I think that’s why I’ve never any real effort to buy HEAT.
I’ll let you know about Grand Tour, if it ever arrives!
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This was my starting position on Heat as well. Thanks to BGA I ended up falling in love with it. Heat is more about you, and choosing your bonus cards, managing your hand and your gear, etc. Flamme Rouge is more about everyone else, trying to anticipate them to get extra movement and avoid exhaustion and not be left behind on a hill.
Heat you can be two turns (bends in the road) behind and catch up by the end of the lap. Flamme Rouge, you botch a hill and that’s it.
So in the end they became different moods, different crowds, both essential to me. Though I’d still rate Flamme Rouge higher.
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PITCHCAAAAAR!!! 
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I only tried Heat solo, but found the gameplay stifling. I felt like the heat-cycle was too random and the precision needed to effectively manage heat was not possible as a result.
I would love either a hand-management that focuses more on precision of card play, or a beer-and-pretzels looser game. But the thing that exists in the middle of those two, known as Heat, is just not as good as other options.
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I realise it’s the same designer, but to me HEAT felt as though it took all the stuff I enjoyed about Flamme Rouge and threw it away while keeping the core mechanic. I can’t pin it down, but all the little moments of joy that I get from Flamme Rouge are gone. (I’ve played a total of seven times now, with people I like each time, so I don’t think it’s just a random bad game.)
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This was my starting point, too. It’s rare that I shift this far on a game from first impression. The fact that it happens maybe 1 in 25 times makes me play the other 24 more than I should before I give up.
Shout out to all the optimizers.
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I prefer Flamme Rouge to Heat, because it feels more… elegant? Streamlined? There’s much less room for error, I think. I do enjoy Heat though, it’s a lot of fun 
I played the Japan map from Heavy Rain a few weeks ago and the flooded track mechanic was really interesting.
I’m also team “Camel up is not a racing game”, because the first thing I say when teaching it is “this is not a game about camel racing, it is a game about gambling on camel races”
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I have a bunch of racing games on my shelves because I feel like I should have some for friends who like them. The ones with actual car racing themes are:
- Heat—I think my friends enjoyed it more than I did. It plays a lot of people and worked well to bring to a week-end with friends that „also“ featured some games but not as a central part.
- Rallyman GT—I enjoy the dice puzzle
Then there are
- Cubitos—my partner likes the dice. We have been meaning to play again
- Robo Rally—still great
- El Dorado—random market deck builders are preferred in this house but this with the map is just really good. It‘ll stick around for the occasional play.
And that‘s it for games n my shelves that come to mind. Others:
- Flamme Rouge left me cold when we played at a friends table. But that was years ago.
- Formula D which I picked up after seeing it on Table Top was terrible.
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I’ve never played Formula D/De. I think that, like Tobago (not a racing game), I found out about it at about the same time the gamers I met were getting bored with it.
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Formula D was a rare, early online async game. Like, brettspielwelt.de was still the mammoth in the room.
My friends and I used to use xbconnect to run Halo servers over the internet after college. Like a monthly reunion. When that started falling apart (I think we continued to move apart and didn’t have enough xbeex) I was looking into online games that would support 8 people. It was Robo Rally, Formula D, and some Mario Kart clones.
None ever came to fruition, no one had the energy to learn a new game and also navigate the hardships of configuring these things as well as the voice overlay back then. But that’s how I first found Robo Rally and Formula D.
I’d forgotten all this until the name came up!
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(This led me to see if brettspielwelt was still in existence. Is Funkenschlag really Deutsch for Powergrid?) (Funny how the English dependence on German leads to latent connotations for pretty much any German word, which may or may not align with underlying meaning)
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Funkenschlag is the German title. 2F titles need to start with an F
Faiyum, Faultier, Funkenschlag, Finstre Flure, Fürstenfeld, Freitag etc…
It translates to „a spark flying“ (it is a noun though). I am sure there is some more professional translation.
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A racing game that we have that I don’t think has been mentioned yet is Jamaica. It’s very light and involves racing around an island while trying to pick up the best pirate loot. We played it a lot with the kids a while ago, but haven’t picked it up since.
There’s also Mississippi Queen, which is a pick up and deliver racing game. It feels way too slow to me, which I suppose is thematic for piloting a paddle steamer down the Mississippi…
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As far as I remember, you win by having most loot, and getting to the end of the course only triggers the game end. In my personal definition (which I’m not saying anyone else should use) that’s not really a racing game; you want to get to the good spaces more than you want to go as far as possible.
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So filtering by race and my owned collection on BGG I get
- The Quest for El Dorado
- New Frontiers (not a race.)
- Get On Board (eh?)
There isn’t Camel Up (weird, that’s more of a race than Get on Board)
I guess my issue with any race game I’ve played is that there’s either some really ham fisted rubber banding or none at all, leading to frustration from the either side of the pack.
It’s the Mario Kart Blue Shell Issue. When you get it, it really won’t affect your positon but when it happens it can be devasting to the receiver. I haven’t played Flamme Rouge but the exhaustion/slip stream seems a lovely way to tackle this and thematically appropriate
QfED also has the speed bumps and groups of terrain to bog you down, again a great way to slow the lead down (with the most speed bumps being the tie breaker) whilst also encouraging people pushing forward.
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This is where I generally cite Monza. Haba truly overengineers its kids games. If you stop and really look at it you can see how the bottlenecks and color distribution were really thought through to slow down the leader. It’s subtle and organic, no added rules, just a little board structure that makes sure someone doesn’t get too far ahead.
And yes, if you’re stuck, you have a higher chance of getting knocked back a space. But generally it won’t effect the outcome (the people behind you will hit the same bottleneck), just make sure that everyone has a good time catching up.
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