Car Racing Game for the piecepack

[Michael Schoessow <mschoessow@...>]

Almost all my free time these days and evenings is being taken up evaluating
games from the recently closed design contest, but I have managed to get a
copy of the rules for a new racing game called Racepack, and designed by my
brother and I, to Karol and Dave for posting on the piecepack.org site. This
game was actually designed and play-tested last year but there were some
final minor details needing attending to in the rules set, and with those
now having been addressed the game is complete. 

Racing games are a favorite sub-genre of mine and Racepack includes several
new innovations, some of which I'm using on other racing game designs. 

The piecepack presents some interesting challenges for a racing game design.
One is the required use of a limited number of square tiles and the second
is that the pawns (which are the obvious pieces to use to represent cars) do
not have directional markings so the game design had to be such that the
direction a car is pointing need not be indicated by the orientation of the
piece representing the car. Another general requirement that I impose on
myself for all racing games is that progress around the track cannot be too
slow. I feel for example that an hour per lap for a 4-player race game is
completely unacceptable.

The movement system in Racepack is not dice-based but is more like Speed
Circuit or Formula 1, where drivers decide their own speeds, being
constrained only by the cars' capabilities and the traffic and track
conditions. There are some differences however. It always bothered me in
Formula 1 that cars were capable of faster acceleration than deceleration
because this is opposite to the physics of real racing, so in Racepack cars
can decelerate more quickly than they can accelerate, and other rules are
complementary to this. Also, in Racepack a lane change movement results in
less forward movement than a straight-ahead movement does. In fact, we
exaggerated this to introduce additional tactical play possibilities into
the game when traffic conditions are tight. 

The game is kept moving along at a good pace by allowing drivers to make
three car movements per turn instead of the usual single movement. It's kind
of like getting your turns in 3-packs, and this really helps speed things up
because making three movements in a row takes less time than the net time
taken by three separate one-move turns in between opponents turns. The
3-pack turn system also seems to reduce the "analyze and repeatedly count
spaces out" disease that afflicts some players in car race games. I'm using
this system or a variation of it in other car race game designs that are
still in process.

The problem of using pawns with no directional markings was not easy to get
around in a way that we found satisfying. Eventually we came up with a fresh
idea that I didn't really like at first but which grew on my as it was tried
out, and which we're now quite happy with. The basis of the system is that
speed and car orientation information is NOT conserved from turn to turn
(although it is conserved between the three movements that constitute a
single turn). At first this sounded completely unacceptable to me because I
felt it would be too unrealistic. On further reflection however we decided
that it's not that big a problem IF it improves game play (I'm NOT a big
believer in preserving realism at the expense of good game play), and
besides, racing board games are already very unrealistic anyway in the sense
that all the movements are slow and quantized, exactly the opposite of a
real race. It turns out that not conserving speed from turn to turn
introduces some interesting new tactical decisions into the game because it
now becomes very important to set up for your next turn in a different way
than with a more conventional movement system. Also, the new system
inherently allows very high acceleration (assuming track conditions allow)
at the beginning of a turn, and this greatly contributes to keeping lap
times down and the game moving along, and to allowing good speed dynamics on
the relatively small track that the piecepack allows. 

As for not conserving directional information, this solves the problem of no
directional markings on the pawns because when a car ends a turn in a
corner, it is automatically assumed pointing out of the corner at the
beginning of its next turn. 

The game rules also support risk taking by allowing faster speeds through
corners at the expense of a possibility of spinning out (die roll). Each
driver also has some "strategy tokens" that can each be used once during the
race for extra bursts of speed or extreme braking, or to hinder the chances
of a competitor executing a high speed corner without spinning out.

At the end of the main body of the rules I list a number of variants,
including ones that accommodate more drivers and cars, ones that use two
piecepacks and may include pit stops, and suggestions for more elaborate
track designs.

I'm looking forward to hearing more people's impressions of this game,
especially those of you who like car racing games and who have played some
of the commercially available ones.


-Michael Schoessow