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.
JOYRIDE DUEL: Next Gen is a bit of an oddity. It is marketed as the Mario Kart of racing games. That promises a certain amount of chaos and, indeed, chaos is what JOYRIDE DUEL has in mind. Rather than a fixed track, with the boundaries and prescribed routes such a thing necessitates, the board is open-world, with numbered gates you have to pass through in a particular order. There are exploding drones and flash grenades, oil slicks and mines that can be picked up on the track or acquired every time you pass through certain gates. The rules contain copious amounts of information concerning the collision of vehicles. Whether it’s a head-on or a side-swipe, you’ll know exactly what to do. The player dashboards have slots for damage, which slowly builds up and incapacitates your vehicle over the course of the race.
With all of these features in place, you too would assume chaos is the special du jour. Yet JOYRIDE DUEL is a surprisingly staid experience. Using a number of dice dictated by the gear you’re in, you zoom around the track, take corners, set up trajectories, and do your best to make it to the end, but it’s all much less dramatic than you’d expect. Across three races, I never added more than one or two pieces of damage to my car. I never did much of anything unexpected, and neither did my friends.
This isn’t because my friends are conservative on the track. Far from it. If ever there were a group predisposed to pushing the limits of this thing as hard as possible, it would be them. JOYRIDE DUEL rarely presents opportunities to hit one another. Even the items only come into play once or twice a race. All of the fun comes from doing things that aren’t racing a straightforward race, but JOYRIDE DUEL does nothing to encourage you to take your eyes off the prize. It is always more in my interest to drive well than it is to muck about with you, and vice-versa.
That’s a shame because JOYRIDE is at its best when it breaks from racing orthodoxy. Though you have to pass through the gates in a particular order, there’s no penalty for passing through an incorrect gate, and your route around the course is not prescribed in any meaningful sense. I experienced a quiet thrill the first time I saw someone edge over the line of their next gate and then shift down into first gear, which lets you reverse. Rather than hauling around the turn to continue, they were taking a cheeky shortcut, backing up and saving probably an entire turn’s worth of movement. Or there was the time I got knocked off course by my opponent, so I reversed and lined up a drone to blow him up. You don’t get that kind of action in Heat.
The flashes of excellence that absolutely are here come a little too infrequently to sustain me. JOYRIDE is at its best when players are plowing into one another, sewing chaos on what remains of the track. I’ve never played the full version, but I would immediately believe it if anyone told me the game gets better with more players. Mark even said as much in his review of the full box. If we consider JOYRIDE DUEL: Next Gen as its own game, it’s fine. If we consider it as a two-player adaptation of JOYRIDE, it’s a complete failure. It feels like there’s a car or two missing from this track, no matter what the box tells me.
JOYRIDE DUEL: Next Gen details
- Designer: Duncan Molloy, Pete Ward
- Artists: Pye Parr
- Publishers: Rebellion Unplugged
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 2
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 20 - 40 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Dice Rolling, Push Your Luck, Race, Turn Order: Stat-Based, Variable Player Powers, Variable Set-up
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.5428 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
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