Street Illegal Card Game

2003 Fairplay A la carte Winner

Speed and Respect! The only two things that matter as you race through the city streets in your souped-up car. Anticipate road conditions as you race through a track of 8 cards to earn chips to help accelerate or decelerate, to try and reach the first position. This is a graphically changed, rule-modified version of Fette Autos.

Street Illegal comes with:
117 play cards
7 driver mats
50 chips
1 rulebook

No. of players: 2–7
Ages: 10+
Playing time: 45–60 minutes

Review by boardgameinfo.com

"…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.
(full review at http://www.boardgameinfo.com/review/11/11758)