Heat - 1961 Championship

 Last year Mrs Kobold and I did an epic boardgame campaign playing through all of the stages of the 2024 Tour De France using Flamme Rouge. We haven't done anything like that since then, but the other day we started a smaller championship.

I bought 'Heat: Pedal To The Metal' just after Christmas, but haven't posted about it here before. It's a motor-racing game from the same people that did Flamme Rouge, and has some of the same DNA. Indeed boardgame forums often have 'Heat or Flamme Rouge?' discussions started by people who think you can only have one race game.

Like Flamme Rouge, Heat uses cards selected from your hand for movement. However in Heat you may select more than one; your car is in gear from 1-4 and you have to play a number of cars equal to your current gear. Standard cards run from 1-4, so you could go a basic 1-16 spaces each turn. Obviously deciding what gear to be in is part of the game. Gear 4 is great on straights, but on corners there is a maximum safe speed and you may need to drop down a gear or two in order to reduce the number of cards you have to play.

However that's just the basics. The core of the game is the Heat Cards (hence the name). These are part of your movement deck, but start in the engine area of your player board. You can spend Heat  to do various things - bonus movement, go round corners faster, play some special cards etc. The played Heat Card goes from your engine to the discard pile. Heat can only be spent from your engine, so you need to get the cards back there to keep racing. From the discard pile they will be shuffled into your deck, when it runs out. From the deck they will make it into your hand. Having Heat in your hand is bad, as you can't use the cards from there and they take up space that should be occupied by movement cards. However certain things (mostly being in low gear) give you cooldown actions, and these can be used to remove one or more Heat Cards from your hand and put them back into the engine.

Careful choices have to be made with your hand and what gear to be in to ensure that there's a steady flow of heat back into the engine, so your car can keep pushing its limits and stay in contention.

Additional rules add upgrades to vehicles (better tyres, cooling systems, tougher or more streamlined bodies and so forth). These take the form of special movement cards, so planning your hand so that you have them when you most need them helps. 

The game comes with four fixed tracks, but the optional weather and track rules affect various track conditions giving you some variety. 

The rules also have rules for bot racers (using a neat card-based system I won't bore you with aside from saying that ... it's neat) and, of interest here, championships. 

The game includes three championships, for 1961, 1962 and 1963. Two have three races and one has four. Yes, like Flamme Rouge the game has a period aesthetic, opting for the early 1960s.

So with a few games under our belt and despite Catherine still struggling to remember the lengthy but logical turn-sequence, we decided to embark on the basic 1961 championship. The first race is on teh Great Britain track, which looks like this:

As you can see, the game uses lovely little racing car models. Mine is blue and Catherine's is yellow. I got a good starting grid position and used some early Heat to stay at the front. The bots run a tight race and you can't afford to let your guard down!

Into a tight series of bends. I held the lead but I was low on heat now. I hoped to get some back on teh second part of the bends, but failed. And because of the track/weather conditions there was no cooldown available on the long straight section that made up a lot of the course. Catherine ran a more cautious race.

The race is two laps of the board. Here we are starting the second lap; I was now in second place but still running well, all things considered.

Through the bends again and things started to go wrong. I managed to use a cooling system upgrade to get some heat cards back, but misjudged a corner and ended up slightly further back than I'd hoped. This meant I took longer finishing the bends than I wanted and had to spend all of my heat cards to stay in place as I did so. 

A strong finish really needs some extra heat in your hand; some to crank up to 4th gear off the final corner and some to give yourself a boost on the last move. I could do neither and saw the bots overtake me. I finished fourth. 

Catherine dropped short of the finish line on one turn, and then saw a hand full of heat cards on the next force her to cross in low gear. The silver car behind her crossed faster - in the case of cars crossing the finish line on the same turn the winner is the one that gets furthest past, and bots don't make mistakes. Catherine was pipped into 6th place by her overheating engine.

Green won, followed by black and red. The random nature of bots means all three could finish poorly in the next race, although they will get pole position in the next one.

So not a great performance by either of us. Catherine doesn't take chances and therefore gets outrun by the bots. I took chances but still haven't mastered some of the nuances of the hand management so it all fell apart for me at the end. We'll see how we do when the championship moves to the next race, in the USA.