Heat: Pedal To The Metal Board Game Solo Review

welcome back to specifically solo my name is Jared boomer this is a board game channel where we focus on solo reviews and solo modes for board games and today we're going to be taking a look at heat pedal to the metal a new game from Days of Wonder a little bit difficult to get for a while I finally got my hands on it I've played it a lot I'm going to share with you what I think about the game but first let's take a look at how this in game plays okay and here we have a game of heat pedal to the metal set up and ready to go the first thing you'll probably notice about this is that there's not a lot of components for this game but this game does take up a decent amount of space and that is because the size of the track boards so he comes with four tracks there's two boards in the game each one is double-sided the USA Track which we have out here right now is the recommended one to start on it's the easiest to kind of understand doesn't have a whole lot of of turns in the track and so in terms of a starting track this is the one that they suggest you play with they also suggest you just play one lap to get a feel for the game and then maybe restart and then and then play the game over from there so how does heat work well heat is a hand management game and what you're going to do is you're going to have these cards in your hand and you are going to play them to move a certain number of spaces on the board all while trying to not get too many Heat cards because if you run out of heat cards bad things will happen so to start the game what you will do is you will draw seven cards so if we pick these up that's 1 2 3 4 5 six 7 these are our starting cards for heat and you can see a lot of these have a number on it these cards are basically just wild cards you kind of take a a chance on them they're called stress cards when you play one of these you would draw another one off the top of your deck and whatever number is on that card that's the number that you would move if it is between one and four this five is an upgrade card and you start with three starting upgrades in in your deck of cards we just happened to draw one of them here so how does this work well on your turn what you will do is you will be in a certain gear position and you can see that down here you're going to start in first gear that means that you can play one card on this turn now you can go up or down one gear every turn for free or you can go up or down two gears on every turn but you have to pay one heat card and we'll get into those in just a second and that's indicated right here on your player mat and there's a lot of helpful steps on your player mat on how things operate so I'm going to take just one turn of this game just so you can see how it works out with me playing and then also with the solo mode which is called the Legends module in this game and we'll just take one turn so you can kind of get a good example of that so say on my turn we've got um you know a lot of spaces before we hit the corner and the corners in heat are important because the corners all have values in them and that's how fast you can go around the corner so this corner has a value it's maybe a little hard to see but it has a value of seven so that means we can go around that corner at a speed of seven or lower if we go around that corner at a speed of higher than seven now we have to pay heat for every number that we're over and you have six Heat cards to start with and you're going to put them in your discard pile once you play them then the next time you shuffle your deck they'll come back through your hand and you'll have chances to put them back in this kind of Reserve pile but your heat cards are limited and you want to probably save them more for the end middle of the game than trying to burn them up right at the beginning of the game so in this particular case I'm the red car I'm back there on spot uh this the third spot behind the starting line I have 14 space until I hit the turn and that's a really nice thing and heat and it might be a little hard to see because we're so zoomed out but on each space there is a little white number that will tell you how many spots it is till you get to this turn down here or until you maybe get to this one or that one over there so you don't really have to count that much every single time you can just move your car so I think on this first turn what I would do is go up to two cards and I would just play two of my highest cards because that's going to get me the most spaces that I could move and and we have a lot of spaces before we get to the the corner so I will play my five and my four card right there now normally you would play those face down when you're playing solo it doesn't matter you can just have those right out in front of you and remember what you're doing you just want to make sure that you keep your cards separate from you know the other cards in your hand or maybe the cards in your deck so and here's a little bit closer look at these cards they'll have really nice artwork on them depending on which color you play as they will be themed to your color so I'm the red card but as you can see there's blue gray green yellow black also in the game and those cards will correspond and you'll find those in the box so I'm going to play those two cards on my turn so now let's talk a little bit about the Legends module and how that works and the nice thing in heat is that you can race against the full field of cars if you would like to in the Legends module and that's what I have out here right now is there's six cars in the game I want to race against five of them I want to make it really feel like a big race so I've got that many cars on the track the the instruction book recommends that you at least race with at least four cars but I think it's not too difficult to manage I think you could do six in your first game especially if you've played a lot of games before if you're new to gaming I would maybe go with those four four cars just to get a little bit of an easier grasp on it but I think this is a very easy game to pick up and I don't think you'll have problems just running with a full set of six so how does this work well at the start of the reveal phase when you're going to move your cars you will reveal one of these cards and on this card you can see there are different numbers and symbols for each card that is on the board so how does this work well we've got a couple of different things that we are going to be looking at so in this case you will start with the car that is the furthest in front and is also closest to the racing line which is the solid the the white solid line that is a little bit thicker that goes around the track sometimes it's on the outside of the track like right here it's on the outside here it switches back to the inside just depends on where you are on the track but it's always the the the the narrowest turn basically if you will or the tightest turn that's how you know what the racing line is so you will take a look at this card and you will see what the cars will move and how many spaces they will move and so like this blue car it wants to go 11 spaces now it can do that because it is not past what is called the Legends line and I'm going to move over here just really quickly and the Legends line right here here is before every turn so it'll be a certain number of spaces before every turn on this turn it's right here sometimes it's a little bit closer sometimes it's a little bit further away so in this case you want to move that blue car 11 spaces so we can do that so we'll move it down to this one space right here and it will sit right there now what are we going to do for the gray car well the gray car wants to move 15 spaces but it can't move 15 spaces because that would make it go past this turn at a way too fast speed so it will move down to the number two space right here in the turn very easy solo mode to operate so you will just move it down right here and that's where the gray car will go now we're going to move the green car next the green car wants to move 17 same thing it can it will also go down to the number two space right here next up is yellow yellow wants to move 10 it can totally do that because it'll still be far enough away from the corner so it'll go right here next is our car we've already decided that we're going to move nine in this case so we'll go back here to spot five and then finally the black car will be last the black car wants to move 12 it can do that it will go down to space number two but there's already a car there so it will sit in space number three and that's basically how the first turn works now there's some other things that you will do after you take your turn in terms of looking at symbols on your cards figuring out if you can slip stream or boost depending on where you are in the field and then you'll just discard those cards that you played draw your hand back up to seven cards and take your next turn very simple uh operation here in heat pedal to the metal so what do you do if you've got this situation where all the cars are past the legend line right here and they obviously need to move well there's another thing that you do in that situation and that is you look at the number above where the car is so if like we're looking at Blue right there it's got a Z above it and you'll look at the number in this space which is a seven so in this case you would move blue seven spaces 7 + 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 so blue would go right here next you'll look at green you can see green has a two up there in that box so 2 + 7 is n so you'll move green 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine spaces and that's basically just how it goes with the solo mode the solo mode the Legends module will work really well it will have different cars go in front at times you might be in front at times it might have a car jump in front of you some cars might sit towards the back very realistic of how a race actually happens and then once you're done with that card you can just put it right over here face up or face down and then draw the next one there's also symbols on the Legends mat to kind of let you know those things that I just told you in terms of how far it might want to move on its particular turn and that is an overview of how you play heat pedal to the metal you race two laps and then once you race those two laps whoever the furthest in front is will win and that's whoever crosses the finish line by the furthest amount not just who crosses the Finish Line first but depending on where you are when you cross the finish line that is the the race winner and then you just put them over there on that little Podium which is in the far corner of the board there and that is that is the overview for heat pedal to the metal so now I'm going to give you some of my thoughts on what I like and and dislike about this game okay let's talk a little bit about heat pedal 2 to the metal the game from Days of Wonder I think my first like with this game is just the fact that you can play it solo there's so many racing games out there but very few can you actually play by yourself and of those I would say there's not a ton of great ones sometimes the solo mode is diminished sometimes you have to set up different uh things for the solo mode or you can't race against the whole field that's not the case in heat pedal to the metal you you can play that full experience you can race against all five opponents like I showed you in that overview that is my preferred way to play they're about to come out with an expansion that's going to add another car I feel like that'll just be even more fun to play with that I'm assuming there'll be new Legends cards in the expansion to be able to operate that that extra car for for that mode but I really like how they designed this I think it's super easy I think the fact that you just pick that card up you move the cars depending on how many spaces it says if they're close to the corner you maybe move them less you count the space in the corner it's a very close and competitive and tight race the whole time with the solo mode and that's one thing that I really enjoyed this Legends module and you can use this Legends module even if you're not playing by yourself maybe there's there's two or three of you playing you want to add some extra opponents in there make it a little tougher have some more action going on you can do that too it's very modular in terms of how many opponents you want to race against so I love that I love that they were able to figure out a way to have a solo mode for a racing game that still feels like you're racing I think that's the most important thing is there's not a ton of downtime it's quick Snappy turns the solo mode the Legends module very quick turns move those cards okay now what do I want to do on my next turn with my car and looking at my cards and figuring out what I want to what I want to play on my next turn so love that about heat pedal to the metal another thing that I really like is all the different modules that the game comes with with so I mentioned in the overview that there's four tracks those are obviously all a little bit different in terms of how they operate some of them you might have more Heat cards or less Heat cards or more stress cards some of them have some long Straits on them some of them are a little more twisty turny so there's some different ways to play there but that's not the only thing that's modular about heat pedal to the metal they also have included upgrade cards and I have some of those right here that I just wanted to show you real quick so these are just some of the basic upgrade cards for the game so these can do some different things they will add some things to your car maybe they allow you to do certain special abilities things like this like this brakes card you could have it be like a one two three or a four depending on how many spaces you want to move so that's another little module that you can add into the game which is a lot of fun and creates some variability and they have basic and also Advanced upgrades cards so maybe you want to play with the basic ones for the first you know game or two and then maybe you move on to the Advan so that's one thing that you can add another thing that you can add is weather so they have these weather tiles and you could put those on the board there's a space for them but sometimes maybe the weather is sunny sometimes maybe the weather is you know cloudy maybe it's raining sometimes so those are just different things that affect the track setup and maybe um things that you can do on the track during the game so they've got those they've also got special track conditions little tiles that you can put onto the board like this one you would go you would only be allowed to go one less speed in that corner so instead of like that example where I showed you where you could go seven you'd only be able to go six so that's another thing that's added into the game as well and then the really fun thing that they've added into this game too is called a championship mode and what you do is there's three years that you can play 1961 1962 1963 and you will play through a series of races and tally up who wins each race and then see who is the champion at the end of those races and all of those create some different conditions you'll have upgrades that will stay with you through the entire season and that's just a really cool thing that allows you to play this game a lot you can play through those three seasons like I said they're all a couple of races each least three you can also make your own season if you want and that's going to add a lot of variety into this game which is another thing that I I like about it in addition to all those modules I think the variety is is is there and it's really hard to beat how much variety is in this game I mean you can decide that you want to do a season and maybe you play that for a couple games maybe you're like this game I'm going to play with the upgrades the next game I'm not going to play with the upgrades or this game I'll play with weather and maybe I'll I could randomly draw them or I could set them up and make it really wild and crazy and so that's a fun aspect to the game as well I will say that for the Legends module the Legends cars are not going to react to those type of things so they won't have upgrades the weather doesn't affect them at all because they don't slipstream or boost or anything like that that you might do in the game so it's more things that would affect you as a player but still nice that it is in there and that that Championship mode adds a little little tiny campaign that you can play that it feels like you're racing through a season and maybe you like I've I've played the championship mode three races first race I came in second next race I came in third and then the last race I I won but I didn't have enough points to win the overall Championship so that's fun and that's something that you can totally operate by yourself and with those Legends cards and the the other cars that you have available for you so another thing that I love about heat pedal to the metal is the artwork I think the artwork is is so well done it's so bright and it's so vibrant and it just really pops all the boards look great the cards look great the cars are really nice quality as well they're just little plastic cars you know nothing super special here but they all have separate numbers they all have a little driver in them so that that's really fun and that's a really nice tactile aspect that you get to pick up and move those cars I will say this game is on board game arena if you're not familiar with that that is an online site where you can go and play board games and I don't really feel like this game would would have that same experience if you played it on there I think you actually need to be picking up the cars moving them around the board that's that's more fun to me than having the computer do it so I would suggest if you can play this in person and get a physical copy that is the way to go but the fact that it is on BGA if you want to try it out or test it that's a really nice way to do that before you commit to maybe making a purchase another thing that I like about the game is the strategy that is involved you know you've got those those Heat cards what are you going to do with them are you going to burn them out early are you going to say well I'm going to slow way down here later in the race I'll be able to knock a lot back into that pile or do I want to try and push it and and go as hard and fast as I can I find myself being a little conservative on the first lap of the race and maybe I should actually power through and get get you know ahead a little bit more I Tred to play from the back of the pack and then the second lap I find myself using more of those Heat cards to try and gain an advantage maybe I go around a corner two or three uh you know speeds too fast or I use one of those to shift up my gear two instead of one now I can play four cards on my turn which feels really good because you can move a ton of spaces so that is something that is involved in this game and it's not a very a a very you know heavy game to understand but there are some some decisions that you have to make some things that you're thinking about but it's very easy in terms of how it operates so I like that that decision aspect of it without it being so rules heavy that I have to keep going back to the rules and say okay what does this do what does this work like how does this make this happen things like that I also really like how the designers have set you up here you've got two separate Rule books they say right on that front rule book read this this is all you need to play the game worry about that other stuff after you've played it once or twice and I completely agree to get a handle on it to understand how you're how you're operating your car and the whole hand management aspect of it I I agree with the designers I think they made a great choice there in terms of here's what you need to set up and get rolling it's a very quick setup take you maybe 10 minutes to set this up sort some cards out pick a color out put the cards cars on the board get your deck ready and you're ready to rock and roll with heat pedal to the metal so I like that they've added like I said those modules and those other things that you can add in later but I like how they start you out by saying hey make this really simple on yourself we're not going to give you a ton of rules overhead right away you can add those things in later if you're comfortable if you don't want to you could just keep playing you know the basic game which is still very very good and it it makes it easier on the player in terms of getting the game to the table knowing that you're not going to have a huge hurdle de climb to to get this one played I think is a really nice decision and they even say in the instructions like I mentioned hey maybe just the first lap just take a a test lap a starter lap and then maybe you reset everything and you'll play for real after that just to get a handle of how this works because I feel like it's a little difficult to explain but once you actually see it and once you are playing those cards and moving your cars you've got an idea down by the end of that first lap of what of what how it works and what you want to make happen with your your vehicle so I do have just a few dislikes for heat pedal to the metal and they're very small things but they do have a little bit of an effect on the game so I wanted to mention them one is that there's a lot of icons in this game and a lot of iconography and once you know it it works really well but there's no player Aid which I would have really loved you have the symbols on your player mat and the order in which to do things but the first couple games you're still going to be looking at the rule book being like okay what is this okay now I do this now I if I'm in this place I can do that if I'm next to a car I can do this okay I think I think I've got it but I would really like just a card maybe that you sit next to your player mat that says when you see this symbol it means to do this when you see this symbol do this instead of having to look at the rule book now I will say all the symbols that you will need for your first game are in that first rule book so it's not like you have to go into the second rule book to see what you need to do but still card would have been really nice to just make that flow a little bit better so I'm not having to return to the rule book especially a game like this it seems so fast-paced and so free flowing that when I have to stop down and look at the rules that's that's a little bit annoying in terms of having a racing game where you have to just stop the race completely for a few minutes to figure out what symbol you might need to do for for your turn that's a minor thing though again the the iconography is well done it makes sense once you know it it will be very very easy to to play this game but for your first couple games you might find yourself looking at the rule book another dislike that I have is that in the Legends module whichever car is in the back and I'm not talking about your car like if you're in the back as the the player but if there is a car that is in the back I have found that that car stays there most of the race whether it just be that it didn't get the luck of the draw on some maybe it wasn't the Legends line and so it's like a sequence behind the other cars that are racing and I found if that happens if it gets off sequence a little bit where like it still has to go around a turn but the rest of the cars have already gone around the turn that it will never really make that that space up so it will likely finish in last or second to last place at the end of the race so that just one thing that I've noticed maybe a little bit of a catchup mechanism for the Legends module would be nice in terms of some more now the cars will move a lot and there will be different people in front and they'll shift positions and everything but if there's one car that's in the back and like I said if it gets off there where it's maybe just didn't get the luck of the draw or moved less spaces a couple turns in a row then it's really hard for it to catch up and and do well for the rest of the race but again that's a minor complaint but one thing that I've seen playing this a couple of times now is that that back car will kind of always stay in the back so let me give you some final thoughts on heat pedal to the metal I think you should pick this one up if you are a racing fan this is really one of the only solo racing games that I have found that works extremely well solo so I think because of that in terms of if you're a solo player and you want to have a great racing game I think this is the one to get for sure but if you like racing games if you like hand management games this is a very good game to pick up if you like like easy games too this is a very easy game to play in fact probably the easiest of the ones that I've reviewed so far on this channel this is a quick setup quick playing not a ton of rules that you have to worry about and if that's something that appeals to you that you want to be able to get this done I can get a race done in about 30 to 40 minutes that's that's about the time that it takes your first game might take an hour because you're again looking at the rule book trying to get the turn order down of this the steps but once you have that down you can knock out a race probably in 30 to 40 minutes and that's with even moving all the other cars on the board so I think if you want a solo racing game that plays fast is something you can get out maybe on a week night or when you don't have a lot of time this is definitely the game for you I really like all the variability that this game provides right out of the box the insert is great too didn't mentioned that but the inserts really well done they've got extra space in the insert they've already announced one expansion there's space in there for another expansion too for another car so that's obviously coming at some point from Days of Wonder so I think that this is a great great solo game though and it's the thing that us as solo players don't have a lot of options with and that's a racing game and this one makes it happen so definitely check out heat pedal to the metal my only other thing I would say is that for some reason days of Wonder is having trouble printing this or has not printed enough copies to keep up with demand and this one is kind of hard to find it's getting a little bit better in terms of availability I got it off of game nerds I just saw it one day on there and it was available and I I purchased it real quick just happened that they had you know a couple copies in stock but I've seen this pop up in a few more stores now seems to have some more availability especially on the asmo day website so if you haven't been able to get this yet I think you would be able to get it now but there was a long period there where it was a very hot game but nobody could get their hands on it I think they've rectified that problem for the most part but if you're having trouble there are some more options available for you now to get heat pedal to the metal so thank you so much for watching be sure to subscribe and like uh this video that really helps me out comment below if you've played heat I would love to hear your thoughts on if you played it and if you've enjoyed it be sure to watch some of the other videos on the channel I did my top five board games I want to play more in 2024 I've got a shelf of Shame video reviews on world wonders and apiary the new stonem game so check all that out until next time I'm Jared and you've been watching specifically solo

Channel: Specifically Solo

Views: 1,370

Keywords:

Id: _BBK3__c-uk

Length: 26min 19sec (1579 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024