Announcing the 2023 GeekDad Game of the Year

Well, another year has gone by and we’ve gotten to enjoy so many great board games. We picked ten of our favorites from the year and announced those as our finalists in November, and then got together at Rob Huddleston’s home this past weekend to play through the whole set and see which game would emerge victorious. We always try to make our finalists list diverse, both in terms of subject matter and in game mechanics, and this year’s list had a lot of breadth, from a cooperative party game about mashed-up movie titles to a complex strategy game about managing a football team. While that does mean that our list of finalists includes something for everyone, it also makes comparing any two games a difficult process!

This year, the title that beat the rest of the pack to take the checkered flag was Heat: Pedal to the Metal, designed by Asger Harding Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen, illustrated by Vincent Dutrait, and published by Days of Wonder. Congratulations!

Check out Michael’s original review if you’d like a more in-depth overview of the game, or keep reading for our thoughts on what made it our Game of the Year.

I’ve long been a fan of Flamme Rouge, a  bicycle racing game by Asger Harding Granerud, the co-designer of Heat: Pedal to the Metal. So when I heard that he and Daniel Skjold Pedersen had teamed up to make a game about auto racing in the 1960s, I was in. Heat: Pedal to the Metal takes the core card mechanics developed for Flamme Rouge, and expands upon them with a great risk/reward system which involves how much heat your engine can take while you jockey to get out ahead of your opponents and cross the finish line first. It’s got gorgeous thematic artwork throughout by Vincent Dutrait, my favorite board game artist. The game is easy to teach, and comes with mini expansions allowing you to customize your cars, change the weather, and even run a full championship season. Most importantly, the game is very well balanced. If you’re in last place, it always feels like some good strategic card play, coupled with a sprinkling of luck, will allow you to not only catch up to your opponents, but overtake them. Heat: Pedal to the Metal is an exciting, engaging tabletop experience that’s always fun and never frustrating. Which is exactly what I’m looking for when I sit down to play a board game.

It seems like every year that we play through the Game of the Year finalists, there’s at least one game that I decide that I need to add to my collection right away. This year, that game was Heat. In fact, I went to Barnes & Noble the very evening we played it and picked up a copy. The game includes just enough details to stay faithful to the theme without getting so bogged down in minutia that it becomes more like an exercise in bookkeeping and rules memorization than game play. It’s a quick game to learn, and nicely combines elements of strategy and luck to keep players guessing while also keeping them in control. But the most impressive aspect of the game is that every game we played (and we played this game four times over the weekend) was close. In our final game two racers–Paul and my son Xander–got so far behind that in almost every other racing game they would have given up, but the design of Heat is so good that Paul ended up finishing the race in second, and had Xander had a slightly better final draw, he likely would have beaten me as well. I’m looking forward to introducing this game to my local gaming group and to the rest of my family, because I know that both are very likely to love it. 

As a general rule, I find that I am often skeptical about board games like Heat: Pedal to the Metal that rise to prominence in such a mercurial fashion, but after getting Heat to the table in preparation for award season, I can confidently say that this game is a deserving winner for this year’s GeekDad Game of the Year. I love a good racing game, like the previously GeekDad-approved titles Downforce and Thunder Rolls, but I’ve always felt that the balance of luck and strategy was a bit off and that if you happen to fall behind early, your chances of overtaking the leader were slim at best. This however is where Heat: Pedal to the Metal shines – the game includes several catchup mechanisms between the push-your-luck dance of adding heat and cooling your engine, the speed limits on the corners, and the adrenaline and slipstream bonuses, that even when you seem so far behind, one big turn can put you back into contention. Another common pitfall for racing games is their replayability, especially when the tracks and their respective difficulties are a known quantity, but with the addition of the different weather and road condition modules, not to mention the 4 tracks included in the base game (and the several fan-made circuits available on BoardGameGeek) each race is guaranteed to present different challenges at every turn. All in all, with the combination of smooth and easy to understand mechanics, fantastic Vincent Dutrait artwork, and a player count that accommodates both solo play and a crowded starting block of up to 6 cars, Heat: Pedal to the Metal is a great game for both new and veteran gamers alike that lives up to the hype and captures the Game of the Year checkered flag with ease.

Over the course of the weekend, we played Heat four times, in part to try it with/without the automated pilots and weather effects, and also so that Rob’s family could give it a shot as well just for some additional perspectives. On our fourth play, I finally won the race and joked that it only took me four games to figure out how to drive my car. The truth is, I really liked playing with the heat mechanic in the game, and I think that’s one of the things that really makes it exciting for me. Throughout the game, there are various ways you take on heat, which represents pushing your engine past its limits, whether it’s boosting your speed on a straightaway or racing around a curve well past the safe speed. Once you do that, you can only get rid of the heat by cooling down, which happens a little if you’re in last place or a lot more if you downshift to 1st gear. But who wants to downshift during a race, right? Instead, I took some risks and got to demonstrate to everyone what happens when you don’t have enough cards to play—at the time I took the photo above, I was in fourth gear and wasn’t able to downshift enough, so my car stalled out! It cost me that race, but I knew the risks. The last time, I was able to play it safer, timing some downshifts around a few turns and letting a few cars pass me so that I could slipstream past them to the finish line. Heat: Pedal to the Metal can give you close finishes, incredible comebacks, and spectacular burnouts, making it a crowd-pleaser.

I had the opportunity to first play Heat: Pedal to the Metal almost a year ago and fell in love with it then. In fact, at the time I was writing up my review, I thought, ‘This could be the next GeekDad Game of the Year.’ A racing game is not usually one of my first go-to games. However, Heat has totally changed that. When I get together with a group of friends or family, I am excited to introduce them to this game. First off, the game looks incredible and has a great table presence. The miniature race cars and the dashboard with shifter piece gives the impression of sitting in the cockpit of a racecar. The dashboard also doubles as a reference to remind players of the steps for each turn. In fact, once you learn the basics of the game and the symbols, you will rarely have to refer to the game manual.

While all of these features add to the game, I really enjoy the gameplay. While you want to go as fast as possible, most of the tracks have several tight turns that require you to slow down. Yet you can still blow through them as long as you can pay for the speed overage with heat from your engine. This ‘push your luck’ mechanic is at the heart of the game for me. Do you speed around a turn while the rest of the pack is slowing down and dump all of the heat cards from your engine into your discard pile? Do you spend a heat to get an extra boost? However, those heat cards eventually end up in your hand and require you to eventually down shift to cool down and put them back into your engine.

I also like the catch-up mechanics which help keep the race close. In fact, being in the lead prevents you from some of the advantages such as slipstreaming which can propel you a couple extra spaces. While the basic game is fun by itself, the advanced modules act like expansions that are included with the game. Weather and road conditions modify various parts of the track so you don’t get the same track twice while the Garage module lets you customize your car by drafting components to prepare for the track after you see the conditions. If one race is fun, the Championship series has players racing on several tracks to win the cup. Finally, the ability to add automated drivers is so easy to do; I almost always use them so there are six race cars on the track–and sometimes they beat the live players! I am so excited that Heat: Pedal to the Metal has earned the 2023 GeekDad Game of the Year. In order to celebrate, I think I will play another race because the more I play this game, the more appreciate the designers who blended theme, game mechanics, and a beautiful art style into a masterful game.

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