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Formula De is a racing game by Eric Randall and Laurent Lauvar, distributed in the United States by Eurogames.
Players: 2-10
Time: 1-2 hours
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)
This is a revision and expansion of a review I wrote three and a half years ago, at which time it was one of my first Eurogame reviews.
The Components
 Formula De comes with:
- 2 double-sided racetrack boards (Zandvoort and Monaco)
- 10 racecars
- 10 dashboards
- 10 gearshifts
- 1 pad of racesheets
- 7 dice
- 2 rulebooks
Racetracks:The game boards are solid cardboard, printed full-color on both sides. Each track comes in two parts which you butt up against each other. The racetracks in the basic game, labelled #1 and #2, are Zandvoort and Monaco. (There are also a huge set of supplements for Formula De which allow you to race all across the world).
The racetracks are crisp and clear, yet surrounded by bright, appealing drawings. There are a number of nice utility features on the tracks as well. All of the turns show the minimum and maximum lengths through the turn, and straightaways have distance labels at the start, end, and every 5 spaces in between. This make counting & thus strategizing, much quicker.
Cars: The plastic cars come in five colors: blue, red, green, yellow, and white. Each car comes in two parts, the car itself and the rear spoiler. This lets you mix and match colors to more easily customize cars (and also give you enough variations for 10 players). Lately I've been playing a red car with a yellow spoiler, which I call the "rust" car, after many years of playing blue with yellow (the "Cal" car).
The molding of the cars is pretty simplistic.
Dashboard, Racesheet, Gearshift: Each player gets a dashboard matching the color of his car body. This is a cardboard sheet that has two purposes: first it shows the six gear dice with notes on which numbers can be rolled with each die; and second it has a place to put your racesheet.
The racesheet is a piece of paper which comes off a pad. It lists all of the parts of your car which can take wear: tires, brakes, gas, engine, body, etc. You'll mark those off as the race proceeds. There are racesheet variants for 1-, 2-, and 3-lap races.
Each player gets a gearshift matching the color of his spoiler. This is just a pawn which is initially put to the left for the "1st" gear space on the dashboard and will move up and down as a player shifts through the gears.
The use of dashboard plus gearshift to remind everyone of your player color is very clever. And, overall, this set of components do a great job of making it easy to play Formula De.
Dice: There are six gear dice in Formula De: a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. Each of these dice is a different color and a different shape, making it easy to remember which to roll (since both color and shape are clearly marked by the position of your gearshift on your dashboard). The dice are not standardly numbered, and some of the numbering is weighted slightly high.
For example, the four-sided (d4) die is actually labeled 1,1,2,2, while the eight-sided (d8) die is labeled 4,5,6,6,7,7,8,8.
The seventh die is a plain black twenty-sided (d20) die, which is numbered 1-20. It's used for various random occurrences in the game.
The dice are overall feel solid and weighty.
Rules: Formula De divides the rules into a 4-page beginner's book and an 8-page advanced book. They're full-color and have a fair number of examples. The division of the rules is convenient because it lets you set a game at your preferred level of complexity. (My group usually plays the basic game with just one or two expansions.)
Overall the quality of the components is good, and the artwork and general beauty is fair to good. Where the game really stands out, however, is on usability. The pieces are all very carefully designed with intuitive gameplay in mind. The game boards, dice, cars, spoilers, and pawns are color-coordinated in a variety of ways, so there's almost no chance of ever moving the wrong car or rolling the wrong die. Likewise, the dashboards and racesheets do a great job of helping you play the game.
I've given the game a high "4" out of "5" for Style: very good.
The Game Play
The object of Formula De is to finish the race first.
Setup: The selected track is laid out, and each player takes a car, spoiler, dashboard, racesheet, and gearsheet. The cars are all placed at the start of the track in a random order.
Gear shifts are placed just below "1st" gear on the dashboards. Players will be shifting into first as they begin the game.
Racing: The rules for racing are quite simple. You have a car with 6 gears. You can shift up one gear per round. You can shift down one gear per round normally, or multiple gears if you expend gas (2 shifts down), gas and brakes (3 shifts down), or gas, brakes, and engine (4 shifts down).
Each gear is represented by a different die, which you roll on your turn. As already noted, these dice only have specific numbers on them, and they're sometimes unequally weighted. The six gears are as follows:
1st gear: d4 (1-2)
2nd gear: d6 (2-4)
3rd gear: d8 (4-8)
4th gear: d12 (7-12)
5th gear: d20 (11-20)
6th gear: d30 (21-30)
In general, you roll a die and go forward that many spaces. There are rules which keep you from swerving around and burning up movement points. Pretty much, if you roll a 30, you're going to have to go thirty spaces forward ... at least on the straightaways.
Turns. The turns are the real gotchas in the game: the thing that makes the game interesting, and not just an exercise in die-rolling. Each turn is marked in yellow so that you know when it starts and when it ends. In addition, turns have a few specific numerical values.
To start off with, turns give you more variety than straightaways. Each is marked with a minimum and a maximum length. Rather than following the shortest distance, as on the straightaways, you have a variety of length options in turns. You have to follow specially marked arrows, but you might be able to take a really tight, short shot through a turn, or you alternatively might be able to stretch it out (so, for example, a small turn might have a minimum length of 4 and a maximum length of 8).
Each turn is also labeled with a number that tell you how many times you must stop within the turn. It's usually between 1 and 3. These means the number of rounds of play that you must end within the turn.
So, say you'd rolled that aforementioned 30, and you were exactly 30 spaces from a turn. No problem; you're actually very happy because you've just barely made that turn and are still in a high gear. Say, on the other hand, you were 15 spaces from a turn that had a maximum length of 13. Rolling a 30 you would have overshot the turn by 2 spaces.
If you overshoot a turn, there are three things you can do:
- If you have brakes, you can burn brakes, slowing yourself down one space per point.
- If you have tires, you can burn tires, "extending the turn" by one space per point. (e.g., if you overshoot by 2 spaces, you can expend 2 tires and be OK.)
- If you have neither tires nor brakes and overshoot a turn, you blow up. Boom! My gaming group has some pretty aggressive drivers, and we usually leave at least one car in rubble at the side of the track every time we play.
Moving through the turns is really the heart of the game, and it's where the game is won or lost. Because turns require a certain number of rounds to move through, you can usually calculate how far ahead and behind the various cars are. For example, if you're just exiting a length 2 turn on the same turn that another player enters it, you're clearly two rounds ahead of him.
Winning the Game: You play the race through everyone crossing the finish line, with ordering showing the final ranking in the race.
Advanced Rules: There are a few more basic rules (opportunities for body and engine damage). There are also quite a few advanced rules (multi-lap races, slipstreaming, pit stops, weather), but they're all add-ons to a core that is very solid.
In general there's only two advanced rules that my group plays with:
Pit Stops. We usually play two-lap races, which seem a nice balance between strategy and luck. This also allows for pit stops. You can pit stop in between laps (often effectively losing 0-2 rounds of play, depending on the layout of the track and your luck) and get all your tires restored.
Slipstreaming. We also tend to use the slipstreaming rules, which allow you to jump ahead three spaces if you end up just behind another car and you're going fast enough (gear 4+). In most games slipstreaming actually never seems to come up, but it's always a tantalizing possibility.
Relationship to Other Games
Formula De is a pretty straight-up roll-and-move racing game. I'm sure there are a lot of other roll-and-move racing car racing games, but this is one of the few I've played ... because I really don't expect to find a much better design. Formula De manages to mix the random die-rolling core with elements of brinkmanship and gambling, making it much more interesting. (Nonetheless, as with most racing games, there's a high random element in this one.)
Race car racing is also a very popular topic for card games, though most of those instead tend to be play-and-move racing games. In that genre I've most recently reviewed Street Illegal
There are a huge number of additional map packs for Formula De, each one containing another two race tracks. The pictures in this review actually depict track #10. There's also another version of this game called Formula De Mini, which is theoretically a little smaller, a little simpler and a little shorter than the original game. It has some slightly different rules than this original game.
The Game Design
The gameplay of Formula De is a very interesting combination of strategy and randomness. On each round of play you can quickly assess your current position and what rolling different dice would mean to you.
Say you're 8 spaces away from a turn that has a maximum length of 8. If you roll the 4th gear die (7-12) you can miss the turn altogether with a roll of 7 (meaning you drop a round of play behind everyone else and also that you'll probably need to drop your gear down to 3rd gear on the next round). On the other hand if you pop up to 5th gear (11-20) you have a good chance of overshooting the turn (17-20). You can accurately measure your risks each round, and decide which you are willing to take, and which you're not. Thus, you mix risk and brinkmanship.
There's also a fair amount of strategy in all of this. For example in my last game of Formula De I made use of some proactive car wear. A few times I purposefully overshot a turn by 1 spot to make sure that the distance to the next turn was "7" rather than "8", ensuring that I had zero chance of missing that next turn on a d12, rather than having a 1 in 12 chance of catastrophic failure.
Formula De does a very good job of making every player feel like they're still in the race all the way up to the end (minus the occasional wreck). A player in the lead in the first round can fall back in later rounds--or end up wrecking his car from pushing it too hard. Even if another player is too far back from the leader to win, he remains in competition with other players to move up (or back) one or two positions before the race is over.
Formula De very definitely abstracts the idea of formula car racing, but it does so in a way that produces superb board game play, which is really the point.
The biggest complaint that anyone will have about Formula De is the randomness. If you don't like random elements, don't play this game, but if you can understand randomness as a balance of control and brinkmanship, then you'll enjoy this game which makes excellent use of these elements.
Overall, the mechanics are elegant yet enjoyable. The simple gameplay is easy to learn, yet allows for very complex strategies. I've thus given the game a full "5" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Formula De is a fun and well-supported racing game, quite possibly the best of its category. There's a fair amount of randomness, but as long as you don't mind that in a game, you'll enjoy Formula De whether you're a racing car fan or not (and I'm not, but am still happy to play the game when it's brought out).
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