This was briefly popular several years ago but as usual it takes me a while to get through my wish list of games. It’s a very simple game but I really felt like playing something light and quick as a palate cleaner after the monstrosity that was Pathfinder: Kingmaker. You can learn this in minutes and be done with the standard campaign in a few hours.

Set in the Roman Empire, this is a chariot-racing game in which you manage a team of aurigas and travel around the arenas of the land, great and small, to compete in races. For each race, you assign an auriga or the charioteer himself, the chariot and a team of four horses. The races themselves are turn-based and every turn you issue a command to your chariot. This include simple ones like accelerate, brake, move to the left or right to nastier ones like crashing into another chariot or using your whip to attack another auriga. So naturally this means that your chariot can be damaged or destroyed and the aurigas and horses can be hurt or killed. Win races and you earn both cash and renown. You can spend money on buying better horses and chariots and hiring more skilled aurigas. Becoming more famous is necessary to qualify for racing in the bigger more prestigious arenas.

As you can see, the graphics are pretty austere but effective enough at telling you what’s going on. I’m a little irked that the user interface for the team management screen is so simple that it’s a little hard to understand what your options available are. Still it’s plenty good enough to show all of the awesome stuff that goes on in races, such as aurigas getting whipped, chariots being destroyed and aurigas being dragged by the horses, debris and horse corpses clogging the track and so on. There are even multiple different arenas with different sizes, shapes and starting positions. Finally there are random events which change things up, such as the praetors ruling that no whips are allowed in a race, or spectators throwing objects at chariots occupying the outermost lanes.

Anyway it isn’t difficult to figure how an ideal strategy to win, though luck is always a factor. Personally I like to get out ahead with pure speed and block chariots trying to block me while trying to not get embroiled in fights. In a campaign game, since your competitors maintain records of their own it may be useful to violence against them so one of your aurigas can become the overall champion in number of wins. While you can get upgrades, saving for them and hunting for availability in the bigger arenas, it’s not as if the upgrade tree is very deep. It’s reasonable to assume that a campaign game is winnable in a few hours. An epic campaign would take significantly longer but I don’t see the point as it just slows down your gold and fame gains and obliges you to have the absolutely the best auriga in terms of total number of wins, rather than just three wins in the Circus Maximus.

All in all, don’t expect too much of this tiny game but I really like what it does. It’s surprising how big the world it is set in is, what with the different continents and the arenas in each, even though you don’t need to visit many of them to win the game. It’s surprisingly addictive to watch the little chariots race around the track and very frustrating when bad luck prevents you from scoring a win. I’m also very amused that I feel so reluctant to whip the horses to make them go faster. This does boost acceleration massively for the current turn but also risks injuries to the horses that slows them down for the rest of the race. The AI chariots tend to use this a lot, which means they can sometimes get bursts of acceleration I can’t match. But their horses also get hurt a lot and I just can’t bear to do that to my own horses even if it costs me a win and they’re just pixels on the screen. On the other hand, if the praetors rule that no whipping is allowed, I pretty much always win the race.