Yeah, the phrase “instant classic” comes to mind with this one. It is so good. I can see myself playing this in forty years with my grandchildren. I usually don’t play enough games in the year they come out to have much of a board GOTY, but I would be stunned if anything else from 2022 approaches this one.
First games last night. Two laps of learning the basics on the USA map (an hour plus teach) then a full race on the Italy map with basic Garage Modules (40 minutes plus upgrade teach). We instantly felt it would be a great house rule to secretly draft the 3 upgrades from dealt hands of cards. The other race teams shouldn't know what your machine can do until it hits the track! This is an awesome game! Once you grok your planning, then you can play smart and fast with the Stress and Heat. It's push-your-luck in a compelling setting. Everyone howled when I spun out... off the line into the first corner in Italy. Brutal and hilarious. Dumped all my Heat into my hand on the first turn, but was still able to come a very close 3rd. Can't wait to dig into the rest of the stuff. A TON of variability in the box. Thanks Days of Wonder. Welcome back!
I have played it 4 times already and enjoy it a lot. My other favorite racing games are Automobiles (shocked you didn’t mention it!), Rallyman GT, El Dorado, and Daytona 500 (the original version of Downforce from 30 years ago…pure racing without ability to bet against yourself!). Great review!
Being in last place - or second last if 5+ - is so much more than "1 extra space and a bit of extra cooling". That cooled-down heat card is a free boost later (worth 1-4 extra spaces), or can be used to take you through a corner faster. But you’re also going to have a much bigger opportunity to draft cars ahead of you, overtaking them with the slipstream rule - another 2-space boost. So we've seen players regularly catch up from quite a long way back - so long as they have the heat to spend. But you don’t want to get more than one corner behind, though - as that really is trouble.
The thing with Downforce is it's more a betting game with a racing theme. Heat is just a pure racing game where you're out to win the race using the resources available to you to the best of your ability, in Downforce it's often about manipulating the race to the result you want. I think comparing them is difficult. Downforce is probably more fragile than Heat. Eg. I've notice on BGA quite a bit you will get players who will bet on the leader at the first betting line 3x and help them win. Those types of players ruin the game to some extent, because you can't win doing this outside the leader having paid much more at auction than you and you coming 2nd in the race. Mostly, it's just gifting the game to that person, and it also takes out the strategy aspect of the game, as there's nothing really the other players can do if someone is going to gift the game to somebody else like this. I give Downforce a 9/10 from my live plays of the game, but playing it online has opened my eyes to it being open to being ruined by other players. I have Heat, but haven't yet played it, though the game does look amazing from the playthroughs and reviews I've seen.
I finally played Heat on New Year's Eve. I wasn't sure what to expect, since I don't care for Downforce, but wow, this game is a lot of fun! We played the basic game with six, all new to the game, and it only took us a little over an hour. It honestly didn't seem that long, because we were having a blast. As for the catch up issue, we didn't seem to have a problem. In fact, it seemed like anybody's race for most of the game. This is definitely a surprise hit for me, and I'll be looking forward to trying the different modules in future games. Now, if only they would add Ludicrous Speed as an upgrade... ;P
I’ve played 15 times now and can get a solo game with 5 bots in around 20 minutes a lap. That’s the full game with weather,sponsors and all garage cards. Absolutely loving it 😊
Thank you for this very helpful review. I am eagerly awaiting restock this game. At least, being a DoW game, we don't have to worry about it not coming back in to print. I do highly recommend Powerboats, or even better the revised version Powerships. This game has a great sense of the balance between speed and control and momentum. It has some really unique very cool dice. It also scales very well to lower player counts, because you don't need a lot of racers to keep the game interesting.
Hi Luke, great and interesting review. I only wonder if I really need this one - taking into account that I have Downforce with all maps. And the possibility for some players to lack behind the whole game seems troublesome. In Downforce you have the betting mechanism, which means you can win even if you are not the winner on the track.
Yes, absolutely that is the advantage of Downforce, although saying that, if the person winning is betting on himself, then that person is pretty screwed anyway. But yeah Downforce is a quicker title.
Heat is a Big Thumbs up for me ! Great game, Awesome IA, defenatly one of my top, if not, my top game of the year 2022 And from all the games i played, beeing at the last places isn't something that cannot be changed. All the games i played, the last player almost always made it on the podium ! But from time to time, you might get stuck coz of bad luck, but at first, if you're far back on the track, it's mostly coz you played bad nor too defensivly ! wish they bring an expansion with the 7th and 8th car and two more tracks soon so i can start a big championship !
@@TheBrokenMeeple a 7th car came out with the expansion. So now, you can make solo races with 7 cars on the tracks, wich is great ! That said, i played the 6 tracks in sort of a championnship (but not the championship module) with just the advanced card (draft) and the weather modules. And i did not lose a single race... 1st place all along which was a bit disapointed as it overall feels too easy :( Probably the "draft" module in solo is making your time much easier and should be avoided (which is a shame as it is a lot of fun aswell) Or maybe, making it card by card after each race. Something like : Race 1 - Nothing Race 2 - Draft 1 advanced card Race 3 - Draft another 1 advanced card Race 4 - Draft your 3rd advanced Card And if still too easy you could then "anti-draft" for the last two races : Race 5 - Remove one of your 3 drafted Card (you got 2 for the race) Race 6 - Remove a Second Drafted Card (you got only one for the last race)
I purchased this along with Thunder Rolls (in the UK - Thunder Rolls took some doing as I didn’t KS it and it hasn’t reached UK retail yet, if in fact it ever will, as there were only 682 KS pledges through Mr B Games) . Both equally good racing games in my opinion and I own most of those listed on BGG. For context, of the games you mention, Downforce is quite low on my list of racing games and Flamme Rouge is quite high. The biggest difference to me between Heat and Thunder Rolls (apart from [1] Formula 1 - v- Nascar and [2]the different mechanics - both good in their own right) is the marketing, including getting it out to reviewers, and distribution and the hype that goes with them. Days of Wonder use the straight to retail model and Mr B Games used KS. I assume Days of Wonder , with their knowledge of what makes a successful game had researched correctly that the game would be a success and produced a number of games to reflect anticipated demand (hence 3.1 k owners on BGG at the time of this post) whereas I assume Mr B Games with fewer hit games in their catalogue needed to be more risk adverse and chose the KS model. I guess there was a limited amount of hype around the KS and this is probably reflected in there being only 250 owners (of the 682 KS backers) showing on BGG. I would be interested in your comparison of both (except I guess you might struggle to find a copy of Thunder Rolls in the UK). Failing that, I would be interested to see any videos where you compare two equally good similar games (in your opinion) where one has been a lot more successful due to the marketing production model and the other has fallen by the wayside. I imagine Thunder Rolls will disappear into obscurity because there is unlikely to be sufficient demand for a reprint. Not even sure whether it is intended to reach retail and if so when. I wonder how it would have faired if it had been a Days of Wonder game (after all it has the designer pedigree and utilises the popular Las Vegas dice mechanic for part of the game. Both games have been equally popular on club night (predominantly euro gamers).
I don't know what to do... I have "formula D" and every expansion of it... Now there's "Heat" and soon there is "Pole Position" (in Kickstarter now)... Waiting your comparison review 😁
Good to know the game length may be long. I’ve only played mille borne and camel up. I would be interested in this game except for the time which would be a hard sell for my family and friends.
Excellent stuff as always Luke. It looks like you get a lot for your money but at between £55 - £60 it's to expensive for me. I keep looking at Flamme Rouge as it's only around £30. Not heard of Snow Tails, I'll have to take a look.
The thing is: its Flamme Rouge plus all the expansions (the weather, the championship and etc its all expansions for Flamme Rouge). So you will spent like 70, 80 bucks to have all this with Flamme Rouge.
I remember when Days of Wonder games were waited for with bated breath and then it all began to go a bit wrong. This looks like a great game but I'm not sure it has a place on my shelf as racing games don't really hit for us and the only one we've kept is Snow Tails.
Thanks for the informative review. I very much like Flamme Rouge and Down Force. The latter is in my top ten of good games bad names. Also the river race element of Carcassonnne Amazonas.
@@TheBrokenMeeple Thanks. Taking it to Christmas with the family (Along with a bunch more). I bet they eat it up :) They like racing games. Every year we still play my old copy of Daytona 500 which is I believe a very old version of Downforce. (Never Played Downforce)
For some reason I hesitate to believe the hype and stellar reviews. Of course I gotta try it first, but I have a hard time seeing how doing the exact same three loops with exactly same set of cards is fun. Even each turn seems kinda same-y, just the max speed is all that's different.
Good review, and the game looks decent. Definitely agree that a race game needs to be quick for me, or it loses the immersion. Highly recommend Ave Caesar - very simple rules, very quick, and great fun.
I wouldn't call it "paying" heat. I would teach it as "taking" heat. You are stressing your engine to go faster in a tight corner. You will be running your engine hot as you stress it more frequently
@@TheBrokenMeeple ok, you were right 🙂 it's extremely impressive and an easy recommend for almost all types of gamers! Thanks again for helpful review on it.
Happy with the components but the cards really do suck, quality wise. Size is not great for shuffling and they are very thin. This is the first game I've owned that I ordered sleeves for. Wondering if they are going to put out an "expansion" like TicketToRide's 1910 and they include more cars, and bigger, premium cards....and milk a few extra dollars out of you.
Instead of paying heat they should have just called it taking or gaining heat, maybe? That's what I will call it when explaining the game. The game has some confusing iconography and nomenclature like that.
This games going to be a pass for me. Downforce seemed boring at times and now there’s a bigger version of that. The ai seems genius but the game doesn’t look that interesting and days of wonder games haven’t been the best. Some good and quite a few bad. Downforce is so depressing for the losing players especially when your losing all game. I bought it played online and was like meh. I wished they had gone with a different theme instead of one that’s been done so many times. To each their own. Not a game I’d want to spend that much on
@@TheBrokenMeeple Put-OFF= how an AI controlled car can go 19 spaces in a turn. I was all excited about a new racing game, but then it fell flat compared to Formula D , Downforce, even Flamme Rouge. That being said....I DO like that -HEAT- has a campaign mode. On second thought, I probably will put this into my collection at some time. ANOTHER negative about this game IS...the price!!! IMO(and I'm not alone) this game "NEW" should be $39.99---- For ME....I will wait and purchase this used for $15-$20
