Joshua Kronengold

Quick Race desc: It's San Juan with simultaneous action selection (all players have their own action deck), shipping for vps put back in, and a larger and much more varied "building" deck.

Which is part of my point -- it's not a "competitive solitaire" game as golf and shot put are--but an indirect competition game where you can be strengthened by other players' choices, but mostly not weakened by them except in comparison. Compare to PR (for obvious reasons) -- where despite early detractors complaining about the lack of competition, there are plenty of ways you can play kingmaker, as above. In Race, there -are- ways to react to a strong position -- you can rush, you can avoid their strong actions, forcing them to take multiple actions while you benefit from then and hope to catch up; you can even quasi-collude, announcing your actions and hoping players knowing them will benefit you (since there are two distinct "builder" actions, this can be used to double-up a rush against a strong vp-earner--or two vp players can swap off producer and the big vp action -- though there's enough trust needed in that that I've never seen it tried). But still, setting up engines and predicting other players is far -more- of the game, and figuring out who's winning and hurting them while pushing your own goals far less.

Obvious, -every- multiplayer game is in a class (more than one, really), pointing to how you're competing with vthe other players (which is as you've agreed, frequently the dominating factor of such games). But IMO, the "threat evaluation" style of board game is way over-represented--and also integrally flawed, as players misevaluating threats can can produce a consistent unbalancing factor between stronger players in a way that a weak player in games that have far less threat evaluation (Power Grid has less than most, so does Tigris and Euphrates, and not just because of the hidden vps. Race has almost none) tend not to.