Kanban: Trying to keep the boss happy

Kanban is one of my more recent purchases and it’s taken me a while to bring it up here on the blog since it’s such a heavy, heavy game and I want to do it justice when talking about it. When you first open the box, there are a million little pieces, including car meeples! Brace yourself, folks, this is a long write-up.

Kanban: Automotive Revolution is a 2-4 player game that plays about 90 to 120 minutes. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Well, that totally doesn’t factor into explaining the rules for the first time, which, when I first was introduced to it, the rules explanation took seriously nearly 2 hours. The setting is a car factory assembly line. The game at its core is worker placement. You are placing your one worker on a spot in order to activate an action within one of five rooms. And then there’s Sandra, the factory manager who is represented by the pink meeple, checking up on workers’ progress and keeping the factory running efficiently.

The game gives you an option of playing with either the nice or mean Sandra. Nice Sandra rewards you for goals met, while mean Sandra penalizes you for goals that haven’t been achieved. I enjoy having these options, and it makes each game different. Each player has their own tableau that holds a specific number of various items.

Now, let’s talk about the rooms. There are five rooms on the board, which are marked by the thick white line: the Design  Department, the Logistics Department, the Assembly Line Department, the Testing & Innovation Department, and the Administration Department. For each spot on the board, you can take several actions inside each room, depending on where you place your worker.

Inside the Design Department, you can select a design. This design will later help you claim cars  or upgrade a design when you’re in the Testing & Innovation Department. The next room is the Logistics Department. Here you can collect car parts and/or stock the warehouses with a Kanban order.

In the Assembly Line Department, you can spend your car part to complete an assembly of a car and push them down the assembly line. Those cars then move into the Testing & Innovation Department, where workers can claim cars from the Test Track or deliver car parts and designs to upgrade the part.

Lastly, the Administration Department is where you can micromanage another department. Sometimes, the spot for a particular room is taken, so you go to the Administration Department to repeat an action from the board. It’s less efficient, but sometimes necessary.

Within each of the five rooms, there’s an option to move up the training track. Moving up this track will give you bonuses, such as car parts, saved time, opening up a seat for you during a meeting, or opening up a space on your tableau. As you become more trained, you move up the certification track, which will come in handy for board meetings, which I will explain later. The more certified you are, the more the bosses want to know what you’ve been working on!

An overview of a round has two phases: Department Selection Phase and Working Phase.  In the Department Selection Phase, players will take turns placing their worker on a spot on the board. From left to right, each worker, including Sandra, must move into another department that has an empty spot.

Next up is the Worker Phase, which is also resolved from left to right. You can see on all the spots that there’s a clock that tells you how many shifts you can get on your turn.  The number of things you can do in each room depends on which clock you placed your worker on. Going first is nice in each room, but then you would be doing less shifts than the next person. All the different things you can do in each room requires a number of shifts. You also have the option to save your shifts and bank it for next time, as well as using a banked shift already to maximize your turn to a max of four shifts total. When it’s Sandra’s turn, she performs an action for the room she is in, and then rewards or penalizes workers based on which version of the game you’re playing.

Meanwhile, as cars are assembled and get tested on the Test Track, it can trigger a meeting. When the pace car reaches the checkered area, a meeting becomes scheduled at the end of the day. The pace car moves up a spot as cars are removed from the track and placed in personal garages. Meetings are one way where you can score victory points. This is where you can tell the bosses what you’ve been working on. You can score points on completing Factory Goals from either those on display or those from your hand. You take turns showing your accomplishments by placing your meeting chair on a face-up card.

You can also score during the end of the week when Sandra makes it back to her desk. For each car in your garage, you get 2 points for each upgrade you made, and 1 point for each upgrade somebody else made. The game ends when a combination of meetings and weeks happens, either 2 meetings and 3 weeks, or 2 weeks and 3 meetings. When either scenario occurs, a final end-game scoring happens, too. You can score Final Goals tiles; add up your leftover shifts, knowledge tiles and parts tiles; cars in your garages; tested designs; and relative placement on the various training tracks.

In between all this, there are also bonuses for each room, and this is where you get the majority of your chairs for board meetings. You can get bonuses for pushing out a particular car, gaining training or upgrading designs. These bonuses are also blindly picked out for each game. There is also a section for recycling where you can trade in a car part for something else without using a shift.

So that’s the simplified version of this game. Ha! The rulebook isn’t too difficult to wade through though, so that’s good. Don’t be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of pieces. Get to know what you can do in each of the rooms. And then at its core, the game is worker placement with the board (Sandra) also taking an action. The person with the most victory points wins the game.

Anybody out there enjoy playing this?