CHENNAI : In Downforce, 2-6 players will each take ownership of a racing team and car. However, winning the race isn’t necessarily the only way to victory. Sounds weird, right? Here’s the deal - you’re still trying to win, or at least finish well. However, you could stand to make a lot more money if you successfully predict how your opponentswill do.
As far as rules complexities go, Downforce couldn’t be simpler. Each player gets a car in their colour and a large hand of cards which dictate how the cars move. That’s right, I said cars - most cards will move multiple race cars along the track, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that you’ll have cards that move your car further than the others. So what’s a wealthy owner of a racing team to do, you ask? That’s where the betting comes in.
At three points during the race, there are lines marked on the track. As soon as any car crosses a line for the first time, each player must place a bid in secret on the car they think is most likely to win the race. All bids are not created equal, however - the earlier the bid, the bigger the payout. Here’s an example - a successful first bet (which must be made around 25% of the way around the track) earns you $9 million, while getting it right with a third bet (which happens 75% of the way through the race) will only get you $3 million. When all the players have either played all their cards or had their racers cross the finish line, the game is over and whoever has the most money in total (from race payouts and betting) wins.
The first thing that hits you during a game of Downforce is the delicious tension of the card play. Making the cars subject to the whims of every player is a wonderful design decision that needs to be played to be fully appreciated, particularly for how it handles randomness. You see, in most games, if you were the blue player and you looked down at a hand of cards that moved every car but blue, you’d be absolutely out of luck. Downforce escapes that pothole because of two reasons. The first of which is that the entire deck of cards is split up amongst all the players, so you know that someone around the table is silently swearing as they look at all the blue movement cards they’ve got; and the second is the betting.
The betting aspect of this game really elevates it beyond its straightforward ruleset. The variable payouts are great - sure, it’s easy to pick a winner in the final quarter of the race but can you do it early for the biggest payout? Also, to go back to that earlier example - if the Blue player’s staring at a hand full of cards that are great for Yellow, maybe it’s a good idea to just bet on Yellow all the way through instead? And I haven’t even mentioned the special powers that each player gets, which shake the game up enough that there’s no such thing as a sure thing in Downforce.
Downforce is actually a resurrection of a 1974 game called Tempo. Restoration Games, as is their specialty, acquired the rights, tweaked the rules, gave it a healthy coat of polish and re-released it. And, once you play it, you can see what they saw in it - this is an extremely enjoyable game.