What Exactly IS a Good Racing Game?

Fantastic post. This summed up everything I've been feeling about race games. Not a damn one of them does it right. Snow Tails has some amazing mechanics, but it's not fun. It's pure Euro all the way, basically a hand management game. I think maybe I need to give up and just go with a video game if I really want to race. I guess it's the only way.

Has anyone here ever played Junkyard Races? How does it stack up against Rush n'Crush?

stormseeker75 wrote: ...hookers in wheelchairs, I don't care.

That almost made me spit-take my coffee. (golfclap)

Also, any mention of Car Wars... hellz yeah!

Car Wars is awesome, even if I have barely played it.


What I really wonder is. Is there any reason to play a racing boardgame when I can hook up my Dreamcast and play Daytona USA? Or get a Wii and F-Zero for that matter. Honest question!

Erik Twice wrote: Car Wars is awesome, even if I have barely played it.


What I really wonder is. Is there any reason to play a racing boardgame when I can hook up my Dreamcast and play Daytona USA? Or get a Wii and F-Zero for that matter. Honest question!

For me it's Destruction Derby on DC and Mario Kart on Wii. I used to play a lot of the Gran Turismo series pre-PS3.

For me it boils down to what I want out of the game and most of the time it's a few laughs, some "screw you", and not having to worry about it too much. For that we usually play Mario Kart, but on the boardgame front Ave Caesar does a pretty good job of it. The key for a game like Ave Caesar is that everyone's having fun messing with each other and not planning the optimum play on every damn turn. You don't need to reconsider the state of the game, you don't need to reoptimize your card play, and really you don't need to do anything except play a damn card and keep the game moving. Mess with the guys behind you if you can, because that's half the point.

When I want a more serious racing game I love Speed Circuit. I talked about it a bit earlier in the thread, but it's more of a simulation type racing game. The rules aren't heavy, but there's enough there to make familiarity and planning really pay off. It's my Gran Turismo now, even though it's really not the same type of racing. But with Speed Circuit you still need people who will play quickly. Nobody wants to play a racing game where they get to move their car every five or ten minutes.

With those two games we have enough racing games. I'd recommend either one of them, but I wouldn't spend a fortune on either of them. The only two I'm still interested in are two that I haven't played yet: Thunder Road and Car Wars. There isn't any reason to have a bunch of racing games. We've got two that are a lot of fun with the right people for different reasons. And that's what it comes down to: who you're playing with and what you feel like doing. We've got about the same number of hours out of Mario Kart as we have out of Ave Caesar. I never win at either one of them, but I try my damnedest to take everyone else down with me.

Circus Imperium is my personal fave. It's a hoary FASA game in the Renegade Legion "universe" that's sort of a Car Wars-meets-Circus-Maximus. Big ill-tempered beasts hauling grav chariots. Whip the beasts too hard, they go into a frenzy and you start moving out of control; get them too close to the chariot in front and they'll try to take a bite out of opposing driver. We had lots of laugh-out-loud fun with it--particularly when we set up a custom Figure-8 track as that crossover point turned into a real bloodbath. But, it's got old school Car Wars-type book keeping to go with it and all the other hallmarks of early 90s FASA games (Renegade Legions whatever, Battletech, etc...)

The Ghenos F1 game, Bolide?, had some of the most interesting physics modeling of any race game I've ever played with its vector movement but it can feel a bit too much like a math exercise.

I think Leader 1, their cycling game, is also great fun...

wadenels wrote: The only two I'm still interested in are two that I haven't played yet: Thunder Road and Car Wars. There isn't any reason to have a bunch of racing games. We've got two that are a lot of fun with the right people for different reasons. And that's what it comes down to: who you're playing with and what you feel like doing.

Seems fair to me, tough I wouldn't describe Car Wars as a racing game. Sure, you can race with it, but the game is geared for blowing stuff and risk management, just turning in a circuit seems kind of a waste.

But it might be me, I bought the game because it looked the perfect fit for my unit versus unit wargame over the simplistic Wings of War and complex stuff like Gunslinger.