It’s probably a pretty obvious theme at this point. I really enjoy a good racing game. I love the need for speed in a board game and while some games give me that with betting or with fast game play, Rallyman Dirt is giving you a rally time trial. So how is Rallyman Dirt as compared to other racing games? I had a chance to play it last night, and at Gen Con and I’ve gotten many a rally in on BGA. So let’s talk about if Rallyman Dirt is a good game.

How To Play Rallyman Dirt

Rallyman Dirt is a rally racing game. What you need to know about that is that it’s not like Nascar or F1 where you have all the cars on the track at the same time. This is still about going the fastest, but blocking people and passing isn’t a part of what you’re doing.

Plan Your Route

On your turn you plan out your route. This means that you lay out your dice from gears 1 through 6 and two for coasting. You decide how many you want to use to create your route. You probably won’t use all of them because you need to hit certain speeds at certain corners otherwise you go out of control. And you still might go out of control because once you plan out your route you have a choice on how to roll your dice.

Rolling Your Dice

You either roll all out or you can roll a bit more safely and strategically. Why might you not want to do the safer option? Well, because you get a bonus if you go all out. When you go all out you grab all the dice from your route and roll them all at once. If you get three (or more) hazard symbols you’re going to lose control. So you plan back out your route, figure out where you lose control and draw negative things, which might be using fewer dice. But you get negative seconds for going all out.

Or you can roll more safely. That involves rolling one die at a time. So you decide when you want to stop and that means that you can stop before it goes out of control, but if you get two hazards early, you might still choose to push yourself further so that you can get a higher speed, because of your time, which I’ll talk about next.

Your Time

After you roll your dice, you get your time. This time card is going to give you a time that you add together at the end of the race. As well as it lets you know what gear you finished in. The faster you go, the shorter the time. In fact, if you’re in sixth gear, at the end, and you go all out with five dice, you get a 10 second card, for sixth gear, and negative five seconds for going all out.

Each gear is going to give you a different amount of time. But if you lose control, they are all (kind of) the same. If you lose control you flip over the card, from the gear you were in, and you get one minute added to your time. And then you draw out some tokens that might have negative effects.

Game Structure

The structure of the game is pretty unique. If you are the first player, you go twice in a row. That means that you should be far enough down the track that other people won’t catch you. Then the second player goes, but they go once. If you play with more than two people, turn order then goes back to the first player and then the second player before the third player. This is so everyone stays evenly spaced on the track.

You also can play a single race. But that generally puts the leader at a disadvantage. They go first to set the track, basically, and that means that their coasting dice are riskier than other players. So often you play a rally in several stages. Whomever has the fastest overall time at the end of a stage is the leader for the next stage and gets the riskier dice. This helps balance a couple of things. First it means you are less likely to get a runaway leader. But it also is meant to simulate how the first driver on a course won’t know it as well.

What Doesn’t Work

So, I think there are a couple of elements that might be a bit tricky for some players. First off the turn order is weird. It’s not a massive negative, but it’s an interesting thing to explain. I feel like it works best when I explain what rally racing is. Otherwise people thing racing, everyone is on the track at once. Nope, that’s not how this is going to work, and players need to understand that to some extent. It also means in a higher player count game, someone might be about finishing a leg of the rally by the time the last player is starting.

The dice are also a bit tricky to teach. Not too bad once you get into it, but there is a bit that needs to make sense about plotting out your path and seeing how far you go and how much you want to push your luck. And also the difference between the dice, or how you want to calculate the odds that you’ll crash or not.

What Works

Firstly, the push your luck works really well. I love to grab that handful of dice, probably five or six, and roll it and push my luck to get those negative seconds. Does it workout all the time, most certainly not. But I really like that element of the game because that’s where you get that high speed feel to the game.

I also really like how you need to plan out your movement. You know what the whole course looks like, and you know the speeds you want to hit. You want to go as fast as you can and as far as you can. But sometimes you need to think about how you can slam it into the corner, do you use the brakes to slow down faster? Of course, slamming on your brakes gives you more of a chance to lose control. It is important to figure out that rhythm for the track that is built.

The timing is another area that I like. I like how if you go out of control on a lower gear, it’s less bad. Sure it’s more time, but you draw out fewer potentially bad tokens. But even if you go far, ending in first gear as compared to even third gear is a difference of twenty seconds. So you need to play around with what gear you want to end up in, how far you want to go, and how it sets you up for future corners.

Who is Rallyman Dirt For?

Firstly, I think that people who like racing games will enjoy this game. But along with that, you can’t just like racing games, you need to enjoy push your luck. Yes, you might just be able to play it safe and get around without crashing. But if someone is pushing their luck and does that, they will have destroyed you with their negative seconds. So you need to be at least somewhat comfortable with that.

My Final Thoughts on Rallyman Dirt

I really enjoy this game. I want to quick talk about the BGA implementation of this. It’s great, with the caveat of it’s great on the computer. On a phone selecting which late you want to be in or if you want to be drifting when you can versus just driving hard into the corner, that’s hard to get clicked. But that’s only an issue with the game online and only on your phone.

In person the game is great as well. I do think that there are elements of it that are maybe slightly better online. Especially in a higher player count game, you might be sitting there for a little bit. But to race a whole rally, let’s say three games in a night, and determine the champion, that is a ton of fun. And Rallyman Dirt, while it gives you a lot of fun challenge with dealing with corners and other hazards, is really a beer and pretzels game. By that I mean you want to push your luck, you want to roll a big handful of dice and you want to see what happens.

My Grade: A
Strategy Grade: C
Lucky Grade: A

So I switched up my grading just a little bit. I am going from gamer and casual. While I like those metrics, not all people steeped in the hobby love heavy strategy games. Likewise, people who are more casually in the hobby might like strategy a lot. So I think that strategy and luck scores are better to let you know if it’s a game for you.

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