Leder Games made its name as a publisher with the merciless and totally asymmetrical strategy game Root, cemented its reputation for idiosyncratic heavyweight titles by following up with Oath, and made it a hat-trick with 2024’s revolutionary 4X game Arcs, one of the best board games ever. And as if to surprise us all it’s just announced ‘Kart’, a racing board game based on the wholesome childhood pastime of piloting rickety soapbox racing karts downhill, powered only by gravity and sheer nerve.
Basic information about the game is already listed in a Kickstarter preview, though there’s no launch date or price point yet. The base game will be for 2-4 players and will play in about 90 minutes, marking it out as a middle-weight board game compared to Leder Games’ big hitters.
According to the Kickstarter blurb for Kart, “gravity calls the shots”. Throughout the race, each player’s ramshackle kart will build up speed and get ever harder to control. The race track will throw challenges at you, bogging you down in mud, putting crash hazards in your path, and even knocking pieces off your kart.
The title of the game immediately put me in mind of Mario Kart, and while the theme here isn’t quite as fantastical, you will be able to grap pick-ups like energy drinks you can chug or water balloons you can yeet at your opponents. And you’ll be able to “catch big air off a ramp”, which – unlike most times a DIY Kart has caught air in real life – will only impress the crowd, not put anyone in hospital.
The fact that this is a one-lap race had me wondering if it abstract the race down into a card deck, but the Kickstarter page states that a 5-6 player expansion which will feature additional maps. Maps are in then, presumably with rules for passing, tailing, or bumping opponents. The expansion will also add more racers, so it’s a fair bet we’ll still have a bit of the old Leder asymmetry in the form of unique racer stats and possibly special powers.
The lead designer for many of Leder’s smash hit strategy board games, Cole Wehrle, left the studio in January. We don’t yet know which designer is leading on Kart – possibly studio founder Patrick Leder himself – and it will be interesting to see how the studio’s output changes following Wehrle’s departure.
What’s your favorite racing game? What mechanics would you like to see Kart build on, and what potholes should it avoid? And did you ever do downhill kart racing when you were a kid? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
