If you're not an aficionado of Winter Olympic sports, the biathlon sounds like a bizarre concept. It's essentially a cross-country skiing race punctuated with shooting on a rifle range. The sight of skiers carrying small-bore rifles on their backs may look like a scene from a James Bond movie but it's a real sport with strong Scandinavian roots. And it's the sport that's the basis for Biathlon Blast, which publishers CarlMax are bringing to Kickstarter.

With art by Damien Mammoliti and Alex Tantraz [OuKinoSama], Lars Max Jensen and Carl Tenland have designed a game for 2-6 players where each player controls one of eight asymmetric athletes, all with their own deck with a mix of common and unique cards. The cards you play determine initiative (turn order) and control how far you move on the terrain your standee has reached. The card will also alter your character's pulse rate and it may change the wind direction, which may also affect your pulse rate. Your pulse rate will have an impact on your 'accuracy' when your skier reaches the shooting range: a high pulse rate will raise the minimum number you need to roll on a custom d6 (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) to score a hit. The wind condition can also affect shooting 'accuracy'.
Biathlon Blast is a race game that's card driven. Players simultaneously select and reveal the card they'll play and then they decide how far they move their standee, subject to the maximum indicated on the card for the terrain they are on. For each card, you have a choice of using the values on the top half or those on the bottom 'icy' half. When you use a card for its top half values the card is recycled in your deck but if you use a card for its more powerful 'icy' values the card is removed from the game. That usually means players only resort to using the 'icy' half of a card on the last lap. There are other twists too: for example, most characters have access to 'ski wax' tokens that can be used to add to movement on the corresponding terrain.
Turn order can prove important in Biathlon Blast because spaces can be blocked and because whether a headwind or tailwind affects you depends on whether you have another character standee immediately ahead or behind you. It's this that makes Biathlon Blast more interactive at higher player counts. The game tho' is certainly playable with just two, but for our two-player games at Board's Eye View we each took on two characters to add to the options for interaction. It's an option you might want to try.
CarlMax plan to launch Boathlon Blast on Kickstarter on 25 February. Click here to check out the KS page.