ok after opening it on arrival day I found it was missing the red 8 sided 3rd gear die. I contacted Asmodee and waiting for them to get back to me. Anyway we had our first game last night using google to randomise the 8 sided roll for the 3rd gear, it worked for us but just a pain having to swipe, input phone code to get it to google. hey ho. It was just my wife and myself last night and found quite enjoyable. plenty of luck with the rolls but you have to decide what gear to go into for each corner and whether to risk a high roll to get you edge to exit or not. really like that mechanic. The board is big but very nice and detailed. Not actually looked at the road track on the other side yet but I think we will be playing that one tonight. If not we will play the Monaco track again but with advanced rules. Had a good read last night of them and they certainly add some more risk and dangers into the mix. Once we have the grasp of it I will be taking it to work on our Thursday games night, (after hours so we normally start when guests have left at 11:30pm, we both work in a pub). Last Thursday there were 6 of us but we only had monopoly deal-5 player, Pandemic-4 player and Camelup which we all played but Formula D is 10 player so that will accommodate all of us if we are there this week.
Our race last night was fairly close on the last few corners where I took the lead even though it was by 3 spaces but my wife had a better gear to exit the last corner so she over took me and went on to win. We only did one lap to test the game. We only used 5-6WP each so no real risk there (basic rules) but having a read of the advanced rules and looking at the other side of the dashboard thing you have a lot less room for error or risk. this should make the game a bit more tactical. Lucky rolls still needed but having less WP on different components should make it interesting.
First impressions:
Design 10/10 love it. Great track, Box is sturdy and big. Everything has a place and packed away nicely.
Quality 8/10 Great design, style. The cars are a little too dinky but I imagine it's hard to do too much detail on them considering how small they are.
Mechanics 5/10 not a great deal of them. More luck than planning but you still need to think ahead a few turns. this is based on basic rules/gameplay.
Game play 8/10 fairly simple game, quick once you know how to play it. Had to head to the instructions once or twice on our first game. this is based on 2 players.
Once I play it again with either basic or more than likely the advanced rules set and a few more players I imagine the two lower marks will increase. i will edit this post when I play it again.
