Race for the Crown – Overview
Hello everyone and thank you for joining us. I’ll be putting together this series of blod posts on why we think this is a game that deserves to be on your table.
This post will be on overall gameplay. I’ll be adding new details on each aspects of the game in further posts as we go. So stay tuned for lots of news.
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The Game Overview
That all said. Let’s talk about the game. Race for the Crown is a Fantasy Chariot Racing Tabletop Game. Ok, that’s a bit of a mouthful but it’s accurate. The various races of Herenford have decided that they’re tired of killing each other constantly for control of the kingdom. It’s wasteful, they don’t get to spend time with their families and generally speaking, field rations are horrible. So, they’ve decided bypass all (or most) of the bloodshed and instead hold a yearly chariot race to determine who should rule the kingdom. Honestly, considering some politics it seems like a perfectly reasonable form of government.
The Rules
· Each team can enter up to 3 chariots pulled by a creature of their choice.
· The first team to get at least one of their chariots around the track is the winner.
· There are some other rules as well but honestly most of the teams just ignore them and the officials are usually drinking pretty heavily by the time it matters anyway.
The Setup
As a player you’ll choose one of 4 unique teams. Each team gets 1-3 chariots to enter the race. The number of chariots can vary depending on the number of players but generally you want 6-12 chariots on the field at the start of the game.
Each team has its own specific stats for their animals, driver and chariot. These can be updated for each chariot independently. As an example, Dwarves tend to be pretty defense in nature and don’t have the fastest chariots. But you have several build cards that you can use to adjust some of your chariots, We’ll get into this deeper on another post.
Each team has one unique ability. These abilities vary but could for an attack reroll, allow an extra side step or an extra perk choice. Each changes how that team plays and allows further customization.
Each chariot also also gets to choose between 3 Team Perks. Some of these are traps you can drop on the field, some affect the stats of your chariot and a few are innate magical effects. A lot of the customization at this level is to decide whether to enforce areas your characters are strong at or augment areas where they might be weaker.
The map is then configured to add some obstacles. There are some easy rules of where things are allowed to go and each of these obstacles can slow you down, or cause some damage etc. This makes each race play a bit different.
There are 2 types of terrain obstacles you’ll place. Rocks and Water, each with various sizes. The rocks are placed on the rock sections and the water is placed on the mud sections. The terrain causes blockages and areas you want to avoid, though you can run over them if needed.
Off to the Races!
So you’re all setup. Now what? Each chariot sets their movement and let’s everyone know they’re ready to go. Then, each of the chariots has a flag and number. Their tokens are put in a bag and you’ll from there to determine who goes first, second etc. we’ll go more into the turn order in a later blog but during the turns you can move, attack other players, attack their animals, and use your abilities or perks. You do this until you’re out of movement points determined, and the next player starts.
Combat is easy to manage but brutal. Your can ram your chariot into the opponent, run over their mounts or attack driver to driver. Or if you have a trap handy just toss it in front of their chariot to watch them crash. Each attack method has a modifier. To determine damage you roll your die, add the modifier and that’s your attack. Subtract the opponents defense and that’s the damage they take. There are also critical fails where they can effectively counterattack as well but we’ll get into that later.
There are two modes, 1 lap or 2 depending on how long of a race you want. As soon as someone pulls off the appropriate number of laps around the track without flipping or getting killed they win! The Kingdom is run by that race for another year.
So that’s it. I mean, that’s a super simplified version of it but in some of the future posts I’ll break into more details on each aspect of the game. As of the date of this post the art is mostly complete and we’re playtesting the rules and putting together prototype copies with a plan to launch on Kickstarter in 2023. We hope you’ll join us for the journey!
