Thunder Road: Vendetta

I’ll be upfront, I generally can’t stand racing games, roll and move gets old fast and pure luck resolution usually bores me within twenty minutes. Thunder Road: Vendetta is the exception, and I think it’s because it never once tries to be a real racing game, it’s a demolition derby that occasionally remembers there’s a finish line.

You roll dice, assign them to your cars, ram people, shoot people, and the track itself keeps mutating as hazard tiles flip over. The Carnage at Devil’s Run expansion adds a fire mechanic that’s a genuinely perfect encapsulation of the whole design philosophy, roll a special die before you move and there’s a one in six chance your car just detonates, while every other result either douses the flames or hands you a speed boost. That’s the entire game in miniature, stupid, transparent, and somehow still tense every single time you roll it.

The theme integration goes further than it needed to and I respect it for that. Wrecked cars physically flip over to show a check-engine-light icon instead of getting quietly removed, which sounds like a small thing until you’re the one flipping your own car and groaning about it in front of the table. If you’re buying into the expansion ecosystem, and there’s a real ecosystem here, Carnage at Devil’s Run first for track variety, then Choppe Shoppe for the asymmetric crew powers, then the Big Rig expansion only if you’re actually hitting five players regularly.

The base game alone is enough for a solid night of yelling at your friends, but it’s also thin enough on its own that the expansions aren’t really optional if you want it to stay interesting past a handful of plays. It’s Burnout in cardboard form, and it knows it. Four stars for delivering exactly what it promises on the box, and for making a lifelong racing-game skeptic actually ask to play again.