Joyride Duel: Next Gen Board Game Review

Joyride Duel: Next Gen

WBG Score: 9

Player Count: 2 (for this particular box)

You’ll like this if you like: Gaslands, Thunder Road Vendetta, Mario Kart

Published by: Rebellion Unplugged

Designed by: Duncan Molloy, Pete Ward

This is a free review copy. See our review policy here

By Steve Godfrey

So, yes, you could go and buy a Switch 2 with Mario World for a large amount of money. Or you could instead try and possibly buy Joyride Duel for around £30 and still have money left over to take someone special in your life out for a nice 3 course dinner. I mean you could, but let’s face it, we’re gamers and would probably just use the extra cash to buy more games. 

How to Joyride

Set up the map per the scenario you want to use and have each player take one of the cars and take either the standard abilities or the asymmetric ones depending on which ones you're using. It’s recommended to use the standard ones if anyone playing is new to the game. 

Determine a start player and place your cars on the start line in turn order. It’s worth noting that each car will take up two hexes of space. Then both players roll two dice and move that many spaces in a straight line. The dice are then placed on the rear view mirror on their player board without changing the values. 

Each race will have a start/ Finish line and a number of checkpoints. To win you have to complete the required number of laps making sure you go through each checkpoint in order before you can complete. However, the great thing about Joyride is that there’s no enclosed track or defined route to follow. So you can go through these in any direction and as long as a part of your car touches the line then you’re considered to be past it……the line…..not that you've gotten old.

On your turn you’ll go through a number of different phases. 

Start: Not much happens here except you can use any items you may have in this step. 

Lock: Take any number of dice from your mirror and place them in the locked slots on your board. Then move that many spaces forward. 

Shift: Here you have the option to use any items you have (you may have picked this up on the previous step.) you also have the option to shift gear up or down. If you shift up, add a dice to your mirror. Remove one if you shift down. The gear you're in should reflect the number of dice you have access to. If you don’t have any dice on your mirror to remove then you can’t shift down. 

Roll: If you have any dice on your mirror you must roll all of them and then move that many spaces. 

End: This is where any end of round effects play out and you can have a final go with one of your items. 

Up until now any movement you make is in a starting line, however, once per turn you can steer your car either in the lock step or the roll step. You will have three hexes in your front arc and when you steer you move your car (at the start of your move) into either the left of the right of those. Whenever you move make sure that the back end of your car moves into the space you just moved out of. If you moved in the lock step and you are in second gear in the roll step, either by staying in that gear or you just shifter into it, you can perform a second steering move. You can’t do this twice however if you didn’t move in the lock step. 

There are items you’ll collect by going through certain gates or picking them up on the track. In this version you’ll have Flashbangs, Drones, oil slicks and Mines. Some are dropped behind you to hinder opponents later on (or maybe even yourself!) or fired in front of you (that’ll teach them for trying to win the race!) 

You’ll also have special abilities that you can use to help you but they are generally one and done. However when you cross the finish line you can refresh one for every person who went past the line before you. So getting over the line first means you get none back. 

Roads? Where we’re going we don't need, roads

Every racing game so far has tried different ways to simulate racing whilst still trying to keep it as strategic, tactical and as fast feeling as possible. How well they do on that front varies but the one problem that they all suffer with is that they all rely on those annoying restrictive tracks. Yep, going round and round in circles the same direction can be fun but what if you didn't have to. What if you could do what every Grand Theft auto game has taught you and drive wherever and in whichever direction you want. Well Joyride does that and gives you relative free reign of the map. With the only real rules being, don’t drive off the edge and don’t ram into barriers. Well you can if you want but it’s not really advised. You’ve got all the freedom you need to approach each track in your own way thus giving you a ton of options in terms of your overall strategy and ultimately the game's replayability.

What I ultimately love about it is that even if you’ve been nudged off the course you were taking it doesn’t necessarily mean that your race has been ruined. It may just mean that you’ve got to take an alternate route which might see both cars careering towards each other in a game of chicken to cross the same checkpoint and who doesn’t want that type of excitement in their race? That freedom just makes every race that much more exciting. Just as you think someone may be out of the race they manage to find a new route or the clever use of a special ability or item that puts them right back up into contention to make for a nail biter of a race.

The joys of the open road

All that freedom of an open track is great, but let's be honest, it's not really chaotic enough is it? Never fear because in true Mario Kart style they’ve thrown in some weapons and items to make sure true chaos ensues. There are four in the box, Oil Slick, Mine, Drone and Flashbang, each with their own way of causing chaos and messing with your friends best laid plans. There’s a simplicity and malevolence to each item that will have you cackling to yourself……who am I kidding, out loud, as you stick a well placed mine right in the path of another player to truly ruin their day. The flashbang blocks up their lock slots leaving their turn to just the roll step. The drone finds them and explodes on impact and the oil slick forces them to steer as they leave and stops them from steering again. Of all of them the oil slick is the only one that has the potential to be used for good as it essentially gives you a free steer action. My advice, place carefully, and by that I mean, wherever it can cause the most chaos. 

Joyride welcomes (partially) careful drivers.

There are some racing games that choose to focus mainly on strategy (Heat, Rallyman GT) and there are others that focus more on the chaos (Gaslands, Thunder Road Vendetta) Joyride however seems to have an equal love of both and that’s absolutely reflected in the two dice steps on your turn. At first I questioned why the separate lock step and the roll step would make much of a difference but they absolutely do.

The lock step is your chance to grasp some form of control over your turn based on the facts you have in front of you, i.e. your dice values. It lets you put a semblance of a plan in place and hopefully set yourself on the right path, or at the very least help you get out of a tight spot. The roll step however is where the element of chaos rears its majestic head. Yes you have some sort of control over how many dice you roll (if any) depending on if you decide to shift up or down and that mitigation can be much needed. What you roll though is up to the fates and the results can often end up bringing some of the best moments in the game. It’s those risks you take that lead to those tense moments when you roll the dice knowing that anything above a certain number will have you careening into a wall and that huge reaction from the players, regardless of whether you succeed or not is absolutely joyous.

At first it looks like going through all of these steps each turn is going to drag the game to a halt. Once you pick up how it works, which shouldn’t be long, then you'll find that turns can be over relatively quickly. There may be a few moments of thinking time if someone has parked a car or a mine in front of you on the previous turn but going through the actual steps is still pretty swift. So much so that there's been time where I thought I’d missed some rules

Duel of the fates

In the current climate where every game seems to be getting their own dedicated two player spin off, It’ll surprise no one to know that Joyride duel is the two player version of a bigger game that can play with up to four players. The difference with this one is that, apart from a smaller board, nothing is different. Every rule I’ve described and pretty much any praise I’ve heaped upon this game you can easily transfer onto the 4 player version. I’ll admit though to being a bit sceptical of a two player version of a game that relies on player interaction to provide a large portion of its fun. Is making a smaller board the only thing you need to make this game work just as well at two as it does with more players? Yeah, apparently that's all it takes. Within the first couple of turns of our first game we were colliding with each other.

Eventually we’d got hold of items and were using them against each other and before the end of our first lap our race was already taking wildly different paths. So much so that by the end of the race we were both on lines that would have easily taken us into a head on collision had we not both been on the road to the finish line in what was a tense end to a great race. They've managed to make a minimal change and still keep what appears to be the energy and feel of the 4 player game. I’ve not played this one yet but I’ve seen plenty of playthroughs and the vibes definitely feel the same. The great thing is that this box is relatively inexpensive. I’ve seen it go for about £25-£29 and if Joyride appeals to you and two players is your main player count then it's definitely worth checking out. Especially if you combine it with the fact that you can get any of the extra car expansion or the bigger box and everything is compatible. Even some of the maps in this box are able to be played with 3 and potentially 4.

Damage just isn’t what it used to be.

If I have any minor gripes then it's with damage. The job of damage is to make you more inefficient by taking higher gears, weapons and lock dice slots away. So every time you take damage it should feel like a tough decision in terms of where you're going to place it on your board. The problem is that with this smaller map you’re not very likely to hit 5th gear and 4th can be used but not often enough that losing it will be a detriment. The same with the lock dice. I’ve never felt the need to use all four of those slots. So for me it feels like that decision isn’t as devastating. It’s going to take a few points of damage before it really starts affecting your game. Unless of course you're having a particularly item heavy game, or you've been tricked into driving into a painted tunnel on the side of a rock many times and you just keep hitting walls. (Stupid Roadrunners) The threat of damage never feels like, well just that, a threat. There are a couple of races in this box that make you start with damage already on your car and there's nothing to stop you from doing that with every track if you feel you want more of a challenge. 

The components add so much to this as well. The cars are big chonky (yep I said chonky) wooden pieces that are just fun to drive around the board the artwork for each driver is a lot of fun and the drivers abilities are thematic to each of them. An expansion one that I love is the pirate that can hook people with an anchor and pull them in. The art on the player boards can feel a bit busy and maybe so can the cars so to help with that and colour blindness, each board has a side with simpler art and uses iconography for the cars. Similarly the cars can be flipped to show just their icon for ease of identification.

Joyride Duel is well worth the price of admission. If you want simple small scale chaos in a short amount of time then this fits the bill, and let's face it, who doesn't want that after a hard day at work? 

Right, I’m off to attach Joyride style items to my car, I’ll let you know how it goes!

UPDATE: My wife wouldn’t let me do it :(