Rallyman GT

Rallyman GT (based closely on its predecessor Rallyman) is a racing game where you can drive safe, push your luck, or hopefully steer a path successfully between the two extremes…

Each player has a single car on a track made up of tiles – you can build one of the suggested tracks in the rulebook, or invent your own. Players roll to see who starts, then move their cars along the track through a series of rounds. When it’s your turn, you take the six black gear dice along with the red braking dice and white coasting dice. Right now, though, you don’t roll them. Instead you place the dice on the track, planning your route along the the individual track sections. Each gear die represents one of the six gears, and your car can move forward by changing up or down a single gear, or stay in the same gear by placing a coasting die. Note that certain sections of track – the corners – demand you pass through in a certain gear: you can’t go around a hairpin in fifth gear! This is where the braking dice can come in handy, as they allow you to change down two gears instead of one. The catch being you’ll be rolling extra dice to succeed in your manoeuvres…

Once you’ve planned your route, you have two options: rolling the dice one by one, or going flat out and rolling them all at once. One by one is the safer option: each die has a hazard symbol (!) on it, and rolling too many of these means a loss of control – which is not good: you spin out and may even miss your next turn. When you roll one by one, you can choose to stop moving at any time, and avoid this fate (- you can, of course, choose to keep going and tempt fate instead). Going flat out is more risky, for obvious reasons: you’re putting all your racing eggs into one dice-rolling basket, and have zero control over whether you lose control or not.

So why go flat out at all? Because when you do so successfully, every die rolled gets you a focus token: on subsequent turns these can be used to pay for a roll result: instead of rolling the die, you sacrifice tokens instead. You can do as many laps as you like (we find one is enough) but the key to success is most likely knowing when to push your luck and when to be cautious. That said – feel free to throw caution to the wind and you may just pull off a dramatic win!

Rallyman GT is an updating of the older game Rallyman.