Love - gamebastion.com

I’d be lying if I said I was a huge fan of racing in general. It’s not something that has peaked my interest in the slightest over my 35 years on this planet. I’ve played a few racing video games – I do enjoy the Burnout series, for example – but I’m still pretty indifferent to the entire sport. I’ve seen a ton of racing board games released over the past year or so, some using cards like Rallyman GT, while others use Dodo’s to create a racing experience. As my first real racing game, I was curious to see if Rallyman GT would scratch an itch I didn’t know I had.

In Rallyman GT, players will roll dice and move their cars along a track, attempting to be the first to win the race over a set number of laps. Players will play in order of what gear they are in, with the players in the highest gear moving first and the players in the lower gears after that. Player roll a group of dice that will allow them to increase what gear they are in, hold the gear they are in, or decrease their gear and begin a break for those corners and sharp turns. Certain parts of the track let you know what gear you need to be in to successfully manoeuvre through that space, and not doing so will result in some issues. The dice rolling and use is actually quite clever in my opinion, and with some mitigation elements – using tokens to avoid rolling dice, for example – not everything feels super lucky. To be fair, those lucky versus unlucky moments still exist, which is natural for any game involving dice rolling!

What I really love about Rallyman GT is the level of strategic decision making that needs to be made, although this takes a few games to perfect for sure. You might be tempted to go all out each and every turn, but playing strategically could mean more success in the future. For example, there were many situations were playing the long-game and only moving a short distance set me up for far better subsequent turns; the alternative was run and gunning it, and putting myself in a situation