Rallyman: DIRT

I bought another racing boardgame!

Rallyman: DIRT is the latest version of a series that's been around for a few years. As the name suggests, it's about Rally. Although there are modes in an expansion for head-to-head racing, this game is about hurling your car around a gravel-covered course as fast as you possibly can, with players competing for the fastest time. You string several courses together - the designer reckons you could have four players get through a three-stage rally in around two hours. 

What's nice is that, like Flamme Rouge, the courses are modular. The game comes with 32 double-sided hexagonal tiles allowing you to build a whole range of tracks. Tracks are usually 10-14 hexes long. Obviously you have curves of varying difficulty, as well as shortcuts, bumps (if you want to get into the air) and water. An expansion (which sadly ay be out of print) introduces snow and asphalt surfaces, different tyres and two different types of cars.

The mechanism is simple and rather interesting. You have a hand of dice - black gear dice, numbered 1-6, two white or orange dice called coast dice and a red brake dice. On your turn you plot the dice onto the course according to two simple rules. Firstly each dice can only be used once per turn. And, secondly, any dice you place must be the same value, one higher or one lower than the preceding dice. Coast dice count as the same value as the previous dice, whilst a brake dice can accompany another dice and allow you to drop by two speed instead of one. Here's the dice placed for a move. The red car starts at 4, brakes to 2, coasts at 2 to get around a curve then accelerates to 5. This sets me up for the next curve which has a safe speed of 4 or 5. 

But then what? Well, each dice has one or two faces marked with a hazard symbol. After placement you have to roll the dice you placed, and if you get three or more hazards then you crash. You can opt to roll the dice one at a time, in sequence, in which case you can stop rolling at any point and simply end you move wherever you get to. Or you can go all out, and roll the dice together. In this case you are rewarded with time tokens, which can be used to shave time off your final time score, or spent to 'fix' dice when rolling one at a time, allowing you to treat them as an automatic success roll. So rolling one at a time is a safe option, but going all out from time to time allows you more options and rewards.

At the end of your move you take a card based on the gear you ended in. Each card has a time in seconds on it - 50 seconds for Gear 1 down to 10 seconds for Gear 6. Your accumulated cards are your total time (minus your retained time tokens as well). So, as you can see, your aim is to complete the course in the least cards whilst ending each move in the highest speed you can. 

Obviously it plays well solo - you can set up courses then see how fast you can run through them. There are a few rules online for bot/NPC racers too, if you want to 'compete' against someone. 

I have a nice collection of race games now. My favourite is still Flamme Rouge, which has a perfect balance of elegance, simplicity and replayability:

Its child-friendly offspring Flamme Rouge: BMX is fun, but with less replay value due to the limited track configurations. I'm working on that:

A sleeper hit in our house is Snow Tails, which covers sled-dog racing. Again, the modular tracks keep it interesting, and it has a novel and frustrating movement system based around having to run your dogs at different speeds in order to go around corners:

Then there's Heat: Pedal To The Metal. We've played this less than I'd have liked. It shares some DNA with Flamme Rouge, but is a very different game:

Somewhere down in the garage we have Waddington's Formula One, which we haven't played for many, many years, but which actually holds up fairly well with 'modern' games in terms of mechanisms. 

Then, of course, if you want to race on water there's Spinnaker:

And, finally, if absurd roll-and-move games are your thing, there's Magical Athlete. There's an expansion due out for it in the next few months, and I have been lucky enough to have made a small contribution to it. 

Do you have a favourite racing-themed boardgame?