Grand Prix Board Game First Impressions
“Anything happens in Grand Prix racing, and it usually does.”
~ Murray Walker
Grand Prix is the newest auto racing game where 2-11 players can compete in the game controlling either one team of two cars or multiple teams.
This is a slight variation on Thunder Alley. The gameplay is similar except for a few changes which I’ll list here…
Cars
You only have 2 cars on your team. You also control 2 neutral cars as well as share custody of a couple of unowned cars. However you will still only score for your team, the others are useful for helping and/or hindering.
Tyres
You have two types of tyres, hard and soft and you can start the race with either set. You can change them during a pit stop and you MUST have used both sets at least once each by the end of the race if that car gets disqualified.
One of the sets of tyres lets you, once per set, add the pit movement on the card to the movement of the car for a one-off boost.
Damage & Pitting
Damage is gained, and removed and reduces your speed in the same way.
However, when you pit you go back a number of spaces based on the value of the damage printed on the tokens.
You also have tokens that don’t count as actual damage, but count as you ‘driving aggressively’ shall we say and these come up on event cards.
Speed
The cars move faster with cards going up to 9 in speed (13 with the tyre boost) and 7+’s seem to be more common.
Positives
Same tactical card play of Thunder Alley which I already really like.
Good F1 simulation.
Negatives
Just 2 cars… If one gets left behind or taken out by an event card that’s half your team gone! I know that’s how it is in real life but it’s not like I trained to be an F1 driver so I can’t race Nascar 🙂
Controlling 2-4 Neutral cars just isn’t as fun as controlling a whole team.
Grand Prix Summary
It’s good, it’s just not Thunder Alley good 🙂
