How to Play Heat: Pedal to the Metal

Like I said, Heat is a racing game. It’s about getting around the track the fastest. And if you finish on the same turn, it’s about being the one that goes the furthest ahead across the finish line. It’s what you’d expect for a racing game.

The game can most simply be broken down into three parts. Though the round structure has eight or nine, it is mainly three. First, you pick the gear you want to be in. You can go up or down by one for free, or for two with a cost. Then you play the number of cards for the gear you are in. Both of these are done at the same time.

Then, in turn order, players play out their cards and go that fast. There are several other things that can be done in this step. Sometimes you are flipping cards to go more of a random distance and pushing your luck that way. Otherwise, you might catch up to another card and draft off of them. Or things like cooling down your heat based off the gear that you’re in. All to push yourself past the turns and to the finish faster than everyone else.

How Heat Works

I think that the Heat in Heat deserves it’s own section. Mainly because this is how you break what you are doing in the game. I talked about the penalty of going up two on your gear shifter, that’s giving you heat. Heat also allows you to push yourself around a turn too fast. You spend your difference in speed to the corner speed as heat.

Heat then is your valuable resource for the push your luck element of the game. And every car only has a limited amount of heat. But as you are in lower gears, first or second, you return heat from your hand to your engine. Basically, as you push the car less it cools down so you are less apt to overheat it or spinout.

I really enjoy this mechanism in the game. It, I think, as well as as card play, are the crux of how the game works. If I push to hard and too fast early, I need to adjust my strategy at other times to get it back. But if I’m too cautious with it, now I drop behind and all that heat I have saved might not be enough to let me push around enough corners fast enough.

Stress Cards

So, heat clogs up your deck. But there are other cards that are in your deck of movement cards that can help, or they can hurt. Stress cards give you risk, but also might give you a lot of reward. You must play out the number of cards for the gear you are in. Sometimes that might mean playing a card that only moves you one. But if you’re on a straightaway, that isn’t that good for you. Moving one is only good around a corner if you come in with too high a gear.

Instead, playing out a stress card might be more helpful. They are supposed to be like a momentary lapse of judgement. Basically, you play out that card you and flip a random card from your deck. It is limited to what it can be, though. If I flip, I flip until I get one of my basic cards. So I know that the range can be from one up to four. So it might be worth it, of course, I might draw another one. Or I might draw a four that pushes me past a turn.

Turns

Before we kind of wrap up talking about the game in it’s parts, I want to talk about turns. Turns, as I’ve alluded to can give you heat. It’s pretty simple as to how turns work. As you reach a turn, it tells you how fast you can take that turn. I believe that the range of speed is as high of seven on some tracks and a low of two.

So as you reach turns, you need to maintain speed up to them, but then you need to shift down so that you can navigate the turn without going too fast. But if a turn has seven on it, and I go eight, I just gain a single heat card into my discard. So something that clogs up the deck, but not horribly. And if that gets me past a turn, it might be worth it. So it’s part of the push your luck of the game.

Basic Game vs Modules

So Heat offers you multiple experiences out of the box. You can play, and I recommend it, the basic version the first game. I ended up playing it the first two, just so that we knew what we were doing. That lets everyone keep their deck the same. It’s an even playing field and is a fun epxerience.

But as you gain comfortability with the game, you can add in modules. You might decide to add in weather which is going to affect how the track performs. Or there might be hazards or difficulties on the track you can add in.

But I think the big one is upgrades. Your deck contains twelve basic cards. Three of each card numbered one through four. In the basic game, everyone has a zero, a five, and an extra heat card that go into the deck. Drafting, those cards come out, and you pick your specific cards. Or you draft from cards three times so that you replace those cards. And the cards you draft might go faster, or offer more variability, or let you draft better. They change up how you might want to focus on the strategy of your game in a very fun way.

Plus, there are modules for racing a championship. So you might want to do that can run a few races. I haven’t played with those yet, but I’m planning on it.

Is It Fast?

So let’s answer the question that I asked at the beginning of the article. Is Heat a fast game? Often times racing games can run into an issue. I take my turn and my car moves. You take your turn, and if you play with five or six people, it can take a while to get back to my turn again. And that doesn’t feel like a car race. Watching Nascar, Indy, or Formula 1, they are all fast. And a car racing game should be fast.

I think that Heat improves upon this a lot compared to some other games. The first two phases, picking your gear and cards, those are done all at the same time. It’s only when you get to card play and moving distances that it goes in car order. And that is fast because it is just flip your cards and move that many spaces.

For the most part, I think Heat solves that issue. There might be some strategy or a couple of rounds in a game where it goes slower. Where someone wants to try and guess what other people have picked to get their right cards and right distance. But that is rare, so the game moves along well.

Who Is Heat For?

Heat is for people who want a fun racing game. It’s from Days of Wonder, so they tend to make more family weight games. They made games like Ticket to Ride, Small World, Five Tribes, and more. So it’s a racing game that I can pull off the shelf and play with anyone. I might not add in things like drafting or weather modules, but the base game is still a lot of fun.

That said, the game still works for more experienced gamers. It isn’t just a light filler game, there is strategy in what you are doing. And if you want to mess around with that you can. But it’s never so heavy and complex that it would keep more casual players from playing it.

Final Thoughts on Heat

I really like Heat. The expansion came out today and I pre-ordered it already. I want that seventh car and I want two more tracks. I’m sure it’ll come with more as well, but that’s mainly what I want from it. Heat works really well as a racing game, and I think it does hit that sweet spot of feeling like you are racing while not being too chaotic. But it’s also not bogged down int he game play either. For me all of that just works.

I do think that now that I’ve played with the drafting, I want to draft. Getting cards that really change up how you can attack the track is awesome. I might even teach with drafting. Especially if players are familiar with gaming at all. The drafting and those cards don’t offer too much additional complexity. But they add in just a little so that you can feel unique.

The one thing that I want to do is play with the dummy players. It is possible to play Heat solo. And maybe I’ll do that on a stream, or tonight, I might have some time to try it for myself. So my review is incomplete because I haven’t done that. But it would be fun to try that out and see how well that works for me.

Let me know your thoughts on Heat: Pedal to the Metal. Have you gotten it to the table? Do you enjoy it’s racing feel?

My Grade: A
Gamer Grade: B+
Casual Grade: A

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First, teach games often. As long as you’re paying attention to what you’re doing and you’re trying to improve upon it, you will get better. The adage practice makes perfect is true, the more you teach games, the better you get at it. You’ll know which things to highlight and which things to skip and bring up in the game.

Second, don’t read from the rule book. If you need it to help you remember, that’s fine, but try to read as little word for word from the rule book. Rule books are not always well written and not always are they meant to teach rules directly from. Fantasy Flight does a good job with a rule book of what you need to know to start playing and then a rules reference that you can dig into for more information, but most rules have all that information in them.

Three, highlight only the important things. I’m going to, after this point, write out how I go try to go through teaching a board game, but this one is pretty easy. There are going to be things that are exceptions to the rule, and unless that exception is important to a strategy, you can gloss over it, for a first game, try and teach the big points and the objectives clearly, smaller details can be filled in as time goes on.

So, what does this look like in practice? When I teach games, I generally try and go about it this way.

1. Theme/story of the game
2. Win condition
3. How a Turn Works
4. Actions You can Do On A Turn
5. Exceptions/Special Rules
6. Any Rules that Depend on Set-up

1 – Why do I start off with theme?

“In Welcome To… you can build your perfect stepford neighborhood.”

That’s basically the pitch that I always use for Welcome To… It works well because it gives people an idea of the white picket fence neighborhood, and even if they don’t know precisely what The Stepford Wives was about, it gives them a vague idea. This line or quick paragraph is how you sell a game and the mood for the game.

2 – Next comes explaining how you win the game, whether it’s cooperative or not and whether I go into every detail or not at this point in time, I explain how you win the game. In Welcome To… I basically as saying that you are trying to build the best most marketable neighborhood to get points by building pools, parks, fencing off neighborhoods and more. Or in Pandemic, the goal is to clear all the diseases before you run out of player cards, disease cubes or have too many outbreaks.

The win condition is just important to talk about up front because it again helps inform the type of game that you’re getting into. If it’s a big point salad sort of game versus a combat focused game. I think that Scythe is a good example of why you do this, Scythe looks like it should be a big area control, dudes on a map, alternate timelines, but it’s a Euro game. So setting that up through talking about how you win is important for expectation setting.

3 – The turn, I’m talking about the big structure of it here. In Welcome To… that is basically that there are going to be three pairs of card options to choose from and you’ll do what the pair you chose to use tells you to do. In Pandemic it’s trickier, you have your turn, you have the drawing of player cards, the infection step and discard step. Now it lays that out nice and clearly on the player aides, but there are still more steps. And it might not just be the turn proper, it could be the round. Sagrada is an example of where a turn is just taking and placing a die, but you need to explain how the draft works in terms of order. We’re not talking about the fine details yet, we’re just looking at the bigger picture.

4 – The actions step is where we get into the details and the longest part of teaching the game. The theme/pitch of the game, and win conditions should be fast, the turn or round information should pretty fast, but this is where it slows down a little bit. Go through all the different actions that people can take, that means explaining the backside of the cards in Welcome To…, walking through the actions in Pandemic, or how to place the dice and how to use special abilities in Sagrada.

With the actions, however, we’re still just going to teach the basic actions. If there’s going to be an exception to one, call out that there will be and come back to it during the exceptions section of your teach. These are going to be the things that everyone is able to do on every turn across the board. This is made much harder by asymmetrical games, but those are unfortunately always going to be a beast to teach.

5 – In the exceptions step, we’re looking to teach the important exceptions in a situation. For Pandemic, that might how the medic cures versus how everyone else does. How the Dispatcher moves people versus the rest of the game. We’re talking about the exceptions or special rules that are big. This is also the point in time where you have already talked that there are special actions in Sagrada, now you can go over what they do.

There are going to be some exceptions that you aren’t going to teach. These are going to be the positive exceptions, not the negative ones. They are going to be the ones that you teach when they happen in the game. So we’re talking about the ones where you get a bonus or get to do something special because of a situation in the game, and as the teacher you’re looking to teach those in the moment in the game instead of getting it bogged down now. However, if it’s a really bad consequence to an exception or special rule, teach that before the moment so it doesn’t feel like a “gotcha” or trap.

6 – Finally, set-up the game, now, for something like Pandemic, you can do this while you go. For something like Welcome To… or Sagrada, probably wait. This is going to allow you to do a few things, in both of them, now you’re teaching the specific scoring for that game. What extra things do you want to consider when drafting or placing dice in Sagrada. What are the three building permits that you’re working to complete in Welcome To…? Now, all the set-up shouldn’t happen now and for some games, Lords of Hellas, for example, you’ll want to have most of the game set-up before people get there. We’re just talking about finishing off those final touches for getting ready to play in that case, so you can explain the specific things for the start of your game.

Now, I know that sounds like a lot. But besides teaching the actions, the main meat of the game, you aren’t going to be spending a ton of time on the other parts. Exceptions and special rules, especially if the game has a long teach in the action part, should go by quickly. Same with set-up, if it’s a big game, Lords of Hellas or even something like Blood Rage, do set-up while you teach. That’s going to give people a really obvious visual example.

That is one thing that I didn’t talk about much, when you are teaching, we are showing as well. When you talk about a phase in a turn or a round, demonstrate it, if you can. When you explain an action, demonstrate it on the board if you can. These are contrived examples, but seeing while hearing is going to help people’s retention of the information and have less questions further down the line. Also, putting things in people’s hands can be helpful as well. If you’ve explained a deck and it needs to be shuffled and placed, hand it off to someone else to shuffle and place it. This might seem like it distracts, but it mainly gives that player a feeling of ownership of helping getting the game up and running smoothly.

With all of this said, finally, remember, you’ll probably never teach a game perfectly for everyone at the table. We’re just trying to present the information as easily or as usefully as possible for the greatest number of people. There are people who need to muddle their way through two turns before they get a game no matter if you’re the best teacher in the world. There are going to be people who think after hearing how the rounds go that they know how to play the game and will checkout at that point no matter what. As the teacher, it’s not about being able to teach it so that everyone is 100% engaged all the time, but to teach it so that most of the people at the table understand most of the game and then you go from there and play and teach in the game.

What tips or tricks have you found for teaching games? Are there anythings that have made teaching some games easier than others?

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