Sagrilarus wrote:
Talk to me about Rallyman Froh.
Rallyman GT has a Formula Dé feel to it, but allows for more control & maneuvering, both positionally and in the dice rolls.
Your car has a fixed set of available dice (custom D6's), dependent on the car model, tires, and the weather (rainy vs clear): mostly "gear" dice used to accelerate/decelerate, and a smaller number of coasting dice and brake dice. On your turn you plot out your course by placing your selected dice on the board, with some restrictions: each gear die must be a single increment higher or lower than the last, with coast dice being used as "fillers" to maintain the current gear, and the red brake dice can be added onto a space to allow gears to be reduced by more than 1 increment. Die types have a different number of "hazard" faces with the lower gears and coast dice having a 1:6 chance of a hazard, and gears 3-6 and brakes having a 1:3 chance of hazard. Your hazard limit, like your dice pool, is determined by your car & the weather.
Turn speed (gear) limits are indicated on the board in the relevant spots, with some additional reduction requirements when taking a particularly sharp path around a turn. If you exceed (or sometimes just reach) the limit when entering the space, you get different penalties depending on the danger level of the turn (small icon on the tile) and the gear you were in: you either skid out, ending your turn and reducing your gear to 0, or spin out and lose a turn. Additionally, particularly dangerous skids may cause you to draw a damage token which can remove some of your dice or ... in a strange design decision that still seems to work, can raise a yellow flag to nerf everyone's ability to pass for one turn or cause a weather toggle (sunny to rainy and vice versa). This same skid out/spin out event happens if hazards on the dice results ever exceed your car's limit. And yes, you can pit stop your car to repair lost dice (as long as your speed is low enough).
Once the dice are plotted, the player can then decide to either roll them one at a time which allows them to stop if they're uncomfortably close to their hazard limit, or they can "go flat out" and roll all of them at once. The incentive for the latter: it's the
only way to gain focus tokens, one for each gear or coast die used in the flat-out roll. Even if you lose control when going flat out (which does allow you to replot your path up to the crash) you still gain those focus tokens... and you can probably guess what these do. Each token can be used to guarantee a non-hazard result during the one-by-one rolling, allowing you to make some really difficult maneuvers around turns and pass opponents. On any given turn you'll be assessing how many of these you have and deciding whether or not to go flat out to gain more, or burn them on a particularly crucial passing maneuver. This melds really well with the theme.
So far so good. Maneuverability, track conditions, some push your luck/bank your luck. There's also a jockeying/blocking aspect. At any given point in the game, player's cars are marked with their current gear. If you want to overtake an opponent, you must be in a gear that equals or exceeds theirs when entering the space adjacent to them. This sounds straightforward but can sometimes be quite tricky, depending on what gear manipulations you've needed to pull off when coming out of a turn or any other factor that may be affecting your chosen sequence of gears (or... a yellow flag because some dumbass put the pedal to the medal at the wrong time).
It may sound... busy (mostly because my words are) but the rules actually go down smooth and the game plays fairly quickly. And more importantly for me, it just captures
racing without a ton of mechanical overhead or Euro abstractions and adds just enough chaos to defuse AP. Component quality is really good. The tracks are built with double-sided modular hex tiles & give you plenty of flexibility to build your own. For its price, the core box provides plenty of content and if you want more there are different car types (just some different dice pools & hazard stats) and additional track expansions which provide... honestly too many extra tiles but also rules for "campaign" style play, some thematic RL track layouts, and a "team" variant that I haven't bothered to pick up because I don't expect to play this with more than 4 people. The only component bummer is the plastic cars, which aren't molded very well and lack definition, but people are proxy'ing micro machines for them, and given the price ($35 for the core at OLGS) I'm fine with this.
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