You’re screaming ahead of your opponents and taking a daredevil corner at “way too many” miles per hour, pushing your engine to the limit, delicately slipstreaming between your fellow racers. That feeling, surprisingly, is actually racing! The genre is dominated at the same time by random chance and pensive number-crunching, turning fabulous ideas into slow crawls. Rarely do tabletop games manage to capture a feeling as well as Heat: Pedal to the Metal - and it’s a feeling that’s vanishingly rare within the genre of racing games.
Heat: Pedal to the Metal Tom Brewster, video goblin at Shut Up & Sit Down To celebrate, Polygon asked more than a dozen writers, designers, presenters, actors, and personalities from around the world of tabletop gaming to tell us which games stood out to them this year. It all added up to a bumper crop of new board games. As a bonus, the annual convention circuit was back in full swing with near normal attendance at marquee events such as Gen Con and Essen Spiel. A load of new games finally cleared customs and made their way into the hands of eager fans.
Things felt blissfully normal this year in the land of board gaming, with groups the world over beginning to regularly gather together in person around the table once more.
