Downforce and Wild Ride Expansion - Should You Play? A Board Game Review

0:00 it's the classic racing and betting game downforce brought back to life as well as its wild ride expansion coming up

0:24 hi it's taryn and stella from nipple university today we are going to talk about the uh the game downforce and worldwide expansion so you're gonna start with downforce first and then this and then show you what we think of it yes so downforce it's not a new game it's existed in in many forms for a very long time dating back to i believe the early 70s a game called tempo and then it went through through various forms it was released in the 90s as downforce in this form and it's had a re-release through yellow in the last couple of years and we just happened to play it just recently yes and it's fundamentally um because because we played this after them it feels like a combo but it actually would be the precursor too it's sort of a mix between the betting style of game that you get in camel up and some of the tactical racing and and track position sort of stuff you get in a game like flam rouge or mississippi queen to some extent so it's it kind of mixes those things together but it came before all of those games it's very light game and yeah it's quite fun so what do you do in this game parent so start of the game everyone gets a auction pad and they get a set of cards and all those cards have all the different car colors on them and different speeds and then there's an auction

1:55 so a car color is flipped up and a special power is flipped up and players will bid on those by playing a card from their hand and essentially betting the amount of money shown in its number and you'll win the cart and the the power yep so whoever gets that will get the card and the power and you can have multiple as long as everyone has at least one car that they own you can have multiple cars in the game you also get the high speed card and then once you get into the race you go round and round the table and players take it in turns choosing any one card from their hand playing it and then moving the cars around the amount shown so then this got the cart yep so this one here it says blue six orange four two wild one yellow so you move blue six one two three four five six you then move orange four one two three four uh wild twos so you can move something two spaces you can't do blue as well otherwise yep can't repeat it and then yellow one and players just go round and round doing this until some cars are finished and that may seem very may seem very straightforward but where the game has its tactics is that betting well there's two elements of tactics there's a track position element of tactics so if you're not interested in having orange wind you can drive orange around the long the long way round instead of the short

3:26 way around and cars can get blocked so say someone's driven the uh green car up into here the blue car now doesn't have a space that it can go and so or even so like so what happened then even there so if if someone if i'm if i don't want blue to win but i'm holding this blue card i could play it and it's stuck it just wastes that card and the more of a the more times a car's cards are wasted the more likely it is it's not even going to get around to the finish exactly then the second part of the game is each time a car crosses one of these yellow lines everyone takes a bet on which car they think is going to win and so everyone secretly on their little grip chooses who they think will win and you'll do that three times during the game and if your bet car comes first second or third you get a payout and get a higher payout earlier in the race a lower payout later and then at the end of the game you get your betting payouts you get money based on where your car or cars that you picked at the start of the the game finish and you lose money based on how much you bid for your car and so yeah maybe you want your car to do okay or maybe just you just want your car to break even for what you bet on or for what you spent on it and then you try to make the cars you bet on

4:56 win and that's really the that's the summary of the game uh it plays pretty quickly a round will play in half an hour it's pretty much a party game as you say it's it's camel up mixed with a track position type racing game six players we'll play up to six uh the basic game comes with this board it comes with the board has two sides to it so this one's got some nice big sweeping corners this one's a bit more of a tight twisty sort of track with more single lane stuff yeah and there we have it that is the basics of downforce what do you think i really enjoyed this game because like mississippi queen is one of my favorite games racing games camelot is different type of racing games i generally i like racing game as a board game better than pc game it has got a great tactics and it's turn based rather than a real-time base because i can never do well with my thumbs with a pc games and video games yeah um we're actually quite opposite on that i've always i always say this when i talk about racing games we had growing up we had some terrible racing games they just there weren't that many good racing games in the 80s and you know so many of them we had a formula one game where it was it was called allen helen jones ellen

6:26 jones i forget which one yes i always get those two confused but the one that was the australian f1 driver it had this this circuit and if it was a straight you needed a three card and so you just had cards in your hands like oh i've got them some threes i can go along this bit now and if you didn't have them you were just stuck there and it was it was pretty much roll to move type of type of thing so when i've come across the better racing games that are out there and the ones where you've got influence on track position and you know flomerus does that in a similar way to this you've sort of got just enough cards to finish the race and you've got to make you've got to avoid getting blocked or make up your drafting as you go through um so i think it's it's nice it's very light and it will play around quite quickly and then the betting makes it interesting because you can see as the game unfolds you know my car's out in front but all of a sudden everyone's trying to help the guy behind me everyone else must have bet on him yeah so i'd better change my bed at the end but still try or i really need to block it and i need to maneuver things like that yeah they're very interesting that way yeah and at the same time it's you know it's light as well so sometimes things are just going to go against you everyone's going to block get your car locked in here and yeah your car is going to come last but you can still do a good job if it's just like starting betting on other people's car that you think you're going to win yeah so i think it's a good uh it's a

7:57 good it's good gamers party game i think or a light game is yeah kind of like not party party game it still has some tactics to it still got some tactics and enough rules that you couldn't teach it to you you couldn't teach it to non-gamers on a night where you weren't expecting to play games right teach it to a non-gamer but it will work well with families as well and it's yeah it's good fun and what does the expansion bring out so the wild ride expansion brings two brings two more maps to the game uh but they come with different features as well so we've got this map here the um wow look at this there's something sands i think it's called dolphins or is that are they shark or just fish they just add the uh add to the danger so this is the aloha sands and you'll see it has jumps all over it so there's also these little 3d jumps that you don't need but they look cool and to jump someone over a ramp so that will let you gain extra distance or not gain distance and you need to have a certain speed and exercise movement in order to get over a round there's four so and six um yeah yeah and then there's another one yes which is behind it the other side here this is the savannah stretch and the savannah stretch as i dig into the box so here there'd be

9:28 a an elephant and a snake and an antelope as well let's see if i can find the herd and then once so it's blocking and then once a car goes past this track uh they go thundering off to the next space so it just basically moves the blockages down the field it's kind of a catch up as well because uh it means the lead cars are getting stuck behind this stuff but then the trailing cars yeah all the lead cars are way up ahead getting stuck in behind this elephant all the trailing cars don't have that they can just run straight through so a little bit more of a catch-up than the the base game has as well reminds me of mississippi quinn as well where the player that goes ahead there's a randomness so you don't know what tile is going to flip up and then you kind of like deal with it and then the second player would probably is better in terms of catching up yeah so there we have it so um would you you know is it a favorite but russian games this is your favorite there's mississippi queen there's a few i still like flomridge oh i think that's probably my my favorite and it's the most gamer of the ones i've played as well i really enjoy the drafting mechanic there but this one works really nicely as well as a light game and a fair game it's that's what you want that's i'm i'm predisposed to thinking of racing games as stupidly random but this is it's nice

11:00 and every time i shouldn't be so surprised anymore because there are good racing yeah yeah every time i come across one i i do uh i do enjoy so does that mean that you have such low expectations for each race game that you come across now or now like the standards like getting high a little bit maybe i do maybe i do go into racing games um predisposed to thinking that it's i mean it is a tough mechanic to make work in board game form i don't think there's a doubt about that yeah i don't think i have and i don't think i have a racing game that i do not like every facing games i come across i like yeah um including i think is that pacquiao it's it's not really racing really is not a race it's not racing like this that one's uh yeah it's just got that interesting mechanics and you know it's not like even mississippi queens again like come back to it and then flem which is no randomness in that so you know contrary to what you expect in writing game is not role to move at all so this is what we think what do you think i'm sure that you know some of you have played this tell us what you think or tell us your favorite dressing game and if you haven't played it we'll have a look um again if you could please help us by hitting that like button if you find this video somewhat useful that will be much appreciated if you haven't already subscribed to us um also we really thankful if you can subscribe to us um so you can get notification of our new and upcoming game you can also hit the link below in the corner to

12:30 subscribe and hit the bell i'm also on social media like instagram you can follow me there and hopefully we will see you in our next video bye