This would absolutely get laughed out of a modern publisher pitch meeting, a nondescript track, a drafting phase for oddball characters, and then straight roll-and-move racing with special powers layered on top. On paper there’s nothing here a serious gamer is supposed to respect. In practice it’s become my gaming barometer, I use it to gauge whether someone’s actually going to fit with the rest of my collection. If they laugh and lean in during the draft, we’re on the same page. If they turn their nose up at “roll and move,” that tells me something real too.

The draft itself has more going on than the box suggests, you’re bidding on characters with wildly different abilities, some that manipulate dice rolls, some that mess with other players’ positions outright, and figuring out which combination of racers to secretly assign to which race is a genuinely fun little puzzle even though the actual racing afterward is mostly out of your hands. That’s sort of the whole joke and the whole appeal, you build a team, hand over control, and then just hope your strategy pays off while chaos happens on the board in front of you. Somebody compared it to getting invested in beetle wrestling or turtle racing and that’s exactly the right energy.

Component quality is genuinely a weak point, the character stands are flimsy and the board itself is about as plain as game boards get, which is a real ding against a company that’s put out much nicer production elsewhere. I know at least one person who gave their copy away and then bought it again within the year once they missed it, and I understand that completely, this is not a game that photographs well or sells itself on a shelf. Four stars instead of five purely for the components. The actual experience at the table, especially with a group that’s willing to take a race this silly a little too seriously, earns every bit of that score.