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 new Rush Hour puzzle entry, Rush Hour Duel, arrived at my doorstep recently. I know that, because I got a confirmation by e-mail that a package had just arrived. A couple hours later, I came up from my office cave in the basement to find that the game had not only arrived, but had already been opened and played three times by my wife and 12-year-old.
Yes, friends…Rush Hour Duel was reviewed before I could even open the box myself. This has never happened before, across more than 500 review copies received since I arrived here at Meeple Mountain.
“Dad, we got a new Rush Hour Duel game, and it’s great! I beat Mom three times,” said the 12-year-old when I came upstairs.
“Well, that is a review sample that came from the publisher.”
“Really? OK. Still, it’s great, I’m glad you picked it up.” Then they ran upstairs to slip into another evening activity.
I looked around, shocked, as if someone had just made off with my wallet. Those guys got Rush Hour Duel to the table before I could, I thought. What kind of respect is that?
For the uninitiated, Rush Hour is a game series from the Ravensburger toy puzzle arm known as ThinkFun. If you have kids and regularly visit your local Target, there’s a nearly 100% chance you have seen or own at least one of their STEM-adjacent games on the toy shelves; if not Rush Hour, maybe it was Rush Hour Jr., Gravity Maze, Zingo 1-2-3, or Roller Coaster Challenge.
We own or previously owned all of those games, so it’s not surprising that my family saw a box from ThinkFun / Ravensburger on the porch and assumed we had just bought the next game in the line. Still, I love that they ripped right into Rush Hour Duel, dove into the box, and knocked out a few plays…and those three plays only took about 10 minutes.
Here’s the Review: Buy It
Rush Hour Duel is a sliding-piece logic puzzle game for exactly two players. If you have already played Rush Hour or Rush Hour Jr. (and know this much: Rush Hour Jr. is still a good challenge even for the adults), Rush Hour Duel is the same game, but now it is a race to beat your opponent to get your logjammed red sports car out of the traffic maze first.
40 challenge cards—once again ranked from easy to super hard—await players, and the beauty of the challenges (like in every Rush Hour game) is that beating the challenges doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily remember HOW you beat each challenges weeks or months after each play. In Rush Hour Duel, players need to move a mix of dark blue trucks, orange sports cars, and light blue sports cars around a small grid to clear a path for your red car to move forward and into the winner’s circle quickly.
The easy cards aren’t that easy, and the super hard cards are ridiculous. That means there’s a nice array of challenges in the box for almost every kind of player. The rules are simple and the setup/teardown are even simpler. I did two sits for my seven plays: three plays, then four more the next day, and I think I’ve spent less than 30 minutes in total playing Rush Hour Duel.
This version is a nice change from the more peaceful, thinkier original game, and that is the break point that may or may not make Rush Hour Duel a game for you. Some people like to solve their puzzles peacefully. Rush Hour Duel is NOT that game. It’s a race—”2-Player Logic Race”, per the text on the box cover—and that’s going to work for some people like my 12-year-old and not necessarily for others.
That’s not a knock, but it is a warning. If you like to place your cute little challenge card on the grid then take your time working through a delightful puzzle, stick with the original games. If you want to beat a sibling with your brain might, run out and buy a copy of Rush Hour Duel right now. (I’m clearly getting older, so my 12-year-old destroyed me in our seven plays, with only the hardest challenges ending up close. On easy mode, the 12-year-old felt like they had invented Rush Hour Duel, and I’m still working through the emotional distress of those blowouts.)
I do have one knock on Rush Hour Duel, though. It’s a cheap product. I mean that both literally and figuratively. The MSRP for Rush Hour Duel is $25, and that’s a great deal for a product that should get a lot of run in your family-weight game closet. My copy lived on my kitchen table for a week and I’m putting it back after I wrap up the draft of this review. I’m very excited to work through the super hard challenge cards, in the hopes that I can finally beat my kids.
But the downside of this is that the cheap plastic cars in Rush Hour Duel don’t slide as well as they did in the original games. I even played Rush Hour Jr. a couple times to prep for this review, and confirmed my hunch: the cars not only look better in that older version of the game, but they slide easily from grid space to grid space.
When you are in a hurry to move cars in Rush Hour Duel—remember, it IS a 2-Player Logic Race!—cars that don’t slide well can create a number of problems. I regularly slid an orange sports car and found it to slide out of the ridges on the (again) cheap-feeling grid.
The cars are beyond basic; in fact, you’ll miss the variety of the cars from the original game if you happen to own the previous versions. I also wish the trucks and the light blue cars came in a different color, just to spice up the look of the thing on the table.
Those are production quibbles, and they are minor. If anything, the issue with cars sliding across spaces affects both players, so no one has a distinct advantage as a result.
If you are looking for a STEM-category game to play with your kids, I highly recommend Rush Hour Duel or any of the games in the Rush Hour line. I’m really happy that my kids (12 and 9) still like games like Rush Hour, strengthening the argument that kids of all ages like a good puzzle experience.
