But you are at the wheel of a complicated piece of precision engineering, and it’s prone to overheating and inconsistency. That’s it-that’s the whole game!Īh, if only it were that simple. If you end your turn behind another car or next to one, you can “slipstream” and go around it, which was part of La Flamme Rouge ’s rules as well. Then you can choose to “boost” by adding a Heat card to your deck and drawing until you get another speed card of value 1 to 4, and if you’re in dead last (up to four players) or second-to-last (five to six players), you get one extra point of speed and move one more space. You add up your speed cards’ total values and move your car that many spaces. You can set your car anywhere from first to fourth gear, moving up one or down gear for free at the start of a turn, and then you play a number of cards that matches your current gear. In Heat, one to six players compete to finish a set number of laps around the chosen track by playing speed cards from their hand on each turn.

One of the designers of that game is co-designer of Heat: Pedal to the Metal, which improves on La Flamme Rouge while keeping some of its best mechanics, now with cars racing around one of four tracks as players try to manage their decks of speed cards to get ahead without overheating.

(Hang on a minute-I need to buy the Out Run port for my kid’s Switch.) Downforce, previously known as Top Race, has been the king of car-racing board games for a while now, while the genre has seen more than its share of duds (anyone remember Milton Bradley’s Turbo ?).Ībout five years ago, we got a fun bike-racing game called La Flamme Rouge that brought a little press-your-luck element to the genre while also incorporating some little tweaks to help the trailing players avoid falling too far behind. I was an absolute sucker for Out Run as a kid, by which I mean I would always play it and never win, or even come close.

Car-racing seems like an obvious theme for gaming, whether at the tabletop or at the arcade.

Download race car checkered flag