Taco Racers: Drafting – Real-time racing game

[Henry Iverson]

While goofing around with friends(all vaccinated, don’t worry lol), one of them said something, I can’t even remember what, that hit me with an immediate, massive hurricane of a brainstorm. Several game designs that I’d rolled around in my head just fused together to make this… insane sounding idea. A real-time racing game, like a prototype by another designer, but you build the cars in the first half of the game. Also, the cars are tacos somehow- maybe I was hungry at the time. So I took a walk, and I brought my little brother with me because he always helps me piece together how to make these things work. By the time I was back, I was ready to make a first prototype- it would not be a roll and write like I had first decided upon, but a fairly simple drafting game with a big exciting race at the end.

Important stats

Age: 8+

Intended game length: 20-30 minutes

Player count: High, max is at least 6

The building phase- 100% untested

First, each player takes a Chassis card, this decides how many cards of each type they may take. I’m skeptical of this bit and am likely to remove it.

Next, 10 cards are dealt to each player. They each take one and pass the rest to the player to their left, until the hands are empty.

The cars are then assembled, and each player discards any pieces they can’t fit in their chassis.

The racing phase- unrefined

Take dice of the colors and quantities specified by your cards. White and Yellow dice are 1-3, blue dice are regular 1-6.

All players begin rolling at the same time, rolling all of their dice at the same time. If there are any patterns in the dice that match those on their cards, they get to move spaces equal to how much Move you got. If you come to a turn, pause your movement until you can get Turn equal to or greater than the value next to it. You may, if you get 1 turn less than what it says, roll Breakdown and then continue.

Speaking of, how does breakdown work? It’s pretty simple, you just roll the red breakdown D6, then must roll white dice equal to what you got on the D6 until they are all on 3.(it works like Tenzi in that you can save any threes that you have already rolled and only re-roll the rest). After they all get on 3, you can start moving regularly. Also, if you have +1 on Breakdown, you may roll 1 fewer die, and -1 makes you roll 1 more.

Then I’m thinking of adding items like in Mario Kart, but I haven’t fleshed that out yet and will only actually put it in if needed in a later version.

First to finish 3 laps of the track wins!

Cards and Tiles

Alright, so I’ve made a bunch of cards(probably too many) and tiles for building a track.

I’ll include some concept art in my update next week(I can’t get back to my computer for a few days, but I’ll respond to y’all when I can).