In Titan Race, you take on the roll of one of several Titans have their own special powers and are racing around weird maps. A game consists of looping over the same map three times, avoiding the traps and other players on the board, and dealing with whatever unique effect is on the map. Each round consists of one player rolling a number of dice equal to the number of Titans in the game. Starting with the first player, each player drafts a die and uses the movement rules shown on that die to determine what direction they go. The players continue around drafting dice until each person has used a die. Then the first player moves to the next player and the process is repeated.

Titan Race is a pretty simple game that has a few things that make it unique. The first is that as well as it being a race game, where the winning goal is to loop the board three times, it is also a combat game where you are trying to knock other players out for a round so that you can get further ahead. You have certain spots you can land to get ability cards that you can then use that might heal your damage, or damage your opponent. Plus, if you run into an opponent, you do push them and that deals them a damage as well. And if you set it up correctly, for example, on the lava map, you can cause a lot of damage to happen and hopefully get that turn where the player is knocked down and recovering to get ahead of them. And then they’ll start trying to chase you down so that you get knocked out as well. Plus each rider has their own ability which will make a difference in how well they can attack or move as well.

For me, Titan Race really shines not in the base mode of the game, but in the Grand Prix mode, where instead of looping over the same board three times, you run your way down across three boards. That means that you are dealing with three different terrains. Yes, you might lose some of the value of dropping traps, but if you get ahead you can do that, but the variety in boards is great. On some worlds, like the lava world, you can end up in lava and get damage dealt to you whereas the ice world allows you to slide across the map in interesting ways. Hopefully, not helping your opponents by pushing them forward when you do that. And like there are six different Titans, there are 6 different boards, though, it is three double sided boards, so you have a good variety of the terrains. And you can put the terrain in any order creating more variety.

While Titan Race isn’t a complex game, it is a good game night game. The game is simple enough that even more board game adjacent people are going to be able to pick it up quickly, and it’s a game that works with most ages. It does have a few small pieces that you might lose, but for the most part, the lap tracker pieces, I don’t use, because we are playing Grand Prix, not looping over a single map, so we only go over the board a single time. The life trackers are small as well, but I haven’t found that an issue or that they get bumped off a spot too much as the footprint on the table is small, so you aren’t reaching far for anything. Now, at times the game can be too simple. If the dice aren’t in your favor and someone else is able to get into a lead, it’s hard to stop them as you can’t drop traps in front of them. This is one advantage of looping over the same board, but, like I said above, it makes less variety in the game by doing that.

While I enjoy this game, I can see it being a game that not everyone will enjoy. This is not a heavy game and clearly falls into the filler category, but some people don’t like light fillers and would prefer just a fast but thinky game, Titan Race won’t provide that. I do think that it is a game you can pull out in a lot of situations because of the light theme and light complexity, and I like to have games like that in my collection. I’m not sure that Titan Race is always the filler game that I’d pull out, but being able to play up to 6 and not being a party game is really nice. Overall, I think more people will enjoy this game than those who don’t, but it won’t be for every group.

Overall Grade: B
Gamer Grade: D+
Casual Grade: B+

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This is a very pretty game as you try and get rituals started. The board has a ton of colors on it and while that can make things look busy on the board some times, in this case it helps keep things clear. There are also a lot of druid figures in the game that work very nicely in the game. Oddly enough, the fae creature artwork might be the best artwork of the game, but that artwork is hidden for the game because you don’t want people to know what color you want to get points.

There are a few interesting mechanics in this game. The first being the interaction of the hidden roles with scoring in the game. In a lot of games with hidden roles you score based off of that role and you’re trying to make it not that obvious who you are going for, and because the scoring happens for every color in a ritual. If you think that someone might be a certain color you could try and cut them out of rituals, and that guessing aspect is part of the game. But you’re also trying to hand out points evenly enough that people can’t guess which color you are. Also, if you can cause rituals to happen, you get points for kicking off the ritual.

Along with that part of the game, the action that you can take on your turn is interesting. All you do on your turn is move a druid from one location to another location until a group of druids is separated from the rest of the druids, and that’s when a ritual happens. However, things can go poorly in the ritual for the druids depending on certain conditions. If every color is present for the ritual you remove one druid of each color, so you have to think about that, but the more druids in a ritual, the more potential points that you can get. It’s a balancing act of giving out as many points as possible, creating the best rituals for your color, and trying to keep your opponents from scoring points on a good ritual.

Beyond that, with rituals, you have to think about where you are completing your ritual. There are certain bonus cards for rituals that you go through in order that adds points into the ritual. So you can add additional points to the ritual itself if it’s on the favored terrain, or bad things will happen if it’s on the cursed terrain for the various point cards. Those cards also give you more points at the end of the game, so you are trying to cause rituals to get a number of them, but you don’t want to cause rituals to happen that could potentially be bad for you.

For me, this game hits a nice balance of strategy and randomness. Because you, especially at the start of the game, don’t have any idea what color people might have, you can start out rushing for completing rituals to get the point cards, but you can also accidentally be setting someone up with that. And as you get further into the game, the turns take longer as your thinking through what might be happening and how to maximize your remaining points so that you end up ahead. The game has a good balance of pushing your color ahead while also causing you to give points to other colors at the same time.

Overall, I think this is a very well done game and one that is quite pretty to look at. The only thing that I very odd about the look is that the board wraps, and I don’t mean that the board goes the pacman run from one side to the other, I mean that the paper on the cardboard on two sides doesn’t have a border to show the edge of the board, but instead wraps around the edge of the board. It made me feel like it was missing another board or so. Beyond that, though, the game has a nice blend of strategy and deduction to it. If you can figure out what colors other people might have, then it becomes purely strategy, but really, you’re going to have a best educated guess. When I played it, both the other person and I thought each other was the same color so that adds to the fun of the game, trying to guess. I also like this game because there aren’t that many rules and while it could be an abstract game, the theme doesn’t add much to the game play, but adds to the look of the game. This game ends up being one that is easy to sit down and learn or easy to pick up and teach to people who might not be heavy into board gaming.

Overall Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: B
Casual Grade: B+

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PS. I should mention that this is a re implementation of Clans. Basically the same game.