By their nature, deck building games tend to be a bit of a slow burn. The format of starting with a small deck of basic cards and gradually buying more in order do do whatever it is the game wants you to do more efficiently doesn’t seem like it would lend itself particularly well to the theme of high-octane racing. And I don’t think it would.
Rally racing, on the other hand, is a different thing all together, and something I must admit I wasn’t really aware of before I picked up Dirt & Dust, designed by Petr Čáslava with artwork by Jakub Politzer. In spite of not having much interest in auto racing, I’ve become a little obsessed with racing board games thanks to the likes of Thunder Road: Vendetta, Lacorsa, and of course the ubiquitous Heat: Pedal to the Metal. Dirt & Dust caught my attention, but deck building seemed like an odd choice for a racing game until I took a little time to learn more about the particular type of race the game is designed to emulate.
Most forms of racing are focused on getting to the finish line first, and by extension each car’s position relative to the other cars in the race. But rally racing tends to be about endurance and navigation, with cars often starting at staggered intervals and victory determined by the shortest time taken to get from the beginning to the end of the course. Rally races tend to take much longer to complete, and the only direct competition is each driver’s score at the end of the race. Now that sounds more like a deck building game to me.
A Deck Building Game With Some Interesting Variations
The setup and basic game play for Dirt & Dust will be familiar to anyone who has played a deck building game before. Each player starts with a basic deck of ten cards, but the game already veers away from the norm a little bit here, with half of each starting deck made up of cards related to a specific, unique driver, making each deck asymmetrical right out of the gate. At the center of the table sits a stack of 10 cards representing the race course – each card indicates a road hazard such as rough ground or a sharp turn, with the first six cards played out in a row to give players an idea of the terrain ahead.
Additionally, each player has their own small board in front of them for keeping track of their car’s position relative to the center of the road, the amount of damage the car has taken, and how much of each of the game’s two main resources the player has accumulated.
Like most deck building games, the core game mechanism is playing cards to generate one or more different types of resource, and then spending those resources on game effects or better cards for the player’s deck. Dirt & Dust adds an interesting wrinkle to the standard format here as well, by adding a dice placement element. At the start of each turn, players roll three six-sided dice and place them above slots on their board. Cards are played to slots on the board, but their game effects are normally only activated when a die above the card is spent. At the end of each turn, cards move one slot to the right until they fall off the end on the board, at which point they’re discarded and eventually reshuffled. This adds a very interesting strategic element to the game, as you can re-use a good card over multiple turns as long as you place it in a good spot and get lucky with your dice rolls.
Get Your Motor Running, Head Out on the Highway
The more utility-focused of the game’s two primary resources is wrenches, which can be spent to buy new cards but also to mitigate dice rolls by adding or subtracting from an unspent die’s rolled value, and thus moving it to a different column where it can potentially activate a different card.
The other main resource in the game is traction, which is used to place markers on the cards, called stages, at the center of the board, thematically moving the player’s car along the race course. Each set of course cards has a prescribed order, with the first six spread out at the start of the game. Players can pick and choose which stage to place a marker on – they don’t have to go in order and can skip any they don’t want to play on for whatever reason. When a marker is placed on a stage card, the player moves their car a number of spaces to the left or right on their personal board. This movement conceptually represents how difficult it is to control the car over this particular part of the course, with sharp turns and other hazards requiring more sideways movement. Being in the center scores more speed points at the end of each turn, and being at the far left or right scores popularity instead of speed – the audience loves it when drivers make dangerous moves, after all.
In addition to moving to the left or right, a player’s car can be in one of two different rows on their board, representing whether the car is accelerating or decelerating. Each position has its own advantages and disadvantages, and activated cards have different effects depending on which row the player’s car is in at the time. Moving between the rows can only be done via a specific effect on an activated card, so a lot of the game play involves the order in which you activate your cards, speeding up and slowing down to get the effects that you need at any given moment.
The Crowd Goes Wild
Seeing drivers push their vehicles to the limit is (I imagine) one of the most exciting things about rally racing, and that idea is reflected in the game by hazard dice and popularity. Each player has access to three hazard dice, which they can add to their dice pool to gain extra traction. The sides of a hazard die are a mix of damage and/or popularity icons – when rolled, the player’s car will take any damage indicated but may also gain popularity, which functions as a third currency and grants whoever has the most at the start of each round an extra die to roll.
Every five points of damage gives the player a counter indicating a permanent problem that they will have to deal with for the rest of the game, generally by increasing the resource costs for different types of actions or causing additional sideways movement when placing a marker on a stage card. This is one element of the game that gives it a sense of urgency – permanent damage is inevitable, so you want to make sure to maximize your actions of a certain type before they become more expensive or difficult to do.
At the end of each round, the lowest numbered stage card leaves play, and any player who has a marker on it scores speed points depending on how their car is positioned. The game ends after ten rounds, with the winner being the one with the most speed points after a few modifiers are calculated: the most and second-most popular each get a bonus, each hazard die still in a player’s dice pool at the end of the game loses them a point, and some purchased cards give a bonus or penalty to the player’s final score.
A Lonely Road
The most consistent criticism leveled at Dirt & Dust so far has been that there is little to no player interaction – that is true, and according to the designer it is entirely intentional. The rules instruct players to take their turns simultaneously (although so far I prefer to play in turn when playing with others), only interacting at the end of each round to resolve the stage card and see who gets the popularity die for the following turn. Just like in real rally racing, players really are doing their own thing to try to get the best speed score they can by the end of the race. Even buying new cards is done from multiple stacks of identical cards, so there’s no real competition there either unless a stack is down to its last card, which seems unlikely to happen based on the games I’ve played so far.
Unsurprisingly, the game has an integrated solo mode, and perhaps somewhat ironically, there is more interaction with the solo bot than there is with actual players in the multiplayer game. In a solo game, the “ghost driver” rolls a fixed set of regular and hazard dice; each regular die is randomly paired with a hazard die, and at the end of each round they will score speed and popularity points based on the hazard dice results unless the human player blocks them by sacrificing matching dice from their own pool. The player can affect the ghost driver’s game in a way that isn’t available in a multiplayer game.
Who Is it For?
Dirt & Dust is definitely not a “racing” game in the sense that many board gamers have come to expect – it’s not a race to see who can get to the finish line first. It is absolutely a multiplayer solitaire game where players try to earn the best score they can using some interesting variations on what has become the standard deck building game mechanism.
If you like non-confrontational games that allow you to do your own thing without interference from the other players, you will probably enjoy it. If you are a fan of deck building games in general, you might find this game’s particular spin on that mechanism intriguing. I honestly found the solo mode to be a little bit more engaging than the multiplayer game, so solo players should definitely give this one a look.
And of course, if you are a fan of rally racing, Dirt & Dust would likely be a good fit – I would especially love to hear from rally racing fans about whether or not the game does a good job with whatever it is that makes that particular auto sport interesting and exciting. If you’re a rally fan who gets a chance to play the game, let me know what you think in the comments!
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