Joyride: Survival of the Fastest Review

boardgamequest.com:

There are several themes that are used to the point of saturation in board games—trading in the Mediterranean, generic fantasy, nature, and post-apocalyptic car racing—to name a few. These themes are popular for various reasons, and they tend to work well. In the case of post-apocalyptic racing games, the Mad Max movies are probably the inspiration for this with the Road Warrior feeling like the inspiration for the original Thunder Road.

Today’s review is Joyride: Survival of the Fastest, a post-apocalyptic racing game that is a game for two to four players aged 10 and older.

To start the game, each player’s token is randomly placed on the initiative track starting at the bottom of the track. Then each player rolls and moves that far in a straight line. Those dice get moved onto their mirror for later.

This is all fairly straight forward but there’s a catch: you can only make one steering move at the beginning of your movement. Twice if you’re in second gear.

Each car also has a choice of special moves with three being common between all the cars and three others being specialized to each car that allow you to do special actions, like steer twice, shift two gears, etc. These refresh at a rate of one per car ahead of you each lap so first place will have less of these advantages than the person in last place.

Additionally, at certain checkpoints, you gain items that generally make your opponent’s dislike you, unless your friends love slipping on oil slicks but who am I to judge? You can store up to two of these items before your inventory is full unless you’ve placed a damage token on one of those slots.

Races continue until the first car has completed the required number of laps.

Joyride is more of a race than Thunder Road Vendetta but also has more attacking other opponents than a game like Rallyman and genuinely feels like it’s drawn inspiration from both between being able to crash into and attack your opponents and the higher gears granting more dice for