“World Auto Racing” (WAR; 2022) is a car-racing card game self-published by designer Ariel Adamson with art by Mako Vice. It’s heavily inspired by media like the “Fast and Furious” franchise and street-racing as a whole. I think that most statistics for it (an 8.1/10 rating on Board Game Geeks; a 14+ age rating; a 2-5 person game) do accurately represent the experience of playing this game, though it’ll likely take more than 15-45 minutes.
Each player has one of five base cars, each with their own unique deck. Each round, players can add modifications to their car, make changes to the terrain (such as making the road slippery or adding a hairpin turn), use various instant cards (that can do things like temporarily boost your speed or ignore restrictions on your power), among a handful of other options. Admittedly, one of my two major mechanical criticisms does stem from this. I think that the decision to separate cards by their function and restrict the number of times you can play a certain-functioning card per round is a good decision in the grand scheme of the game. That said, combining one or two types of cards (maybe removing the distinction between tire and other modification cards, or combining control and team cards, for instance) would be valuable and make it a little less to keep track of.
At the end of each round, everyone counts their total motion (a calculation based on things like handling and power, with various factors that you add or multiply by), and the combined total is your movement for the round. The first player to reach 100 points wins. This is an area of awkwardness in the game design, though I don’t necessarily mind it mechanically; it’s just weird for the theming. It’s supposed to be based on street racing, but there’s no set “finish line” on the game board or even a specific course to go down. In many ways, setting it up this way is more reminiscent of endurance racing like 24 Hours of Le Mans, where you don’t necessarily know how “far” (i.e., how many rounds or how many laps) you’d need to cover to win – it’s just based on who can cover the most distance by a set point. Again, I don’t mind this mechanically, I just find it awkward thematically.
My second area of mechanical criticism is balance. In any game where you have different starting abilities and custom decks, each will have different strengths and weaknesses. In the hands of one player, a deck that gives you stronger handling but weaker power might be better than one that lets you control the field more, and vice versa. That’s not unbalanced. That just lends itself to different strategies. I’d even argue that slight balance issues are, if not good, at least unavoidable in games with different starting builds. That said, I do think that decks that are strong in handling or power rather than trying to control the field or balance both handling and power do have too much of an inherent advantage. I don’t think the balance is horrible, and I think it can be easily fixed for future editions (we removed one card from the handling-based deck, for instance, and it became much more even), but it’s an issue. The solution to this lies in a blend of buffing user-specific effects in control and environmental effects and nerfing or removing some of the strongest user-specific effects of other decks, but there are ways to somewhat address it as a house rule.
Finally, as I get into who I would or wouldn’t recommend this game for, I want to talk more about the audience of games. I already started to touch on it with the piece about 24 Hours of Le Mans and the article title, but I want to focus on it a bit more explicitly. WAR sells itself as a racing game. And it is one, there’s no denying that. But it’s not a racing game for car people. Every time I’ve tried to play this game with a car person, they’ve gotten too bogged down in the inaccuracies of game design in what they didn’t do to understand WAR for what it does do. It’s a strategic card game. It’s akin to games like “Magic the Gathering” or any deckbuilder ever. It happens to use cars as its theming. It’s not a game for car people. (To be clear, my sources on this include an amateur racer who built their own racecar and someone who has actually participated in a couple street races.)
I know I kind of tore into this game, but I don’t want this to be negative overall. There is a reason I opened by agreeing with WAR’s 8.1/10 rating. It’s an interesting racing game that does allow for a lot of customization and strategy while addressing some common issues in the genre (such as advantaging whoever goes first). The mechanical concerns I noted are real, but don’t ruin the experience. There is a lot that it has going for it. But it’s important to understand that it is a strategic card game first and foremost. If you are coming into this game because you love racing or are a car person, I would stress that the theming takes a backseat and mechanics are at the wheel.
Who is WAR for? This game is for people who like racing games but are looking for something a bit more strategic. It’s for people who liked my review of “Steampunk Rally” but thought it might be a bit too complicated. It’s for people who focus on mechanics over theming. But again, if you’re coming into this looking for a game adaptation of street racing as it advertised, this game is not that.