Players: 2-10
Time: 1-2 hours

This review is, in parts, a revision of my review of the original Formula De game.

The Components

Formula D comes with:

• two double-sided racetrack boards (showing Monaco and Race City)
• 20 cars
• 10 dashboards
• 10 characters
• 7 dice
• 2 rulebooks

Racetracks:The game boards are linen-textured cardboard, printed full-color on both sides. Each track comes in two parts which you butt up against each other. The boards in the basic game show a racetrack at Monaco and Race City, a generic road race.

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 (in very high contrast, which I find easier to read than the previous edition), and straightaways have distance labels at the start, end, and every 5 spaces in between. This make counting (and thus strategizing) much quicker.

Cars: There are 10 racetrack cars and 10 road race cars, each molded in plastic with two tones of paint on them. They strike me as a little small, but they fit nicely on the tracks and are easy to distinguish from each other.

Dashboard: Each player gets their own dashboard, which shows the current status of their car. It comes as a plastic tray that you set a linen-textured cardboard display upon. This display shows your gear and your "wear points".

You slide a plastic gear shift into the display to show changes in your engine speed. It's really clever looking, but not quite as easy to move as I'd like.

You place little plastic pegs into the "wear point" rows showing your car's tires, brakes, body, engine, and other stats. You'll move these down over the course of the game. They're useful components that are much better than marking this all on paper.

Characters: These are ten double-sided cardboard characters. One side shows racetrack racers and the other shows road race racers. Each card shows the driver's car color and its starting wearing stats. The road race side also shows individual drivers' special powers, which are marked by (unfortunately impenetrable) icons.

Dice: There are six gear dice in Formula D: 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 D divides the rules into an 8-page beginner's book and a 16-page advanced book. The advanced book also includes optional rules and road race rules. I think that's a few too many options, but you can definitely play the game at your desired difficulty level.

Overall the quality of Formula D's components is great, and the artwork and general beauty is good. Where the game really stands out, however, is on usability. The dashboard setup is great and the combination of how the dice and gears work allows for some really intuitive gameplay. I've given Formula d a "5" out of "5" for Style: excellent.

The Game Play

The object of Formula De is to finish the race first. The following description covers the "advanced" game.

Setup: The selected track is laid out, and each player takes a character, dashboard, and associated car. Each player marks his starting tires, brakes, gearbox, car body, engine, and road handling "wear points", as shown on his character. The cars are all placed at the start of the track in a random order.

Gear shifts are placed in 1st gear, which is where the players should be starting. (Under the advanced rules, players actually roll a die to see if they start in 1st or 2nd or stall out.)

Racing: The rules for racing are quite simple. You have a car with six gears. You can shift up one gear per round. You can shift down one gear per round normally, or multiple gears if you expend gearbox (2 shifts down), gearbox and brakes (3 shifts down), or gearbox, 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.

Slipstreaming. Whenever you end exactly behind another car, you can "slipstream" forward three spaces--something that almost never seems to happen in actual games.

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 red 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 defines 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 1-stop 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 (or, not enough) 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 2-stop turn at the same time that another player enters it, you're clearly two rounds ahead of him.

Damaging Your Car: The advanced game has a few different ways to damage your car. When your end a move next to or behind a car, there's a chance one or both of you take car body damage. Whenever you roll a "20" in 5th gear or a "30" in 6th gear, there's a chance that everyone in those gears takes engine damage. Whenever a car is damaged in these ways, it leaves a damage marker behind, and when cars hit those they might take road handling damage. If you run out of any of these stats, you're out of the race.

Pit Stops: You can either play one-lap or multi-lap races. For multiple laps, you'll usually have pit stops: if you want you can pull into a pit stop between laps to earn back all your tire points. This will usually cost you some time (though you could get extraordinarily lucky and zip right through).

Winning the Game: You play the race through everyone crossing the finish line, with ordering showing the final ranking in the race.

Optional Rules: There are numerous optional rules, including: qualifying laps, individual car construction, weather, and team races.

Perhaps the most interesting variant is the "road race." This is done on a special track: there's one on the back of the main Formula D board. In addition, it looks like Asmodee is going to be releasing a map that includes a Chicago Road Race as Formula D's first supplement.

Road races generally work exactly like the original game, except they're more chaotic. You play drivers who each have a "nitro" boost, which can give a few bonus spaces once per lap (and thus help you make a turn), and who each have a bonus power as well (such as Dimitri who loses engine points less often and Derek who may do extra damage to other cars on collision). Finally, the boards have more variety. Race City includes an area full of damage markers, a place where cars can take other sorts of damage (from angry residents), an award for going the fastest around a police station, and some interesting track configurations.

Relationship to Other Games

Formula D is a roll-and-move racing game, but also one that I think is at or near the top of its category. It 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.)

Formula D 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 original Formula De had dozens of additional double-sided map packs available for play. Thus far, Asmodee has announced one additional map release for their Formula D game. It'll show the Sebring track in Florida and the streets of Chicago, and is due for release in 2009.

There's also an official computer version of Formula D, which can be found at RacerLine.com. For the moment, it's all in French, but an English version is promised for the beginning of 2009.

The Game Design

The gameplay of Formula D 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 I'll often make use of proactive car wear. In this situation I might purposefully overshoot a turn by 1 space to make sure that the distance to the next turn is small enough that I have zero chance of missing it.

Formula D also 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.

This new edition of the game is much like the previous one, by Eurogames Descartes, but I think the (slight) changes are all to the good. I really like the road racing option, because it can add a lot of variety to change up the game (and serious Formula racers can still enjoy their much more strict racing rules).

Overall, the mechanics of Formula D are elegant yet enjoyable. The simple gameplay is easy to learn, but allows for very complex strategies. In this newest edition, the game has only gotten better. I've thus given Formula D a full "5" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Formula D is a fun 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 D 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). In this new edition, Asmodee has only improved the game, including some better components and some better variety. Hopefully they'll be able to maintain Eurogames' rapid pace of map releases as well.

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