Video review here!
This week, I'm looking at MB’s Dragster from 1976, don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it, there’s a good reason for it...
The first thing that you notice is that this is a relatively small board game compared with others from it’s time, it’s nearly four times smaller than Monopoly and Mouse Trap, and sadly, the fun and the entertainment value is four times smaller too.
“The great dragster race game of speed and skill” I’ll be the judge of that, thank you. Dragster racing, you think of high speed excitement, exhausts spitting fire, huge rear tires, tiny bike wheels up front, cars that are pretty much a motorised missile on wheels. Well, forget all that when playing this game…
Opening the box, you’re presented with the game in it’s entirety. In fact, it’s one of the few games I know of that can be played in the box, this is it folks, this is what you get. The board is a moulded yellow piece with two slopes and two rubber triggers.
Each player gets four dragster cars and a marble. The pieces are nicely made but lacking detail, the board is certainly robust and I do like the little dragster cars, they kind of remind me of Micromachines.
Your aim is to ping your marble up the slope and it will land in one of the four lanes, pushing down the dragster car in that lane with it. Players fire their marbles at the same time so it’s a race of sorts to get all four cars down to the finish line and into the stalls, get all four cars down to the bottom, you win. That’s it. That’s the game. Sounds fun doesn’t it? Doesn’t it….?
All the dragster cars start at the top of the slope, there’s a small ridge at the top of each channel that the front wheels rest in. You then have to fire the marble up and hope that you end up pushing a car down the slope and over the finish line. You’ll find there’s always one channel that you can’t get the ball to land down, for me, it’s the one closest to the trigger. Again and again you’ll fire the marble up, but it’ll land exactly where you don’t want it too. You’d think that being sensitive to how hard to fire the marble up is the key to this and to some degree, you’re right. However, this little nub at the top of the slope allows the marble to bounce off and land in any of the four. It’s more a mixture of luck and skill that the ball ends up where you want it.
Trying time and time again to get the ball down the channel you want gets boring and tedious very quickly and in a game that’s over as quick as this, that’s not a good thing. The game is also flawed in that using the trigger tends to shake the cars off the start line and they’ll begin rattling down the track themselves.
This game blows…my mind with how much instructions there are with it! Preparation? Are you kidding me? With a diagram to show how to position the cars at the start of game. Thanks, I was gonna fire the cars off the trigger, phew, thanks for telling me! Then there’s all these instructions for a game as simple as this! The funniest rule is “if a marble is shot so hard that it flies into an opponent’s track, then it is a FOUL” what game of this would that ever happen?! Having read this I’ve tried to make this happen but it just doesn’t want to. I can’t make the marble leave the board at all. The instructions are all written in masculine pronouns despite the box having art suggesting it for girls too…and 5-14 year olds? Good luck finding a 14 year old who’d want to play this.
Just because a game is retro and old, doesn’t mean that it’s automatically a classic. Good games endure through brilliant design and creating a willingness to want to play again, they have to be overall fun. This fails to be entertaining due to the repetitive and tedious nature of the game mechanics, it’s overall boring. The game’s saving grace is that at least it’s quick to play and when you’re fed up of it, playing it out the box means that putting it away is quick too. It’s about as much fun as being on a pinball machine and just letting the ball fall through the flippers each and every time. Like I said at the start, there’s a good reason this game is obscure and forgotten about, there’s better classic games to play.
