Mike Hulsebus | Contributor

It’s always frustrating when you expect that a drive should take a short time, only to find out that it’s going to take far longer than expected. I’m sure you can attest if you’ve ever accidentally found yourself outside of the stadium during a football Saturday.

Formula D is a game that, initially, took too long. I would have people nearby ask “you’re still playing that?” as we were just finishing our first lap. But over time, I discovered that that the game can easily be fixed with a few tweaks. Is that enough to take Formula D out of the pits and into the pole position? Let’s have a look.

In Formula D, players each control a car participating in a three-lap race. Each player has a little gearshift that stays in front of him that shows what gear he is in and how much more damage he can take. As the player shifts gears, he’ll get to roll dice that get higher and higher results. First gear gives results numbered from 1-2 while 5th gear can send your car as many as 30 spaces. But this isn’t a drag race; there are turns to maneuver through.

Each gear lists the possible values that could be rolled when using that gear's particular die.

Mike Hulsebus | Contributor

Each of the turns on the track has a number assigned to it. A simple turn might be a 1, while a more complex turn might be a 3. In order to go through the turn without getting damaged, your car has to “stop” in the turn that many times before proceeding. Stopping simply means to end your turn within the borders of that turn, not going down to 0 speed. If you overshoot a turn without stopping enough times, you take one damage for each space you overshot it as long as you were only one stop away from making the turn. If you were supposed to stop, for example, two times and didn’t stop even once, your car is eliminated from the race.

This how I finished my last two or three races.

Mike Hulsebus | Contributor

Each time it is your turn you can go up one gear, stay in your current gear, or shift down. You can skip gears when shifting down by taking extra damage, but there is no way to jump ahead in gears. There are a few more rules than this (how changing lanes works for example), but those are the basics of the game.

Really, the game is about taking chances and making good tactical decisions. If you’re able to choose the correct times to shift up and down, you’ll exit the turns going faster than the other cars and take the lead.

The game boils down to a series of risks. Say that I’m in a turn where I have to stop twice and, at its longest point, the turn is eight spaces long. I can try to stay in a higher gear and roll a die that will give me results of four to eight, but if I roll that eight, I’ll have to downshift on the next turn to prevent going too far past the turn without making enough stops. So while I might exit the turn in 1st gear and then slowly work my way back up to 3rd, if my opponent was able to exit the turn in 3rd through good planning and good rolling, he’s going to pull ahead of me by a good distance while I’m still trying to regain speed.

Careful planning in the turns will put you ahead of your opponents.

Mike Hulsebus | Contributor

There are no weapons, no action cards, and no hazards on the track, so you might think that, if everyone’s rolling the same dice, you’re going to stay in the position you started the race in for most of the race. In actually playing, there is a lot of back and forth in the game. In the most recent two lap game I played, I started in 4th, worked my way up to 1st by the end of the first lap, and then figured I probably had it in the bag when I didn’t stop in the pits and blew past everyone puttering in pit road. I ended the game losing my last damage point on the second-to-last turn, eliminating me from the race (which wasn’t a huge deal since I was already in last place). The winner was someone who, on the last turn, was able to exit the turn in a high gear, passing the people that had been in 1st and 2nd before he edged out the victory.

If Formula D takes you three hours to play, it isn’t worth your time. If you can get in done in 60 to 90 minutes, it’s a fun game. The thing that ruins the game is that everyone will want to figure out every possible option before rolling the dice. You hand them the dice and then they start figuring out if they want to shift up or down. They count out where they would go if they got certain numbers on the die with different gear results. They look at how many times each number appears on a die.

Mike Hulsebus | Contributor

Formula D is a race and needs to be played as such to be fun. The house rule we made for our most recent fun game was that when it’s your turn, you pick up the dice and roll. If you want to count out spaces and consider your different options, do that on other peoples’ turns. After you roll, move right away: no takebacks or reconsidering. I would say that this cuts down the time that the game takes in half. It’s such a game-altering change that I’m surprised it isn’t mentioned in the rules.

Everyone had a fun time with the game which I attribute to one other thing: we played with as few rules as possible. See, the game comes with basic rules and advanced rules. In the advanced rules, individual parts of your car have damage points and there are many different ways that you can lose them. Overshooting a turn does damage to tires. Coming up behind a wall of cars does damage to brakes. If you end your turn next to another car, you have to make a roll to see if you take damage to the body of your car. It’s not that the other rules aren’t good, it’s just that Formula D doesn’t suffer too greatly when you play with basic rules and the quicker you can start rolling dice without taking the time to explain what gets damaged when, the better.

Once that problem is solved, I think the other main problem with the game is that there is no catch-up mechanic. While it is certainly possible to move around in the rankings and go from last to first, there is nothing built in that will assist you in that. If someone plays too conservatively, he can find himself so far in last that there is no chance for him to make his way up to first during the final lap. For this reason, I like playing the team version of the game in which everyone is on one of two teams and earns points based on their final position. That way, even if the player in 8th can’t make it up to first, he can at least still help his team out by trying to beat the guy from the other team who is in 7th.

I’m excited to log more plays of Formula D now that I’ve finally learned the real way to play. I wouldn’t call this a pole position game, but it definitely serves a niche. The game plays all the way up to 10 players which makes it good when you have a lot of people to play a game with and don’t want to just default to playing a party game. If it only played, say, five players, I would probably trade this away, but for its versatility and fun dice rolling, Formula D is a keeper.

Mike Hulsebus is glad that he doesn't review racing games very often since the word "turn" can have two meanings. He hopes that no one ever comes out with a game about tern racing and can be reached at mikehulsebus@gmail.com