upward in order to secure scoring bonuses.

Your goal: become the king of the autobahnery.

Scratch that. Not scoring bonuses. Scoring, period. There’s so very much going on in Autobahn, including the race to connect the Eastern Bloc after reunification lifts the roadblocks that previously kept much of the country off-limits. In the end, however, this is a multifaceted game that isn’t all that interested in most of its facets. This isn’t to say they’re entirely disconnected. There’s a particular course to follow. You lay roads to fulfill routes and make deliveries. You make deliveries to unlock enough bonus actions and upgrades to level up in certain sectors. You level up in those sectors to permit your lobbyists to ascend the matching scoring trees. It’s all interconnected.

This isn’t to say it’s interconnected well, or interconnected elegantly, or interconnected in a way that reflects most of the actions you’ll take on a per-turn basis. For a game that’s about two and a half to three hours long, Autobahn is paradoxically both too short and too long. Too short, because it’s a sprint to a finish line. The entire third act, which adds a fourth deliverable good and throws down the barricades that block a third of the map, is so rushed that it might conclude before half of the table can even glance at Berlin, let alone elevate enough peons to achieve a respectable score. But it’s also so dang long, full of persnickety turns that achieve very little, only for the occasional turn that achieves three or four times the usual. Its pacing is erratic. Not unlike its trucks, come to think of it. When they aren’t stalled, they’re racing toward the border, often hopping from the center of the map to Paris or Prague with nary an interlude. There’s rarely any middle ground. Which in turn means there’s rarely any reason to consider how trucks can block one another.

Put this all together and you get a game that’s brimming with ideas, some of them fascinating, but not much of a head for how to piece them all together. It wants to do too much. It isn’t enough to have a strong card system in service of building routes. Nor was it enough to bolt a delivery game over the top of that foundation, no matter how stilted. No, Autobahn also needed to include a scoring concept that forces far-out valuations. It’s a game with entire atrophied branches thanks to those valuations, pursuits that aren’t worthy of exploration because they don’t yield as many points, or as easy of points, as other objectives.

Truckin’!

There are occasional moments that reveal what Autobahn could have been. These usually arrive early in the game, sometime at the start of the second act, when there are enough motorways to permit some movement but not so many stacked bonuses that trucks teleport across the border. In these moments, two or three vehicles will be racing to make a delivery while companies pour concrete right in front of them. The card play is tight; with limited routes and only a few service stations, every decision matters. The game is incremental, but it’s the incrementality of a close race, not the bean-counting that comes to dominate its later turns. In those moments, Autobahn captures the spirit of connection, the sense that the world is growing closer and faster. It doesn’t last long, that moment, before the game retreats to its flabby corporate positioning, before it accelerates beyond its own reach. But it’s there.

There’s a good experience somewhere in Autobahn. A fresh and exciting experience. It bites off more than it can chew, in the end. But this idea, this merger of route-building and route-using, has its shining moments. I desperately wanted more of those. Maybe someday we’ll get them.

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A complimentary copy was provided.