What Exactly IS a Good Racing Game?

Every time one of you fools brings up Magical Athelete, I am obligated to retort with Monster Derby...its older, better, and especially more awesome sibling.

I think it depends how much racing you want and how much other stuff you want with it. I really like Speed Circuit with the Avalon Hill (uses dice) rules. In Speed Circuit you set up your car at the start with a Start Speed, Deceleration, Acceleration, Top Speed, and Wear Points. They govern what your car can do. Each turn everyone writes down a speed and whether they're going to draft the car in front of them, and then there's a simultaneous reveal and cars move in order of place on the track. It's a lot more fun and tense than it sounds, and it's just straight racing. Familiarity and skill are big assets. In the event you need to push your car beyond the limits set at the beginning of the game you can do so, but you risk damaging or even disabling your car with a roll of the dice. Sometimes it's worth the risk.

My wife really like Ave Caesar. It's a much simpler game, where you get a hand of cards and you play a card to move your chariot that many spaces. There's a good bit of planning and hand management. The game is really easy to learn and start playing, and goes well with a few beers.

Both games have something we both really like: positioning and blocking. Any good racing game should have this. Only one car can occupy a single space on the track and you can't move through other cars, so positioning is important. In Speed Circuit positioning is especially important in corners, where navigating a corner well means you can navigate it faster than you would usually be able to. In Ave Caesar positioning is important because there are walls and dividers in the track which let you block people behind you or force them to the outside on turns.

Racing games with auction/bidding mechanics can be fun too, but I have a lot of games with auction/bidding mechanics. I don't feel like I need it in my racing games.

Speed Circuit sounds like something I need to look into.

S.

Space Ghost wrote:
"'Every time one of you fools brings up Magical Athelete, I am obligated to retort with Monster Derby...its older, better, and especially more awesome sibling."
Trashdome!! Trashdome!! Trashdome!!

It looks like Magical Athlete is a straight up Asian knockoff of Monster Derby. Unfortunately, Monster Derby looks like a bag of crumpled up assholes, from the aesthetic point of view.

That's a game that could use an FFG reprint.

Crumpled Up Assholes, now published by FFG.

No, that's been done. It was called REX.

I think you've got the name of your next review, Pete.

Snow Tails is NOT the answer. I bought it on Sunday and played tonight. I really like so much of what the game is trying to do but it's not fast and not particularly fun. The search continues. Anyone want to trade for my copy? Hit me up, bitches.

Well, as far as I'm concerned, racing is a genre that's best left to video games. I don't think it's possible to bake anything into the system that won't introduce a lot of elements that you don't want in there. What I like is:

A good feeling of speed - This is just about impossible to do on a tabletop. Things just don't go fast in board games. You can make the game short, and you can reduce downtime to a thin wafer, but you're not giving a tangible feeling of forward velocity. The only thing I've ever seen in any racing game that gets close to what I'm talking about is Car Wars. Yeah, the game may take half an hour to simulate 15 seconds of real time, but the rules make you really appreciate how fast your little cardstock cars are ostensibly moving. You're really hauling ass at speed 10, but even the slightest change in your direction is dangerous as fuck. Yeah, speed's a risk in a lot of other games, but in this one, you totally eat shit with one bad die roll at high speeds. You don't just spin out or whatever; your car flips, rolls, crashes into things, bursts into flames, and explodes. You get to watch all this step by step. You even have to drop pieces from 6" above the board to place all the debris from you wiping out.

Ultra-tight competition for position - There's a reason Mario Kart has the Blue Shell powerup and Gran Turismo doesn't. The latter game has realistic physics and forces you to manually switch gears and get a feel for your car's weight and handling if you want to maintain a lead. When you're in first, a small mistake can easily blow your lead. Mario Kart has simple controls, and the courses aren't that challenging. If you're in first, you're not likely to make mistakes, and the only way to dislodge you from that position is to give the other players a "catch up" mechanic. I like how NASCAR Champions handles this. When it's your turn, you will be forced to move other players' cars, and maybe not your own. So, it's usually a safe bet to move the guy who's dead last. This keeps anyone from ever getting in a position from which they can't conceivably recover. Games that force you to plot your moves in advance from random card draws do a similar thing, since they tend to create some distinction between advantageous track position and forward track position.

Betting or shooting - Sorry, but games racing games that don't have one of these two things tend to turn into exercises in resource management with a lot of counting. Beans, spaces, who cares? I'm counting and budgeting, and nothing about that says "racing" to me. I like The Great Space Race for this because you get to ram other ships, create obstacles on the track, and play random fuckover events on other players. The Really Nasty Horseracing Game does a pretty good job on the betting side because there's so much flexibility in how you stack the odds and how you wager your money, and the only real way to get a bigger payoff than everyone else for sure is to bet on yourself and win. At the same time, a longshot pays out huge, so everyone has a reason not to continuously fuck over the guy in last place.

Blind turns - I didn't like Road Kill Rally, but this is one thing it had going for it. You build the track as you go, so you can't always anticipate how many tire/heat/whatever points you're going to need for the next turn, or at what speed you should be heading into it. I don't know how realistic it is, when I'm playing Formula D, for me to have my mind on the hairpin and 90 degree halfway across the track while I'm trying to negotiate the turn right in front of me, but it doesn't feel right. I feel like I should be focused almost, if not quite entirely on what's directly in front of me, and that rarely happens. It doesn't make sense to build as you go in many, even most contexts, but at least it gives you some sense of immediacy about the race.

I like all these things, but I tend not to like the baggage they bring along with them. You try and communicate high speeds without expressing it with a simple number of spaces moved or damage points accumulated, and you bog the game down with minutae or sluggish pacing. You try to keep a runaway leader from turning the game into a snooze, and you end up hobbling successful players with arbitrary difficulties. Introduce ways to win without winning races, and the game is no longer about winning races. Take the ability to anticipate upcoming obstacles away, and it becomes a guessing game. Maybe there's some way to get a good balance of these components into the same game and keep the downsides to a negligible minimum, but I haven't seen it happen yet, and I've given up trying.