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.
I’ve always enjoyed Heat: Pedal to the Metal, Asger Aleksandrov Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen’s smash racing game. It is a smart system. Managing the ebb and flow of your cards to suit the layout of whatever track you’re barreling down comes as close as I imagine a board game can get to feeling like a race. Any time I think about Heat, I imagine tapping the clutch and recklessly shifting up a gear as I head into a monster corner.
If I’ve always enjoyed Heat, it wasn’t until recently, when I finally got to play with car upgrades, that I came to love it. I agree with Mark’s review, the base game is a little too easy, a little too canned. When everybody has the same cards, the figurative course of a race feels predetermined. With the upgrades, that’s no longer true.
Consider my last race in España, where my friend Boris had drafted upgrades for a car that could make massive gains on straightaways, and I had taken a gamble on aggressive turns. I was worried that I had over-leveraged my position, since España has two mid-race stretches that I would need time to get through and Boris could cruise through in a matter of seconds.
Rather than the default Heat pattern of “Low gear into tight turns, high gear coming out of them,” I was just about doing the opposite. España is probably Heat’s trickiest course. It sets an unusual tempo, full of tight turns with only moderate straightaways in between. I sacrificed distance across those straightaways in the name of blasting through corners with as much as 3 points of extra speed, an enormous amount of cushion.
An unintended side effect of my drafting choices, of this lithe and underpowered car, was the ability to more or less ignore España’s tunnels, the new course feature in the Tunnel Vision expansion. A crucial part of hand management in Heat is the end-of-turn discard before drawing back up. This is how you get rid of unwanted high cards before a turn or perfidious low cards heading into a straightaway. If you end your turn in a tunnel, you can’t discard anything. This presented an issue for Boris and his muscle car, but as for myself, well, it’s hard to drive too hard around a corner when you can’t drive too hard at all. It was a coincidence, but I will accept praise.
The Nederland track is a comparative lark, a series of five twisty turns followed by an absolute screamer of a straightaway. España is unusual in Heat for being a one-lap track—trust me, one lap is plenty—but Nederland brings us back to the traditional three laps. This is not a track that would reward over-investment in corners, though a good pair of tires certainly wouldn’t steer you wrong.
The previous expansion, Heavy Rain, introduced a new upgrade, Liquid Cooling, which feels so good to use that you almost feel like you’re cheating. Tunnel Vision introduces Drafting, which isn’t as immediately gratifying. The trick with Drafting is that you have to move through empty spaces to use it, and you have to end up in a space immediately behind another car when you’re done. It’s just picky enough that my instinct is to avoid it while upgrading my car, but it forms a powerful combo with Slipstreaming if you’re able to pull it off. Five points of completely free movement in Heat is huge, especially if your opponent has made it around a corner and you haven’t.
I can’t pretend to be neutral here. Heat is one of the few games I intend to be a completist about, at least for as long as the expansions are good. Tunnel Vision’s innovations strike me as being for more experienced players, between the brutal fun of España and the particularity of Drafting, but Nederland is such a joy to drive that it might be my new default track. Hop back in the seat, buckle up, and slam the gas. These cars ain’t gonna drive themselves.
Heat: Tunnel Vision details
- Designer: Asger Aleksandrov Granerud, Daniel Skjold Pedersen
- Artists: Vincent Dutrait
- Publishers: Days of Wonder, Gém Klub Kft., Hobby Japan, Hobby World
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 1 - 7
- Age range : 10+
- Time range : 30 - 60 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Catch the Leader, Hand Management, Push Your Luck, Race, Simulation, Simultaneous Action Selection, Track Movement, Variable Set-up
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.21821 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
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