Racing Five Legends Around a Track I've Never Driven

Wind came up hard the third week of the season, tower rocking enough that I didn’t want to be reading anything with small print, so I pulled out Heat instead, cards big enough to see at arm’s length even with the cabin creaking. It’s a racing game, you pick a gear, you play speed cards, you take corners too fast and generate heat that clutters your hand until you cool your engine down, which sounds simple and mostly is, though the tension of it snuck up on me by lap two.

I’ve never played Formula Dé or Rallyman or any of the older racing games people keep comparing this to, so I can’t say if it earns the comparisons, but the Legends module, the AI-driven cars, is the reason this one stays in the pack. Five of them can run a race in under a minute of turns and they play sharp enough that one beat me and another human player in a championship, which stung a little but proved the point. Solo it holds up completely, no compromise version of the rules, no half-game feeling.

The stress cards are the detail that stuck with me most, a card goes into your hand face down and you don’t know its speed until you flip it, so you’re planning a corner around a number you can’t see yet, which is a nastier bit of design than the box lets on. Advanced upgrade cards, by contrast, slowed things down for me the way a couple other reviewers mentioned, more decisions without more payoff, I’ve mostly left that module in the box. Championship mode with the sponsor cards adds real depth though, incentives to take risky lines just for bonus points, worth the extra setup.

Weighed the box before it went up, light enough, and five players got a full race down to fifty minutes once everyone knew the rules, which is the kind of pack-weight-to-payoff ratio I don’t get often. Best two-player and best solo racing game I’ve had in this tower, full stop.