Heat: Pedal to the Metal First Impressions

Heat: Pedal to the Metal is a card-driven racing game.

Can you manage the heat and keep cool on corners?

Heat: Pedal to the Metal puts players in the driver’s seat of intense car races, jockeying for position to cross the finish line first while managing their car’s speed if they don’t want to overheat. 

Heat: Pedal to the Metal Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

Players are racing and will be in one of 4 gears. The higher the gear, the more cards you play and the further you can move. But, move faster than the speed allowed for a corner and you spin out.

To avoid this, you add Heat cards from your supply into your deck to make up the difference between your speed and the corners max speed.

Heat cards can only be removed from your deck and returned to your supply by driving at lower gears.

How do you win?

Cross the finish line first! Well, there is more to it than that but I demoed this at Essen so that’s how we ended the game.

Main Mechanisms

You’re sort of deck-building your movement cards but you only add or remove one card type. You’re just adding heat cards in and out. The advanced rules in the box allow you to upgrade your car giving you more cards to manage but for now, it’s just movement and heat… Oh and stress cards (the plus sign) that give you a random movement off the top of the deck.

Theme

Racing! There is a drafting mechanism, slowing for corners and looking after your car. While it’s not a great simulation of Formula 1, there are the attributes you would expect packed into an accessible game.

Setup

Cars out, Cards out.

Components & Artwork

The board and cars are all nice. The player mat is decent with symbols that show the phases of a turn order pretty well… I mean, they’re not very intuitive until you’re really sure what they mean but they work.

Ease of Teaching

The basic game is quite easy to teach with only the Stress cards causing an issue. Also, slipstreams can take a while to sink in.

There is a more advanced version and season mode which I glimpsed at briefly in the rulebook that adds more stuff.

Similar Games

While I was playing I thought it reminded me of Road Rally USA and Flamme Rouge. I mean, any card-driven racing simulation will sound similar.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal Review

Positives

A decent racing game system that is fun to play.

Managing heat cards so you have them when you need them is actually quite tough.

Heat means you need to really focus on how to best take corners which is realistic.

The season system and extras look like a lot of fun.

Negatives

The base game is good, but too basic and lacks replayability

It’s quite pricey for what it is, double the price of Downforce which has a similar set of components.

Summary

A very fun game with a season mode that includes car upgrades, weather, road conditions, and events that sounds like a lot of fun.

Jesta ThaRogue