Restoration Games has brought back a half-dozen old board games since the company was founded a few years ago, including one of my childhood favorites, Stop Thief!, which was kind of a precursor to modern games that ask you to download an app to help you play. (The original Stop Thief! came with a battery-operated “phone” that would give you clues in the form of sounds to tell you if you’d found something or even located the thief – and, if he escapes, sounds of him running or breaking glass so you can guess where he went.)
One of their first redesigns was the game now known as Downforce, which has existed under multiple names going back to 1974, when designer Wolfgang Kramer released his first game, an abstract game called Tempo. He repurposed the basic mechanics of that game for a series of car-racing games, including 1996’s Top Race, which seems to be the last iteration of this game until Restoration brought it back in 2017. This new version has slick graphics and very simple to learn game play that still has the same core mechanic where players play cards to move six cars around the track, but where the card you play likely moves some of your opponents’ cars forward too, and you can win the race but still lose the game depending on how every player bets.
Players begin the game with a hand of cards that varies with the number of players – you deal out the entire deck of 42 cards, ditching any remainder if you have 4 or 5 players – and then use those cards to bid for the six cars in the ‘auction’ that ends with all cars assigned to players. When you win a car in the bidding, you get two additional cards: one that lets you move that car 8 spaces (and doesn’t require you to move any other cars), and a card with a special power unique to you for that game, with some more useful than others. (My favorite is the one called Tricky, where you have the option to execute the moves on any card you play from the bottom up, rather than from the top down, so you can choose which is most advantageous and may be able to use the card to create or clear a bottleneck.)
Each player then plays one of their cards on each turn. The cards have from one to six rows, each row showing a number and a car color; the player moves all of those cars the displayed number of spaces, going from top to bottom, if possible. (Cars can be blocked when the track narrows in the three turns; you can and should use that to your advantage.) Some cards have spaces marked ‘wild,’ which you can assign to any car not already shown on the card. Players go around the table playing these cards until all six cars have crossed the finish line or the remaining players with cars on the track have run out of cars.
Games take about 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the number of players and how quickly everyone takes their turns. My seven-year-old niece had no problem keeping up with the game after she sat and watched the adults play once, just needing a little guidance on using the cards to her best advantage. (I think it took a little longer for her to grasp the way the cards worked when certain cars would be blocked partway through a move.) And who doesn’t love a race car game … especially one that doesn’t suck?