Joyride is an exciting, vibrant take on the racing genre that videogame fans will love

Well, here we are — no new or particularly exciting racing games in the board game world for ages, yet now we have HEAT: Pedal to the Metal, Thunder Road: Vendetta and finally Joyride all landing in rapid succession. For me, HEAT is still the best of these, but for some it might be just a bit too involved and a bit too “traditional” in its thinking. Thunder Road is good fun, but it’s more about luck than judgement — so I’m delighted to report that Joyride fits the niche between the latter two titles almost perfectly. 

What does almost perfectly mean? Well, let me put it this way: After just a few rounds of the base game of Joyride, I felt compelled to seek out and purchase a nearly new copy of the Kickstarter version (known as Joyride Turbo). This means I have access to ten distinct cars with three unique abilities, as well as numerous expansions that range from essential to… rather silly!

These days, I don’t have the space to invest in big box games lightly, so it came as quite a surprise to me that Joyride hit such a high note. The base game features a double-sided board that forms the basis of all your races and events — but a handful of included terrain pieces allow for significant variation. Additionally, Joyride is unique among its peers in that it uses checkpoint tokens to create very different paths through otherwise identical maps.

Set up is fairly quick, and the rules are relatively simple. Each player chooses a car (there are four in the base game box, two extras in Next Gen and then two more in retail expansions, or four more in the Turbo edition. Each character comes with their own chunky wooden car, a player dashboard and a set of dice to match. They also get a little plastic gear stick and three unique power tokens that might be spent over the course of the game. 

When the game begins, each player is going to choose a gear (which determines how many dice they roll) and then roll those dice. In higher gears, players can only change the direction of their car once — before they start moving — whilst in second gear you can choose to reposition both before and after moving. There’s the option to lock dice from the last turn so you can get some control over your speed, but broadly speaking, in higher gears your car will go a lot faster — and one thing that differentiates Joyride from other games in this genre is just how quickly walls seem to come at you. 

Across all three of the racing games that I’ve mentioned in this review so far, one of the overall themes is without doubt that of risk and reward. In HEAT, the player has a high degree of control due to the deckbuilding and cardplay mechanisms. In Thunder Road, there’s a lot more randomness to this and for me, a feeling that I have little control over the outcome. Whilst Joyride uses dice, it still features enough player agency to be interesting. The ability to control your gear and lock dice that you like is a big difference, whilst unique skills like Handbrake Turn can make all the difference at a key moment.

Items and collisions also play a more interesting role in Joyride than its peers — mainly because they exist (unlike in HEAT) but are much more predictable in terms of outcome than Thunder Road: Vendetta. When a collision occurs, the outcome depends entirely on what the vehicle hits, and what direction it hits it from. A rear shunt, for example, will simply slow the shunting car and push the car being shunted. A head-on collision will essentially stop both cars, whilst a direct side swipe will almost always rotate the car being hit in the side (which is perhaps the best outcome an aggressive player can hope for). 

Items like missiles and oil slicks work more or less just as you’d expect, causing the affected player to resolve the impact using concepts that will have since become familiar due to the basic collision rules. This keeps Joyride moving at a fast pace, with players keen to get back to their turn in one piece – in two player games the racing is tight and focussed due to the head to head nature, whilst in four player, Joyride is a bit more chaotic but still a ton of fun.

There are a few catch up mechanics included in Joyride and these can be useful when playing with a runaway leader. For starters, any player except the first player over the finish line at the end of a lap can recharge one of their unique abilities and this means that if it becomes clear that someone else is going to be first, the players that follow can use their skills a bit more freely to try and gain an edge. Skills include offensive and defensive abilities, but some also allow extra movement or agility — like the Handbrake Turn skill I mentioned earlier.

Joyride also looks fantastic, and for me is the best looking of the three games we’ve been discussing here. The artwork is cartoonish but also clear and easy to identify. As an example, Joyride uses a thick black like to denote anything which will result in a “collision” if hit, and it’s this kind of thing that really helps make the game straightforward to play despite quite a lot of visual excitement and a huge amount of variability across the component set. 

Considering that Joyride Turbo is being reprinted at retail with all expansions and content and priced at just £100, for me this game is a bit of a bargain. If you’re keen to dive into it in the meantime, you can get about 90% of the content in the Turbo box just at retail — with the base game, the Next Gen variant and two smaller expansions already available. I haven’t played with the “monsters” yet, but I can only imagine that they add even more craziness to the experience.

Sitting right between HEAT and Thunder Road both in terms of weight and I would suggest overall enjoyment, Joyride is a really good racing game that edges out the other two for component quality and visual impact, whilst backing its good looks with quality, exciting gameplay. A definite contender for the “only” racing game in your collection, and an essential purchase for players who want to maintain a “top 5” sample across all racing games.

Joyride is available now through Amazon, among other retailers.