There was a point after my first lap around the South Africa track, one of the two new tracks in Heat: Rocky Roads, when I realized that it might be my favorite track in all of Heat. Nothing else in the extended Heataverse feels quite as rewarding of great play. South Africa isn’t as punishing of poor play or bad luck as España, nor is it a source of the same adrenalized fun that comes with ripping down the straightaways in Italia or Nederlands, but a skilled player in South Africa can do some incredible things. And for the record, I came to this realization while I was getting absolutely walloped.

What is it that makes the track so good? It isn’t the gimmick. The only special rule is that any player who finishes their move on a gravel space has to pay a heat if they have one. If you’re on gravel and you don’t have any heat, it don’t hurt you none. This is a perfectly fine addition to the game, one that will occasionally make you second-guess taking advantage of an opportunity to slipstream, but it doesn’t add so much to the game that it would change the feel of an entire track.

It’s the corners. South Africa is jam-packed with delicious, surprisingly slow corners, and…

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JOYRIDE DUEL: Next Gen is a bit of an oddity. It is marketed as the Mario Kart of racing games. That promises a certain amount of chaos and, indeed, chaos is what JOYRIDE DUEL has in mind. Rather than a fixed track, with the boundaries and prescribed routes such a thing necessitates, the board is open-world, with numbered gates you have to pass through in a particular order. There are exploding drones and flash grenades, oil slicks and mines that can be picked up on the track or acquired every time you pass through certain gates. The rules contain copious amounts of information concerning the collision of vehicles. Whether it’s a head-on or a side-swipe, you’ll know exactly what to do. The player dashboards have slots for damage, which slowly builds up and incapacitates your vehicle over the course of the race.

With all of these features in place, you too would assume chaos is the special du jour. Yet JOYRIDE DUEL is a surprisingly staid experience. Using a number of dice dictated by the gear you’re in, you zoom around the track, take corners, set up trajectories, and do your best to make it to the end, but it’s all much less dramatic than you’d expect. Across three races, I never added more than one or two pieces…

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I’ve always enjoyed Heat: Pedal to the Metal, Asger Aleksandrov Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen’s smash racing game. It is a smart system. Managing the ebb and flow of your cards to suit the layout of whatever track you’re barreling down comes as close as I imagine a board game can get to feeling like a race. Any time I think about Heat, I imagine tapping the clutch and recklessly shifting up a gear as I head into a monster corner.

If I’ve always enjoyed Heat, it wasn’t until recently, when I finally got to play with car upgrades, that I came to love it. I agree with Mark’s review, the base game is a little too easy, a little too canned. When everybody has the same cards, the figurative course of a race feels predetermined. With the upgrades, that’s no longer true.

Consider my last race in España, where my friend Boris had drafted upgrades for a car that could make massive gains on straightaways, and I had taken a gamble on aggressive turns. I was worried that I had over-leveraged my position, since España has two mid-race stretches that I would need time to get through and Boris could cruise through in a matter of seconds.

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