Race, crash and shoot your way to the finish with Thunder Road: Vendetta

How many racing games is too many? I'll let you know when I find out, but so far I don't seem to have reached my limit.

Restoration Games has carved a sub-niche within the hobby gaming world by refreshing classic board games with updated game mechanics, components, and graphic design. They worked wonders transforming Star Wars: Epic Duels into Unmatched, and now they've given their restoration treatment to Thunder Road, a fairly obscure post-apocalyptic racing game that was originally published in 1986.

I never played the original Thunder Road, so I can't tell you what has changed with the new Thunder Road: Vendetta, but the game play in the restored version is very smooth and simple. Each player gets three cars, one helicopter, and four dice. The board is made up of three randomly chosen tiles laid out in a row, with spaces laid out in a hexagonal pattern. Cars can move straight ahead or forward to the right or left -- never backward, this is a race after all. The road is littered with hidden hazard tiles as well as visible obstacles such as mud puddles and rock formations that can slow your car down or destroy it all together.

Each turn, players roll their four dice and take turns assigning them to their cars. The number on the die determines how far the car moves -- it must move the full amount, this is a race after all. The fourth die can be assigned to one of a few extra options, such as nitro boost to make the car go faster, repair to remove damage, drift to allow it to glide past other cars without crashing, or the dreaded helicopter.

Helicopters are able to appear anywhere on the board and shoot at your opponents' vehicles, or even your own if they are in the way -- this is a race, after all. What's more, if a car ends a move in the same space as a helicopter, it is immediately destroyed and removed from play.

After moving, if there is another car in front of yours, you can try shooting at it. Each player has 3 different sizes of cars, with the smallest being the hardest to hit but the easiest to push out of the way by crashing into them. Damage is dealt via a stack of tiles that will generally have a one-time effect and then linger as damage counters. If a car takes two damage it is immobilized until repaired.

Crashes are probably the most fun part of the game. When a car enters another car's space, it is placed on top of the other car and then two dice are rolled: one determines which of the two cars (top or bottom) is moved, and the other indicates what direction. In this way, cars can get knocked into other cars, causing a chain reaction of crashes. They can also get knocked into rock walls or off the board entirely, either of which results in elimination.

The aforementioned hazard tiles add even more chaos to the game. They're hidden until a car moves into one, and they can be anything from clear patches of road to land mines. Often a player will be faced with a choice of either moving into a hazard that could be harmless or even helpful, or taking a safer, more predictable path around. Just as often, there's no choice at all, leading to all manner of hilarity with mud puddles that slow your car down, oil slicks that send it careening off in a random direction, or wreckage that triggers more crashes.

As soon as a car reaches the edge of the third tile, a new tile is drawn and added to the track. Then, any cars that are still on the first tile are eliminated from the race, and that tile is removed from play. This continues until one player has had all of their cars eliminated. At that point, the edge of the third tile is the finish line, and the first player whose car crosses it is the winner. It's a great way to take the sting out of player elimination as a game-ender, since the eliminated player will normally only have to wait one round (often less) for the game to be over.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Thunder Road: Vendetta is a little on the egregious and random side, but nonetheless it is a lot of fun, and makes for an excellent, low-entry-point alternative to more complicated games like Car Wars or Gaslands.

Note: I highly recommend the Carnage at Devil's Run expansion if you can find it, it adds new hazards and road tiles that push this game from good to great.

• Thunder Road: Vendetta official website
• Thunder Road: Vendetta on BoardGameGeek

Dive into yet another corner of the Star Wars universe with The Mandalorian Adventures

I never seem to get tired of "moving guys around on a map" games. One of the oldest games in my collection is Leading Edge's 1989 Aliens; Unmatched and Core Space are among my current favorites, and that's not even getting into "proper" miniatures games with three dimensional terrain like Star Wars: Shatterpoint or Gangs of Rome.

The Mandalorian Adventures is definitely on the light end of games of this type. It's a cooperative game that asks players to take on the roles of characters from the Disney+ series and work together to complete missions based on episodes from the first season of the show. The game makes use of a spiral-bound book, with each two-page spread consisting of a map and its game objectives plus any special rules needed. The missions tend to be fairly simple variations on finding a particular item from among several face-down tokens and then escaping off the edge of the map.

The game uses cardboard standees rather than plastic miniatures, presumably to keep the production costs down. Even as a dedicated miniature painter I didn't mind this at all -- the artwork on the standees matches the other game artwork, and it meant I could get playing without having to take extra time for painting.

Each character uses a unique deck of cards to perform actions in the game, with the number on the card determining how effective the action is. For example, play a four for movement and your character moves four spaces; play it for attack, your target takes four damage. Some of the cards also include special game text that is resolved if that card is used for a particular action -- this is what makes the different characters distinct from each other, with some relying on stealth, and others on greater mobility or simple brute force.

Enemies are represented by tokens on the board, each with a type (either a melee fighter, a shooter, or a sniper), a number of wounds required to eliminate them, and a special ability that resolves when a player character moves near them.

One of the game's more ingenious innovations is the game mechanic for activating the enemies. Each time a player uses a card to perform an action, that card goes in a pile that is specific to that action. Once the numbers on the cards in a particular stack add up to 5, a card is drawn that will cause a particular type of enemy to either move towards or attack the closest player character. If the total adds up to 6 or more, it also triggers a "crisis" event that is specific to the scenario being played, usually something  that will make things more difficult for the players. This forces the players to consider their actions each turn carefully: they'll need to try to spread out their actions as much as possible among the different choices, and also to consider when to play a particular action. Normally, game-controlled enemy actions are fairly arbitrary in cooperative games like this, but here the players can mitigate that with their choices. It makes the game a lot more interesting.

As "hobby" board games attempt to reach a wider market, designers are faced with the reality that their games might be a bit much for people whose only previous experience is with family games like the dreaded Monopoly. Many designers have chosen to address this issue by instructing players to start out with a series of tutorial games that dole out the game's concepts and mechanisms gradually. Normally I don't care for this sort of thing (although I do recognize its value), but The Mandalorian Adventures implements the idea well. The game includes a deck of cards in a fixed order that are meant to be worked through over the course of the first six games. Whether the players win or lose, after each game they are introduced to new content that will make the game a little more complex and improve its replayability.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A very fun little game that should be accessible to a much wider audience than something like Shatterpoint or even Firefly Adventures.

• The Mandalorian Adventures official website
• The Mandalorian Adventures on BoardGameGeek

Race to the finish with Heat: Pedal to the Metal

I'm a few years late to the party with regards to Heat: Pedal to the Metal, which is ironic given the game's subject matter. I've never been particularly interested in race cars or racing, but recently a few things have happened that may be changing my mind. One was Lacorsa, a beautifully designed racing game that lured me in with its deluxe components and simple but elegant game play. Another was Michael Mann's excellent film Ferrari, which is about the Italian car magnate and features a plot that revolves around a high stakes race.

It may be just as well -- Heat was extremely popular right out of the gate when it was released towards the end of 2022, so much so that stores around the world were having a hard time meeting demand. By the time I got to it, there wasn't any problem finding a copy as it has become a ubiquitous fixture at most local game stores. After I got a chance to get it to the table and play a few games, I could see why it was such a phenomenon.

It's a simple enough game, and mostly what you would expect. The board represents a race track (there are several to choose from) and the goal is to be the first to get your little plastic race car across the finish line after a set number of laps, usually two or three. Each player gets their own deck of cards that govern how fast and far their car can move. The faster your car is going (represented by what gear it is in), the more cards you play each turn. It seems simple, right?

The trick is that you need to slow down to get around corners, and this is where the real game lies. You have to look at your cards, and at your car's position on the track relative to the next sharp curve, and figure out how to slow down without falling behind the other cars in the race. Your deck consists mainly of cards numbered zero through five, and these are what you use to move. Each turn you have to play a number of cards equal to the gear your car is in -- no more and no less. Normally you can only shift up or down one gear at the start of each turn, but you can shift an extra gear by adding heat cards to your deck.

Heat cards are the primary currency of the game. Each player starts with six in their "engine," a separate pile next to their deck, and one already shuffled in with their other cards. Heat cards in your hand can't be used for anything, so they clutter up your hand and limit your options each turn. The only way to get rid of them is to cool down, which usually means spending a turn in first or second gear. The most important thing you do in the game is manage the back and forth of using heat, because...

Each corner on the track has a speed limit number attached to it, depending on how sharp the curve is. If your speed (the total of all the cards you've played at the start of the turn) is higher than the corner's speed limit, you have to take on heat cards equal to the difference. If you don't have enough heat, you spin out, which means your car stops at the beinning of the curve and is reduced to first gear. Plus, you have to take on stress cards, which make your speed unpredictable by generating a random number when played. The more stress you take on, the harder it gets to control your car.

The game is thrilling, in a way that not many board games are. The feeling of trying to decide how fast you can take an upcoming corner, or of knowing that you can't slow down enough, can't be a million miles away from what it's like to actually drive a race car. It's very easy for me to see why this game is so popular and well reviewed. It hits that sweet spot of being simple to play but extremely engaging.

Additional modules allow the game to be played with customized cars, weather conditions, and a multi-race tournament series. Additionally, the game has a simple but effective way to add non-player cars in order to fill out the track when you have a smaller player count. A recently published expansion adds new tracks, components for a seventh player, and rules for driving in the rain.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) A phenomenally well-designed game that brings all the excitement of racing whether you are a fan of the sport or not.

• Heat: Pedal to the Metal official website
• Heat: Pedal to the Metal on BoardGameGeek