For the Win - Race Games

The article is inspired by a recent game of Oath....

Read more...

What is Oath about? I can't even find a game with that name. This is the Werhle game?

"Werhle" is the new "Worker Placement."

I like your writing Oliver, but this is by far the most inside-baseball article you've written. This definition of "race" could apply to darn near 80% of all mainstream games.

I’ve often found that the challenge in racing games is keeping players in last place engaged. Formula Dé was particularly bad for this because it could become pretty clear halfway through the game that you had no chance of winning if the leaders did nothing dramatically stupid.

The best race games can mitigate this. Formula Dé is best played for a season where every position matters. The nature of the starting decks in Flamme Rouge means every finish should look close even if the veteran players are at a real advantage. Catan dangles the possibility of points on development cards and obscures who the leader truly is.

Playing a race season usually makes games much more interesting. Getting some points instead of no points could make the difference at the end of a 5- or 10-race series. In Flamme Rouge, you only get to discard half your fatigue at the end of each race, so it’s even more critical to manage your laggards — slipstreaming behind the second-to-last guy is much better than being the second-to-last guy and starting the next race completely wasted.

Thank you for all of your comments.

@Sagrilarus - Yes, Oath is by Cole Wehrle from Leder Games. Full title: Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile. It's... well.. hard to describe. It's definitely not a worker placement game. You're right though, a lot of games are race games. It's all right if this article wasn't for you. Hopefully, other articles will be more for you.

I was just listening to The Thoughtful Gamer in an episode about BattleTech and the host just buried himself in technobabble that no normal human would understand. I laughed out loud, because he had just said he was going to try to keep it in non-gamer terms.

I appreciate that this is a gaming site for intelligent gamers and that new readers are going to have to come up to speed on much of the lingo. But calling any game where the first person to exceed a threshold of some sort a "race" game is really going to throw people off the trail. I don't know what else to call it and I don't even know if there is a need to put a label on it, because the breadth of games that would fall into this category would be so huge as to not have very much in common. Settlers of Catan and Formula D would both fit. Any game where something else doesn't finish the run would be in the mix.

I'd love to hear your opinions on "true race games" (how's that for violating my own rules) where the basic concept of getting from one location to another the fastest is clearly, non-metaphorically, the basic goal of the game. That's actually a pretty big pile of titles, and there certainly has been some innovation in that group. Your writing here is often foundational, taking a part of the hobby, defining it and speaking to examples of how it works. Your articles serve as ambassadors to the less experienced readers. Perhaps this time you just set the breadth of the discussion too broadly for my personal taste.

Thank you @Sagrilarus.

I appreciate that "techno-babble" isn't for new people in our hobby, but clearly There Will Be Games felt it appropriate to publish my article, so it seems to fit their requirements and seems to be the right sort of article for the site's visitors.

The articles from me that appear on There Will Be Games were first published on my own blog, before I submit them here. Ultimately, it's up to the editors of There Will Be Games to decide which articles they want to publish on the site and I would never feel hard done by if some of my articles never appear here.

Thank you for your suggestion of another article, but I don't quite have enough experience of "true race games", as you call them. Maybe another writer feels it's something they want to write about and I'll also bear it in mind for when I have played enough racing games to talk about this topic.