Downforce is an auction, betting and hand management racing game.

Title: Downforce

Year Published: 2017

Designer: Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson, Wolfgang Kramer

Publisher: Restoration Games

Players: 2-6

Game Time: ~40 Mins

Set-up Time: ~1 Min

Ages: 10+

Theme: Racing

Mechanisms: Auction, Betting, Hand Management

How to win: After buying cars, racing them and betting on the outcome, have the most money at the end of the race.

Game Description

High-stakes bidding on million-dollar race cars. Frantic bets placed in secret even as the cars race around the track. And to the victor, the biggest purse of all. But in the world of motor racing, the margin between victory and defeat can be a single moment: a steep banked turn, tires screaming and spitting out smoke, and the downforce, pressing you down in your seat and keeping you on the track as you make your move inside to pull ahead.

How to play Downforce

Downforce Round-Up

This game looks great. it’s very clean and white but there is detail on the board worth examining. The cards are very plain but not in a bad way. Everything is easy to read and very nice to look at.

Setup is… easy to a point. Layout the board, place cars and do a little sorting/shuffling of cards.

But the auction phase where you’re bidding for cars and power cards is… fiddly.

Straightforward bidding is indeed straightforward but when it comes to bidding without a colour, bidding with wildcards and the second round of bidding? Well, there are more rules to that than the rest of the game put together…

But the race itself is VERY simple; Play a card move cars. The player Powers are very simple, the movement is very simple and even the intermittent betting is simple.

It’s just nice and easy.

Until you start blocking cars in and screwing them over during movement! Argh!

When someone plays a card with a ‘6’ in the colour of one of your cards and it only gets to move ‘1’, it’s annoying! Oh well… you’ll get them back.

I do like the final scoring too. IF, and I mean IF your cars finish they are assigned a value based on their position and you also gain money for betting correctly.

But then you’re going to pay for what you bought in the auction phase and take that off of your score. This means if you buy multiple cards you had better be prepared to drive them all well…

It also means that if players consider a certain power more powerful than the others, and some groups do, then you can make someone pay big for it.

A good alternative to Jamaica and about the same level of difficulty.

Downforce Rating

A very fun and straightforward racing game

I give it 7/10

First Impressions September 2017

This is a brief overview of the game with my final summary.

Jesta ThaRogue