Pedal to the Metal, Late to the Party

Heat: Pedal to the Medal is a board game published by Days of Wonder and developed by Sidekick Studio that came out in 2022. Each player controls a Grand Prix race car competing against up to 5 other racers to navigate the tight corners of a track, managing a hand of cards representing the car’s speed, the driver’s stress, and the engine’s heat.

And I am straight-up obsessed with it at the moment. It’s not just because it’s a lot of fun, but because it’s so elegant and clever. The core mechanic is so well-balanced, with every component having a clear cost-vs-benefit aspect that seems to generate an infinite number of interesting decisions from what should otherwise be the most tedious and repetitive process of going around a race track.

Even if you have no interest in auto racing, Heat is such a clever abstraction that it gives you a better idea of where the depth and complexity of the sport lie. Each track — there are four included in the base game — has its own peculiarities which can lead to surprisingly different strategies.

And then that core mechanic can be expanded on seemingly indefinitely, with a bunch of modules included in the base box, which players are free to mix and match. The game has been out long enough that the first expansion, Heat: Heavy Rain came out earlier this year, but I feel like I could play the base game dozens and dozens more times before needing to add anything else.

This is neither a tutorial nor a detailed review, but my list of the aspects of the game that impress me the most.

Abstracting an auto race

The most basic description of the game is straightforward: Each player has their own deck of cards, with speed values from 1-4. At the beginning of your turn, you can choose to shift your car up or down one gear. The gear determines how many cards you can play that turn: e.g. two cards for second gear, four cards for fourth. After choosing cards simultaneously, each player in race order moves their car forward according to their speed.

At certain points around the track, there’s a corner marker with an attached speed limit. Any car that crosses that line with a speed value greater than that speed limit has to pay a penalty.

Just that is enough to make a simple abstraction of car racing. In fact, Formula D manages to be a pretty engaging board game doing just that: putting players in charge of shifting gears, changing lanes, and watching their speed around corners. But the thing that makes Heat brilliant is that it doesn’t just try to abstract the mechanics of a car race, but the feeling of one.

It’s designed to challenge players to press their luck as far as they can, trying to get every last bit of speed from their engine without pushing it too far.

Hand Management

The way it does that shouldn’t be a surprise, since it’s in the title. In addition to the numbered speed cards, each player’s deck contains a number of heat cards. Generally, heat cards start out in your engine. You “spend” them for various actions or penalties by putting them into your discard pile.

For example: you can normally shift up or down 1 gear per turn. If you spend a heat, though, you can shift an extra gear, simulating the strain on your engine as you suddenly drop from 4th gear to 2nd while you’re turning a tight corner. You can also choose to spend a heat on an extra boost near the end of your turn, where you draw a speed card and add its value to your current speed.

Those are the bonuses, but you also have to spend heat for taking corners too fast: one heat for each point you are over the speed limit. If you ever need to spend heat but don’t have any available in your engine, it causes a spin out, which can be disastrous.

There’s a counterpart to the heat cards in the form of stress cards. Drivers can play a stress card to draw a random speed card from their deck. In the fiction, they’re intended to simulate the moments when a driver briefly loses concentration. In practice, it adds a much-needed bit of randomness to the game, so that it doesn’t come strictly down to careful arithmetic every turn. More importantly, it demands that players stay ready to react to changes as much as planning ahead.

Currencies and Penalties

What’s so clever about the heat cards and stress cards is that they’re both currency cards and penalty cards, with a built-in sense of pressing your luck.

Unlike the other cards, the heat cards and stress cards can’t ever be discarded from your hand. Stress cards have to be played, introducing a random value into your speed calculations. But you can only get rid of heat cards by using cooldowns.

Each cooldown lets you move one heat card from your hand back into your engine. You automatically get one at the end of your turn whenever you’re in second gear, and three when you’re in first gear, obviously since you’re not pushing the engine as hard. More cooldowns can be available from upgrades, varying weather conditions, and other bonuses.

It’s such a clever mechanic because it organically simulates the feeling of your engine overheating. If you keep pressing the engine without slowing down to let it cool off, your hand will gradually fill up with heat cards that can’t be played. You’ll eventually stall out or spin out, with no speed cards available to play.

There’s an interesting counter-balance baked into each of the non-discardable cards. Stress is mostly a beneficial card, but with the downside that it’s unpredictable. An unlucky draw could send you through a corner too fast, or leave you wasting an entire turn only moving one or two spaces forward on a straightaway.

Heat feels like largely a negative card, taking up space in your hand and preventing you from moving forward until you find a way to get rid of it. But it’s also the currency you spend to do everything cool in the game, like boosting, or speeding around corners with just enough control to stay on the track. There’s an element of risk and unpredictability to both of them, with the mechanics practically forcing you to push things as far as you can.

As the blurb on the back of the box says, “There’s no prize for crossing the finish line in a pristine car, so put your pedal to the metal.” One of the rare cases where the marketing copy doesn’t just feel like marketing copy, but the overriding mission statement of the entire game design.

Modularity

And finally, I just think it’s fascinating how they were able to take a relatively small and straightforward number of mechanics and recombine them into so many different modular variations. I’ve had fun playing the 1-lap starter game with the base decks, expanding to more laps, expanding to different maps with their own numbers of laps and turns, and then adding the upgrade cards.

We haven’t even added weather yet, which randomly adds bonuses or penalties to the track overall (like hot weather adding heat directly into your discard pile) and to certain sections of track (like wet road causing you to slipstream farther).

There’s also a tournament mode, where players race across three different tracks, each with a different condition. And sponsorships, where you start with special upgrades, and you can earn more by performing exceptional stunts in front of the camera crews stationed at specific positions on the track.

It also supports any number of 1-5 players, since there are built-in mechanisms for “legend” cars, which are controlled by a set of rules determined by drawing cards as they cross certain points of the track.

The Art of Game Design

There’s a version of the game on Board Game Arena, so you can play asynchronously with people on the internet, and that’s where most of my games have taken place so far. But on top of everything else I like about Heat, there’s a definite appeal to playing the physical version. The artwork is gorgeous and perfectly evocative of the “golden age” of the Grand Prix, and it’s nice just to have it spread out on a table. The cars are — not at all surprisingly — fun to move around the track. And there’s something satisfying about seeing cards flowing from place to place, evoking just a tiny bit the feeling of watching a cross-section schematic of an engine working.

Part of the reason I’m so late to the party with Heat is because the pandemic and the move to southern California combined to put an end to most of our board game playing. We’re slowly starting the hobby back up again, and I’m remembering the excitement of seeing a clever or novel design for the first time, with all of its systems and mechanics interacting with each other.

I definitely don’t want to give the impression that I’m an expert, but I do spend an awful lot of time thinking about game design. I often think of it as wrangling two disparate disciplines, trying to apply a meaningful idea onto a set of elegantly constructed mathematics. Expression vs science, in a way. I’m most impressed when designers are able to use the mechanics as expression. Especially when it’s abstract expression, not necessarily conveying a concrete idea, but a specific feeling.

Heat uses a set of simple, interconnected mechanics to give players the feel of a high-tension, high-stakes race, trying to maintain control over a powerful engine that could overheat or careen out of control at any moment. It takes what could’ve been simple arithmetic and makes it feel exhilarating.