I think one of the byproducts of growing up in a town that was basically 2 km long and half a kilometre wide is that I never really developed a need for a car until I was in my early twenties. And as a result of not having a car for the entire first half of my life, I’m just… not really a car guy. I don’t seem to have that stereotypical urge to fix an engine, and I couldn’t care less about the intricacies of the Daytona 500. Watching a whole bunch of cars turn left all day has never exactly called to me.

But I do love the bicycle racing board game Flamme Rouge, and when the designers of that (Asger Aleksandrov Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen) came out with another racing game, I couldn’t help but be intrigued. Although, I found myself predisposed to disliking Heat. Upon its launch it immediately got a bunch of critical acclaim, and I felt weirdly betrayed. How dare the community move on from Flamme Rouge so easily, and for a game about grotesque cars!? How inelegant! My monocle nearly popped off my eye at the mere thought of it.

But, I never let my biases prevent me from giving a game it’s proper due. If I’m going to dislike a game, I feel I should at least play it, so I can have an educated opinion, rather than one rooted in assumptions and hearsay.

Bowl of candy not included

At its core, Heat is a racing game. I want to call it a deck builder, but that’s not quite right. All players will start with the same base deck, you’ll draft some equipment cards to add a bit of asymmetrical flare, and during the game, heat cards will enter and exit your deck. Not really a deck building game, but it has a deck building vibe. Each round starts with all players drawing up to 7 cards, and then playing cards equal to your current gear. You can always play one more or one less than your gear to ‘shift’ for free, or you can jump a gear by moving a heat card from your engine into your discard pile. I’ll get back to what heat means in just a moment. All players pick their cards for the round, then you slide into the movement phase.

The cards you play from your hand, will each generally have a value from 1 to 4. At the start of the movement phase, the player in first position moves the number equal to the value of the cards they played. You can move a heat into your discard to ‘boost’, which has you just drawing the next card off the top of your deck and move that number of spaces. Then the next player goes, but if they happen to end their turn directly behind someone, they can slipstream, moving two bonus spaces, in a great catch up mechanism that does wonders for keeping all players in the race.

On the subject of movement, the course you’re racing on will have corners, and those corners will have limits. You can safely pass the corners by only moving the described number of spaces on your turn. For every square you move beyond that limit, you’ll need to move a heat from your engine to your discard pile. If you ever need to move a heat, but can’t, then you ‘spin out’, making you reset back to the square just before the turn you spun out on.

So let’s talk about the titular heat resource. It’s actually kind of amazing. At the start of the game each player will have 6 heat cards in the centre of their player board. Whenever you need to ‘pay a heat’, you’ll move one of those heat cards from your engine into your discard pile. Those cards will eventually get shuffled and drawn into your hand, where they will clog up your deck until you ‘cool’ them, which simply removes them from your hand and puts them back into your engine.

Clogging up your hand is no joke. Having more cards to choose from when you’re trying to thread the needle between players and nail a specific corner is paramount. But heat isn’t just a dead card, but it represents a moment where you push your car beyond its safe limits to gain an important edge. Taking those limiting corners just a bit faster than everyone else, boosting on a straight away to exceed your gear capacity, it’s all things you need to take into consideration if you’re hoping to win.

Of course, what really makes Heat: Pedal to the Metal great, is the tension that arises from the stress cards. Instead of numbers, these cards have a + symbol, which when resolved, just has you flip over cards from your deck until you pull one of your base speed cards, then move the number on that card. It’s a bit of uncertainty, a touch of risk. The stress cards cannot be discarded, either, they must be played at some point. If you hold them for too long, you’ll clog up your hand, removing those precious options from yourself. But also you need to negotiate with yourself, how much are you willing to risk? If you play a stress card and pull the 4, you’ll go over the corner and spin out. But you probably won’t draw a 4. Right?

Because the game is not entirely deterministic, it creates excellent moments of tension. Moments when you need anything other than a 4, and you’ll end your turn right before the turn, but then you flip the card and then bam. There’s the 4. Alternatively, when you come out of a turn onto a massive straightaway, you spend the heat to jump from 2nd to 4th gear, and play all your stress cards and flip over a series of 1’s and 2’s. I don’t know what the motorsport equivalent of a wet fart is, but I feel that in my soul.

Conversely to those bad examples, I recently played a game where on the final stretch I played 2 stress cards and boosted on my final turn, and all 3 of those random card draws pulled a 4, leaving me 2 spaces ahead and winning the game. It was dramatic and exciting, the kind of moment that makes everyone stand up and shout, not believing that you managed to pull off a crazy come back. The game system is chaotic in a way that creates moments that you’ll remember, long after the box has been put away.

As I said before, I was weirdly determined to dislike Heat when it first came out. It was getting all kinds of praise, and in my head I was like, “But I already have Flamme Rouge, how dare you suggest something might be better?” No one was actually saying that, but enough people were comparing them that I got defensive. Add to that the fact that I don’t really care about car racing as a theme, and yeah, I went in skeptical. But Heat has completely won me over.

There’s a real sense of tension throughout the race, those moments where you play a stress card and hold your breath as you flip, hoping for exactly what you need, and then you miraculously get it. Slipstreaming gives trailing players a chance to catch up, so even if someone manages to break away, it never feels like the race is over. You can still find a clever line, tuck in behind at just the right moment, and surge forward in a way that makes you feel like a savant. It’s the kind of game that gets people standing up, shouting, reacting to every reveal. It captures that feeling of pushing a machine to its limit and threading the needle just right.

I do think there are some balance quirks with the equipment cards you draft at the start. You take six of them, and the draft order snakes so that it should balance out among equally skilled players. But in my early plays, there were definitely moments where someone who understood the game better just crushed me, and it wasn’t entirely clear how much the cards contributed to that. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s something I noticed.

What is worth noting is how expandable this game feels. Different tracks, more varied turns, weather conditions and more, it all fits so naturally into what the game is already doing. There are already 2 big box expansions out there, with more on the way.

That said, the setup can be a bit of a chore. There’s a lot going on with boards, decks, and modules that it makes me not want to commit to doing the full championship mode at the table. I don’t necessarily feel like racing multiple maps back to back creates a more interesting experience. As a one-off race, though? Heat is fantastic.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal surprised me. It took a theme I don’t care about and turned it into something tense, exciting, and just plain fun to experience. It’s one of those rare games that can pull people out of their seats, make them laugh at their own misfortune, and cheer when things go exactly right. And for someone who couldn’t care less about cars, that’s saying something.