It was in English class. Classmate Tim suggested racing on graph paper. Yes, why not? With a ballpoint pen he drew sweeping lines that became curves that formed a race track, not caring about the diamonds on the sheet.
A cross on a diamond corner on the starting line became my car, Tim drove with his own cross. From now on, the windows mattered. On your first turn you were allowed to move one diamond corner further. In the second turn you continued the line and had to choose one new spot from the nine diamond corners from your new position and then drew a line again.
Sounds abstract, but this is how speed is created on paper. If you went two right and one up on the previous turn, on the next turn you will also go two right and one up plus the maneuver you perform. You can accelerate, slow down and even veer out of the bend.
Racing game Heat: Pedal to the Metal captures that racing feeling in cardboard. And racing turns out to be just as much fun as in second grade.
Each participating driver has his own pile of cards with values 0 to 5. You can play a number of them each turn: you move forward that many spaces.
The finesse is that you had to determine your acceleration in your previous turn. In first gear you only play one card, in fourth gear you play four.
And here it comes: some bends you can only go through at a certain speed, say ‘7’. Taking a turn in fourth gear is then a risk: there is a good chance that the four cards you have to play will be higher than 7. And there you go, into the gravel trap, cursing in the dust clouds of your competition.
But a race wouldn’t be a race without the opportunity to squeeze that little bit extra out of your car. By moving heat cards from your engine to your discard pile, you can do things that are normally not possible: skip a gear and immediately switch from 1 to 3 or back. Those heat cards do dilute your draw pile in the later round. They are bad cards, useless cards that stick in your hand. You can only get rid of them by cooling down, and that is only possible in the lowest two gears.
Heat shines with five or more players. Then all the racing drama is present, from neck and neck to the red lantern. Just look at that, red is behind, that won’t work out anymore, but what is that, he tries to take that sharp bend in third gear, would it work, will he end up on the podium in the wake of yellow, no! Out of the bend. Lost everything.