Taxi Over

• Designer: Alex Randolph 
• Publisher: playte
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 15-30 minutes 
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/48prPcS 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Drive your taxi as fast as you can! Each additional roll of the dice makes your taxi move exponentially faster. The first player to complete a lap collects the accumulated fare, but beware of other taxis ramming into you from behind or rolling a number that’s too high, causing you to fall into a sinkhole in the city!

Set up the board by unwrapping it from the box and lying it flat on the table.  The empty box will hold the accumulated fares; it starts with a single coin in it.  Each player takes their taxi and places it outside the board next to the Start point. The game is played in turns, with each player going through the same 3 phases:

1] Roll the Dice – roll up to 3 dice, one at a time (the dice are 1-1-2-2-3-3).  If you roll a second (or third) die, if your sum exceeds 4, then you have committed a Speeding Violation.  You can stop rolling dice whenever you like.  

2] Move – as long as you have not committed a Speeding Violation, you move your taxi forward (sum of your dice) multiplied (number of dice).  Spaces can only hold one taxi, so if you still have movement and run into another taxi, you simply push it forward (possibly into a sinkhole, at which time it goes back to start).  If you have committed a Speeding Violation, you separate the driver from the taxi and place the driver token in front of the player; also place one coin into the For Hire box.

3] Collect money – if the driver arrives at or passes thru an intersection space, that player calculates all the money in the For Hire box.  After the player takes this, put a new coin in the box to seed it again.

The game ends when a player has 10 or more money tokens.

My thoughts on the game

I felt like this game was familiar when I saw it at Spiel 2024, and as it turns out, it’s a re-skin of a game from my youth called Push Over.  That version was on a plastic board with a grooved track on it – this new 2024 version is more suitable to our boardgaming sensitivities with a nice box, great art, and wooden pieces to push around.

To see the original version – https://boardgamegeek.com/image/259935/push-over

The game is essentially a push-your-luck game – as you try to move as far forward as you can each turn.  Of course, each time you bust (Speeding Violation), the game adds a coin to the collection box, so your opponents now have a better chance at getting more money. It’s a fairly unpredictable game due to the multiplying of numbers, and the game will have its moments when someone pushes another car into the sinkhole.    Also, when you get caught speeding, you have to go back to the start line which puts you a few more spaces away from getting to the place where you score.

The components are really nice with good wood pieces and translucent dice.  The board also cleverly wraps around the box and is held shut with magnets.  The downside is that it hard to get the board to lie flat sometimes…

The board is a bit weird with the road spaces being very unevenly spaced, and I’ve seen beginners try to make spaces on the track where there aren’t – because you’d expect there to be one…

Taxi Over is a light game which can be played in ten minutes or less.  It comes in a nice compact package and you and your friends/family can be having fun in no time at all.

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/48prPcS 

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor