Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
The success of CMYK’s Hot Streak has had the intended effect. I know, because while I was at Gen Con 2026 I saw a few more betting-style party games than I had in recent years, with Underdog Games’ Dino Racer leading the way at this year’s show.
Taco Cat Games—the company formerly known as Dolphin Hat Games, before leaning into the company’s most popular title, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza—is swerving left in a world where everyone else is turning right. Here’s what I mean: Taco Cat Games has been making fast, fun card games for a decade, with titles like Moose Match Mayhem! and Gimme That! leading the way with games that feature zero board and dozens of cards, dice, pencils, and yelling. But with their new release, Go! Go! Go Kart, I had a somewhat shocking conversation with Taco Cat’s CEO, Dave Campbell.
“Yeah, it’s a board game,” he told me when he handed over a review copy. “Let me know what you think; we’re really excited about it.”
After a few plays at home—including a four-player game with my two kids and one of their friends, along with the standard plays with my kids and the wife—I’m ready to see why Dave is so excited. Go! Go! Go Kart mostly avoids the problems I find with some racing games, because there is a nice velocity to each round’s structure.
And it never hurts to rip off a game like Hot Streak.
Go! Go! Go!
Go! Go! Go Kart is a betting game for 2-7 players that plays in about 30 minutes. Like Hot Streak, players don’t have racers of their own…instead, players must bet on one of the five karts in each game: Taco, Cat, Goat, Cheese, and Pizza. (Obviously.) Each kart token is a very cool-looking miniature with the smiling face of the card game’s mascot seated in different, brightly-colored vehicles.
The game has a very large board, with a simple track with large spaces that circles the outside of the map. All five karts are positioned behind the starting line, then the youngest player kicks things off by drawing and playing a card from the single deck used to drive the game’s action. Some cards move a single, specific kart forward; others move a kart ahead to one of the star spaces scattered around the track. Some cards move a racer back to another racer, and wild cards can move a kart forward or backwards a space or two.
Many cards feature a swap banner. This is important because the goal of the game is to hold the betting token of the kart that finishes the race first. At the beginning of the game, everyone randomly gets a kart token showing one of the five racers, but any time a player plays a card with the swap banner on it, they can swap their betting token with one from the center of the table, assuming the racer they want hasn’t been claimed by someone else.
That means chaos is everywhere. The kart you thought was going to win might get moved all the way to the back of the pack. Cards come up in a random order every time, with some races ending very close and others ending with a very wide margin of victory (or defeat, if you guessed poorly). My kids found ways to yell as often as they could, especially when they howled any time my racer was suddenly shoved to the back of the pack.
Scoring is simple: the racer that crosses the finish line is worth seven points to the player or players who are holding that kart’s betting token. Every other kart is scored based on their position on the track, with each space showing a number of points (1-5) awarded to anyone holding those betting tokens.
And no money is changing hands, making Go! Go! Go Kart a slightly better pick for younger kids than something like Hot Streak, with all the chaos and screaming you want in a game where you have very little control over the proceedings. Gamers like Hot Streak because there’s more of a “game” feel; in Hot Streak, I’m doing prop bets and I’m “strategically” adding a card to a draw deck that might never surface. All good; I like Hot Streak for the yelling, but the strategy game I imagined never really materializes when I play it.
Go! Go! Go Kart has a lot of the things players like about Hot Streak, with less downtime between rounds. After three races, the player with the highest score wins…and the third race scores are worth double, ensuring everyone (and every child, notable because I happen to know a few children who are still in that awkward “sore loser” phase”) is still paying attention when the proceedings wrap up.
My main issues with the game are twofold: player count, and game length. I would skip this title if you are only going to play it with two or three players. I think the chaos and the betting token swaps are the magic of the game, and my two-player game with my son was the only time I would say the game was average.
One other issue: occasionally, we had races where nothing happened for a longer-than-expected series of turns to start. Move X backwards, or move X to Y racer, or other game effects where no kart left the start area for 5-6 turns. Similarly, we had a race where it felt like karts were not making meaningful progress towards the finish line. The best races had 2-3 karts making progress towards the finish line with a race that wrapped up in less than 10 minutes. When Go! Go! Go Kart is that game, it is very much worth your time.
