Hot Streak Game Review

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 don’t know what’s in the water at CMYK, but we should do a study. In the last two or so years, the publisher of Wavelength, The Fuzzies, Spots, Lacuna, Wilmot’s Warehouse, and the new edition of Quacks has evolved into an absolute powerhouse, firing out great, idiosyncratic games at a pace most publishers can only dream of. Every three or four months, an email arrives in my inbox asking if I’m interested in covering their newest flight of Quixotic fancy. The answer is always yes.

When the email includes photos of a hotdog mascot miniature, the answer is definitely yes.

Hot Dog!

Hot Streak is an easy sell. It’s vibrant, the board rolls out of the side of the box, and the four mascot minis look straight out of a late-90’s Nickelodeon original. It couldn’t be easier to play, either. You place bets in a snake draft, then sit back and watch the race. Cards are dealt off the top of the race deck, dictating the movement of each character. There is little player agency involved in the race itself, but that’s part of the appeal.

Many of the cards move characters forward one or two spaces at a time, and others warp them ahead to checkpoints, but most of the cards are pure shenanigans. They cause mascots not only to move backwards, but to veer left and right, to fall down, or to turn around. Characters who have turned around will continue to give the race their all, they just do it in the wrong direction. Characters who fall struggle towards the finish, moving one space forward every time one of their cards is revealed. Those who are run over while already on the ground are disqualified, as are those who veer off the edges.

While the Newtonian motion of these races is something to see, the magic of the experience is rooted in the illusion of control. The deck only uses around 2/5s of the included cards, so the makeup is different every time you play. Before the first race, players see all the cards that have been chosen, which gives your bidding a sense of intentionality. Bets come in two flavors, Safe and Risky. Safe distributes the winnings more evenly between win, place, and show, while Risky bets heavily reward a first-place finish. There are also side bets, a binary yes or no question framed around some sort of outcome: Dangle will finish in the bottom two, for example, or the final stretch will be empty when the first mascot crosses the finish line.

All the bets are made publicly, and loudly declared. In addition to the cards dealt into the starting deck, each player gets a hand of three cards during setup. Once betting concludes, everyone adds a card from their hand to the deck before the race starts. I can double-down on my bet, trying to ‘roid up Mum with a 3, or, alternatively, if I see that everyone else is feeling confident about Gobbler’s prospects, I can chuck in an unexpected Fall Down in his suit.

The illusion of control will take you pretty far. The collapse of that illusion, it turns out, will take you further still. Hot Streak manages the near-impossible: your failures are funny. I can sit back, oozing confidence that my character will do well—he has so many cards in the deck, how could he not?—only for a Turn Around card to come out and for my boy, my beautiful boy, to run himself right off the bottom of the track and into last place. A character nobody expected to do well may finish first on fumes as everyone else collapses, the track strewn with groaning composite foam bodies trying to claw their way to glory.

At the end of the first race, you deal one card from the deck to each player. Bets are placed yet again, and everyone adds in a card from their hand. Wash, rinse, and repeat once more. I’ve played Hot Streak with people who never play board games, and I’ve played Hot Streak with people who know Gaia Project better than I know my own mother. They all loved it. The game store where I work has chosen a CMYK title as the game of the year the last two years, in 2023 and 2024. It is hard to imagine that’s not about to happen again in 2025. Whatever’s in the water at CMYK, we should all be so lucky as to take a drink.