Elephant Rally

Players: 3–6 players
Play time: 60 min
BGG rating: 6.3

Every year, villagers gather from far and wide for the harvest festival. They bring fine carpets to the market and share delicious mango juice while praying men honor the holy cows, and the children tease mischievous monkeys and gasp at the snake charmers. But the main event of the festival is the elephant race. Young men and women of the region spend days painting joyous and reverent decorations on their elephant partners for this one moment when they can surge through the crowds of festive villagers, push and shove their way past other racing pachyderms, and brave the tiger-filled forests to win honor for themselves and their proud elephant friends. The bell rings, the elephants trumpet their excitement, and the race begins! Elephant Rally, which was first released as Formula E, is a game in which 3 to 6 players race their elephant pawns through an Indian village, over treacherous mountains, and across parched deserts seeking to be the first one to complete the course. The primary game mechanism in Elephant Rally is hand management as players use their hand of cards to advance their elephants through the course. Elephants move in a unique manner – they push elephants in front of them until those elephants hit an obstacle, then the active elephant pushes sideways until a path is clear for it to move forward again. Certain move-adjusting cards and tactical-screwage cards can be played to trigger events like diagonal movement, obstacle movement, and nasty little screw-your-opponents effects. Elephant racing is not necessarily a sport of honor!