In my group, I’m one of the few people who likes racing games. Although the racing I do is in video games and go carts since amature racing seems like an expensive hobby to me. My fondness for racing means that I’ll look for racing board games too. Rallyman is a rally racing board game designed by an actual rally driver and his love of the sport shows through in this game.

Gameplay

Rallyman uses dice as part of the movement. Each die in Rallyman represents a gear so to upshift to first gear you use the first gear die and then to upshift to second you use the second gear die. That starts to make it sound like Formula De, a game which I don’t care for at all, but the two are very different because of the way they use the dice.

One whole turn uses all the black and white dice you want to use. Each die you use moves your car one space forward no matter what. Each die can only be used once in a player’s turn. Certain markings on the board limit the gear you can be in. At the end of your turn you grab a card of the gear you ended in which has a time value on it. Higher gear cards have less time on it than the lower gears since you’re going faster in the higher gears. At the end of the race, the player with the lowest time is the winner. These cards are also a reminder of what gear to start your next turn in. Since it’s not a die, it also allows you the only way to downshift and upshift in the same turn. For example, if you end a turn in 2nd gear, you can downshift to 1st and then back up to 2nd since the die for second gear wasn’t used yet in the turn.

I mentioned black and white dice back there. Well, the black dice have gear numbers on them and there are five from 1-5. There are two white dice that are used to maintain your current gear but move your car one space down the track. So the game play on a turn is to upshift or downshift, trying to be in the highest gear that you can and going as far down the track as you can while obeying the gear limits on the track.

The point of these gears being dice is to determine when you will lose control. The dice have two exclamation marks on them except the white die and first gear which have one exclamation mark. When you roll the dice, three or more exclamation marks means you lose control of your car. You turn over the card of the gear you lost control in and it tells you if you fly off the track to your left or right or stay on the track. It also adds 1 minute to your time while you straighten out your car and get it back on the road. Flying off the road means you need to look at the terrain in that direction and look at the board to see what that means. Going off in to grass does nothing beyond the time penalty, but hitting rocks will cause you to lose two black dice in addition to that time. That means you can only roll three black dice each turn, but those dice can change every turn.

So when you’re rolling the dice the game lets you do two different things. You either can roll all your dice at once and collect time chips for doing so but if you get three or more exclamation marks on those dice you lose control. Time chips subtract from your total time at the end of the race so most of the time you’re going to be rolling this way to “go faster”. The other way you can roll your dice is one at a time. Doing it that way you don’t collect time chips but you can choose to stop rolling whenever you wish. So after you see two exclamation marks you can choose to end your turn or press your luck by rolling the next die. So here, you’re driving slower to keep your car under control and reduce the chance of having an accident. The game also lets you spend a time chips you collected previously so that the die you’re about to roll is guaranteed to be good and you don’t even bother rolling it. This way you can drive even more carefully but it will cost you some more time.

Since this is rally driving, you’re not always on the track and the track isn’t completely flat. The game lets you cut corners, which let you go faster through the corner since you’re straightening out the corner by taking the short cut. When you do this you have to flip over a corner card. They’ll have one of three things on them. Either OK, splashing the corner or tire damage. If it’s OK, nothing happens and you keep driving. Tire damage costs you one of your white dice from this turn on, which can really cost you in the long run since they’re so useful. Splashing dirt on the corner means the gear rating for that corner is lowered by one for everyone else behind you. There are also bumps on the track that give you a boost of one space when you hit them. You can get an additional boost by going one gear higher, but you lose control if you roll an exclamation on that die, no matter what you rolled before. That’s a good spot to choose to roll them one at a time so you have the opportunity to play a time chip on that bump to keep yourself in control.

The boards are also two sided and it’s snow terrain on the other side. The game lets you set up your car with snow tires or regular tires. If you don’t have snow tires in the snow, you’ll wipe out in a second exclamation mark instead of the third one. But snow tires on asfault will only let you roll one white die. So a mixed surface race makes things even more interesting.

Thoughts
So the game is part puzzle when you’re plotting out your gear shifts. It’s part gambling when you’re trying to go fast or cut through the corners. But overall it’s a race game and feels like it. The players around you are going to push you to take risks when they take risks. The first guy cuts through a corner and you’re looking to cut the corner otherwise you’re going to be taking that corner slower than they did. Or you decide to play it safe and it pays off when the leader punctures a tire in a corner or loses control when they roll a bunch of dice at once and get too many exclamations. The mechanisms for how you use the dice cause you to do upshift and downshift in ways that make sense for real driving.

Game designers have to take some aspect of racing and try to translate it in to a game while dropping other aspects because of the nature of moving a real-time activity to a turn-based game. Rallyman does a really good job of finding a balance between those two things. The way the dice and cards are used make it feel like you’re dealing with risks under your control and not having randomness thrown at you. The game gives you a way to get around the track without ever having the possibility to lose control, but that won’t win many races. You could have driven around that track like a granny, but you wanted first place.

Since this race is time based, a rarity for racing board games, you might feel like you’re losing the first race as the 4th player, but as soon as the results are read off after the first course you’ll quickly realize that’s not the case.

There is a little bit of downtime at the start and end of the game because the rules for starting are that player’s starts are staggered. So it goes 1-1-2-1-2-3-1-2-3-4. Which means the fourth player takes their first turn on the 10th turn. Also when you end player one crosses the finish line, then usually player two a turn later so the ending usually goes something like 1-2-3-4-2-3-4-3-4-4. That one isn’t too bad since players can start adding up their times, but that start is killer as a 4th player when you just want to start the game. If you’re willing to splurge on a second set, there’s not too much of an issue, I think, with setting up the same board and having 3 more people play on a second board of the same course layout to make for a 6 player game without too much downtime.

One thing that tends to happen in games is that the first player takes a turn in a certain way and as long as it generally looks like it’s efficient and not too risky, every player behind them will repeat the exact same move. So sometimes you only start to get different moves when someone spins out or punctures a tire through a corner and then can’t duplicate someone else’s move. This will change as you play with people who like to take different amounts of risk or playing with different road conditions and players not having the same type of tire.

What’s to like: Good racing feeling. Lots of different courses to construct with only 4 boards. Rally racing, which is a theme that hasn’t been worn out by every other game.

What’s not to like: A lot of downtime at the start and end for some players. Drivers following in other’s footsteps causes random luck to be the decider sometimes.

Overall:  A