Two Car Racing Games I Love That Couldn’t Be More Different.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal

Heat: Pedal to the Metal: Published 2022 by Days of Wonder
Designers: Asger Aleksandrov Granerud, Daniel Skjold Pedersen
Artist: Vincent Dutrait
Writer: Jesse Rasmussen

Heat is a card-management game (not a deck-building game, although advanced modules do let you add better cards to your deck). It plays from 1-6 players (and more as you add expansions). The cards in your hand control how fast your car moves down the track. You want to go fast on the straightaways and slow down to avoid spinning out in the corners. On each turn you can shift gears, which determines how many of the cards from your hand you will play that turn.

A 3-player game with 3 Legends, after one turn

The pack is tight heading into the first corner.
The Finish Line and garage building are add-ons that I 3d-printed.

In addition to the speed cards in your hand, which range from 0-5, you have a couple other kinds of cards:
Stress cards: allow you to play an additional card from the top of your deck
Heat cards: these all start in your engine, a pile separate from the deck you play cards from. Heat is a resource that you can use to shift gears faster, go a little further on your turn, or exceed the speed limit as you fly around a corner. Each time you spend a Heat card from your engine, it moves to your discard pile. From there it gets into your deck the next time you need to shuffle your deck, and then into your hand of cards, where it is useless. There are limited opportunities for cooldown, which lets you remove a Heat card from your hand and return it to your engine. Managing your Heat is the core of the game. Use too much and you will spin out or have a hand that does not let you move at all; use too little and you’ll get left behind the rest of the pack.

You know all the cards that make up your deck and need to figure out which cards are best to play each turn, while thinking ahead about what other cards are likely to come into your hand next, and what you need for the upcoming part of the track. The game feels very realistic, as cars pass each other, use slipstream to sneak ahead, and manage all the corners and straightaways. Each turn plays quickly, with the decision time (choosing which cards to play) done simultaneously for all players. I’ve played 10 times now, and in most plays the lead changes hands frequently, and the race often comes down to the final turn.

The base game is easy to learn. There is a simple card system for managing additional cars (the “Legends”) so you can race with the full complement of 6 cars (7 if using the first expansion) even with fewer players, without much overhead. The components are very nice: small race cars that you move around the track, 2 double-sided game boards, offering a choice of 4 tracks in the base game, a dashboard and gearshift knob for each player, colour-matched to their car, plus all the cards. The game comes with a nice insert that provides a spot for everything to keep things organized.

The stock box insert has a place for everything.

The basic game is great, but the game comes with a few advanced modules that make it better, though a little more complex:
The Legends mentioned above, to add additional cars beyond the number of players
Weather & Road Conditions: to modify how the track behaves, so it’s not the same every game
The Garage: a set of basic and advanced upgrade cards that give your car more powerful capabilities. A few of these are drafted by the players at the start of the game.
The Championship: play a series of races, with special upgrades available based on performance in each race

At this point, I always include the Legends and Weather & Road Conditions each time I play. The Garage module adds complexity (and time for the initial drafting of upgrade cards), so I don’t always include that when there are first-time players at the table. I’m still exploring & learning about how the upgrades work. I have not yet tried the Championship module; I’d need the same set of players to agree to play through that in multiple sessions, which may not happen.

I also have the first expansion: Heavy Rain. This adds two more tracks, a 7th car, and additional upgrade cards for the Garage module. The new tracks feature sections with rain (which limits gear shifting) and chicanes (two corners close together). A second expansion (Tunnel Vision) is also available, and a third (Rocky Roads) is coming in 2026. In addition to these expansions there are also many fan-designed racetracks available; some of these can be bought as large neoprene game mats. It’s possible to spend a lot upgrading this game!

I love this game. While there is some luck involved in which cards will be in your hand each turn, there is also a fair bit of skill in managing your hand and keeping track of what is likely to be next. It feels very realistic as you move around the track, and it’s really fun to see cars passing each other, pushing their cars to the limit by spending heat wisely (or not!), and seeing the race come down to the wire. Even after 10 plays, I feel like I have just begun to explore what’s in the box. My weekly Tuesday night game group includes several fans of this game, so it gets played regularly.

Of course, when I love a game, I’m not satisfied with it out of the box, and have to add some upgrades. In this case I’ve got a combination of things I have 3d-printed, and upgrades I have bought to enhance the gameplay:
I’ve 3d-printed little garage buildings to hold the road condition tokens and make them a little more noticeable, as well as a cute finish line marker.
I bought some pretty speed limit signs to place at each corner (these are multicolour 3d prints that are nicer than what I can do myself with my printers).
I bought neoprene player dashboards from GripMats for each player to replace the cardboard ones that come with the game.

Blue player’s dashboard (upgraded neoprene mat),
showing the cards played the first turn (at upper-right),
the remaining cards in their hand at left,
and their deck with a few stress cards turned up to the right of that.

I have also 3d printed a new insert for the game. While the insert that came with it is quite good, the 3d-printed one can fit the expansion and all my upgrades (except the player mats) in the base game box with no lid lift, and the components for each player (car, shift knob, starting cards) are stored together, making setup a little faster. The upgraded neoprene dashboard mats fit in the expansion box.

My 3d-printed insert has room for all the maps boards from the base game and first expansion, held in place by 4 corner spacers

Under the boards are little boxes for each player with their cards, car and gear shift.

The bottom layer of the insert stores all the other cards,
the weather tokens, and the 3D-printed extras I printed and bought.

Heat is a great game. It’s easy to get to the table, even with new players, and even without any of the expansions it offers a lot of headroom to add more to the game. I think I will be playing this game for years to come, and have a lot more to learn to get better at it.

Thunder Road Vendetta: Maximum Chrome

Thunder Road Vendetta: Maximum Chrome: Published 2023 by Restoration Games
Designers: Dave Chalker, Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson, Brett Myers, Brian Neff
Artists: Marie Bergeron, Garrett Kaida

This one is a box full of dice-chucking crazy chaos. The theme is a post-apocalyptic setting clearly inspired by the Mad Max movies. Ostensibly it’s a race down a track, but the track is filled with hazards, some realistic and some just insane, and players can crash into each other’s vehicles and shoot at each other. The winner is either the first to cross the finish line after at least one player has been eliminated, or the last one standing after everyone else has been wiped out. This is not a serious game; I once was eliminated on my second turn, and still had fun.

Let’s start with the base game. Each player gets 4 vehicles: small & medium cars, a large truck, and a helicopter that flies around shooting other player’s vehicles. Small cars are easy to dislodge when crashed into but harder to shoot; the large trucks are hard to move but easier to target, and the medium cars are in the middle. The choppers just fly around until they decide to land on the track and shoot at something in front of them. They also become hazards for the vehicles on the track.

At the start of each round everyone rolls their own dice, and then turn by turn in the round you assign dice to cars to determine how far they can move. If you land on a hazard tile, you flip it over to see what happened, and resolve it. If you enter a space with another car, you normally roll other dice to determine which one gets bounced, and in which direction. This may result in addition hazards being triggered, or additional collisions (slams). If your vehicle lands on impassable terrain, or goes off the edge of the track, that vehicle is eliminated from the game. Vehicles can also be disabled as a result of a hazard or being shot. Disabled vehicles cannot move on their own until they are repaired. If all of your vehicles are either disabled or eliminated at any point in time, you are eliminated from the game.

The racetrack is made up of large tiles with many spaces on each. The base game comes with 5 double-sided track tiles. The game starts with 3 tiles laid end-to-end. When the first vehicle reaches the end of the third tile, a new one is randomly selected and placed in front of it, and the first track tile is then removed from the game, along with any vehicles still positioned on it. When the first player is eliminated, a finish line is added to the front of the track, and the game now becomes a race to that finish line.

Game situation: 3 player game after the first round

Even after one round, things are already getting wild.

Blue player’s dashboard, with dice assigned to cars.

Each turn proceeds quickly, as players assign their dice, move their vehicles down the track, and encounter hazards or slam into other cars. The conflict creates a lot of laughs; this is not a game to be taken seriously.

The base game includes 4 sets of vehicles, all the same. The expansions contained in the Maximum Chrome Edition include:
Carnage at Devil’s Run: this adds 5 more double-sided track tiles, with new terrain types (desert glass that makes vehicles slide around, toxic goo that gets sticky, ramps that send you flying), new hazards, and fire! Cars can catch fire, which can help them go faster, but may also lead to them exploding! I think if you have just the base game, this expansion should be the first one you add. The extra terrain, hazards and fire add a lot of variability and more fun.
Choppe Shoppe: adds Team Leaders with asymmetric abilities, and car upgrades. This adds some complexity, but makes each player’s vehicles behave differently in ways that are a lot of fun. This improves replayability by adding variety and different strategies for different players (I use the word strategy very loosely here!).
Big Rig and Final Five: extends the game to support up to 6 players by adding very different vehicle sets. The Big Rig is a single 3-section truck that moves slowly but is hard to stop. The Final Five are a set of 5 motorcycles that are nimble and hard to shoot, but easy to shove around. These additions change the game a lot, both for the players playing the new vehicle types and for other players trying to combat them.
Extra Ammo: a mini-expansion that adds several small decks of cards to change road conditions, add more different abilities to players and their vehicles, and offer achievements that give rewards when completed. Just a bit more variety.

All of these extras add depth, replayability and more fun and chaos to the game. The Choppe Shoppe and Big Rig and Final Five add some complexity that is best saved for those who have played the base game before.

There is one additional expansion that is not included in the Maximum Chrome Edition: Carnival of Chaos. This changes the game substantially into a Mad Max: Thunderdome-type battle for survival. I have not played this expansion. There is also a campaign game expansion coming in 2026: Interstate of Decay.

The Maximum Chrome Edition comes with a really great multi-level insert that organizes the hundreds of components well. I have not found it necessary to 3d print my own insert for this one! The vehicles in this edition are painted with a wash that makes them nicer and more detailed than the vanilla finish offered in the base game.

The insert opened up, showing all the layers that stack up in the box.

I have added a few 3d-printed components to what comes in the box: 3d rocks and hills to represent the impassable terrain on the road tiles. Some of this I found for free online, and some of it was nice enough that I paid a few bucks for the 3d models. Unfortunately, there is no way to fit all this stuff in the game box, so I have a second box just for the 3d-printed terrain that I haul around with the very large and heavy game box!

3d-printed impassable terrain in the middle of the track,
and ramps in the background, amidst hazard tokens and fire spaces.

All the 3d-printed extras I printed, with the box I carry it all in.

Thunder Road Vendetta is silly fun. It looks great, and the components really add to the experience. The Maximum Chrome edition adds many choices of extras to add in to change things up and keep the game fresh.

Wrap-up

These wildly different racing games are both among my favourites right now. They are both easy to learn, and offer an ability to ramp up the complexity when you’re ready. Both come with beautiful components and have a great table presence that helps players immerse themselves in the theme. And both have a really good insert to keep everything well organized. If you want a serious, realistic car racing game, I recommend Heat: Pedal to the Metal. If you want a less-serious game full of chaos and laughter, try Thunder Road Vendetta. I love both of them!

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