Dirt & Dust
- Greg White
- 33 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Dirt and Dust, from Albi and Ares Games, looks like a racing game. It’s got a rally car on the box so you might reasonably expect to open that box and find the track or maybe a variety of tracks to race around against your opponents. But no - the only track is the score track. Don’t let that put you off, however, this is a great game. It’s a bit of a deck builder, it’s a dice roller and each round is a brain-burning optimisation puzzle!
Petr Čáslava has designed an interesting take on a rally race. Rather than directly racing your opponents you’ll be mapping out the stages by playing your cards and activating them with your dice.
Set over 10 rounds the gameplay is mostly simultaneous, although the first time you play it’s worth doing a one-at-a-time player-by-player turn to make sure everyone has a full grip of the rules. What you can do on your turn is relatively simple; it’s doing it well that’s the heart of the game!
Each player rolls their three dice and assigns them to their player board in the slots for their roll, then the choices begin... You may play a card from your hand to any empty slot on your board and buy cards from the market by spending wrenches, which are one of the two resources in the game. You can activate one of the cards in a slot as long as it has a dice above it, or if you’ve gained enough traction (the other resource) you can map out a stage of the rally which is ultimately the goal as this is where the points are. Each of the actions can be done in any order and as many times as you can afford.
Each player's starting deck consists of five basic cards and five driver cards, and the different drivers offer a unique spin to each deck. The cards when activated give you ways to earn wrenches, traction and popularity points, and other various special effects - including ways to change position of your car on the rally card track.
Along with the player board for cards, each player has a track position grid. If you are in the top row, you’re accelerating, and in the bottom row you're decelerating. The space on the grid you occupy at the end of the round will define how many points you score if you successfully mapped the current stage of the race or, if you’re living on the edge and have ventured into the red zone, how many popularity points you’ve earned by wowing the fans. The player board also tracks your damage and resources.
Mapping a stage requires spending the required traction points on the stage card. At the point you map it you must move your car the required number of spaces left or right on your grid and perform any additional actions indicated on that card. If you are forced to move off the grid, take certain card actions or if you ever voluntarily move off grid for a bit more traction, you gain a danger dice that you must roll immediately, taking the rolled damage and, occasionally, popularity: that spectacular jump didn’t do the car any favours but the crowd went wild! Danger dice stay in your pool of dice and have to be rerolled each round unless you find a way to repair them. Damage can build up fast and every 5 points of damage has an irreversible permanent effect, from decreasing your hand size or increasing costs of card and mapping stages to ultimately your car being written off and you being out the game.
Popularity points can be gained in a variety of ways and are recorded on a separate track. Being the most popular driver at the start of each round gets you an extra die that can let you activate more cards, and if you are the most popular at the end of the game you gain extra victory points.
We’ve had a lot of fun playing Dirt & Dust, and the simultaneous play means there is little difference in game length whether you're playing with just two players or taking the player count to four. Expect games to run to around 90 minutes. Each round is a new puzzle as you try to optimise your available cards. At times it seems you just can’t achieve your goal then you realise if you spend a wrench you can adjust the value of a die to activate a different card, or if you buy a certain card from the market you could play it this round to lose a damage die that would otherwise probably break your car next round.
When you understand and appreciate their abilities, the different drivers really can change your strategy. For example, one driver - ‘Sofia’ - relies heavily on taking damage dice and scoring extra traction as a result; fortunately she also has ways to mitigate the damage, but if you don’t plan well you can end up with a lot of damage.
Each game we’ve played has had a very close finish with only a point or two separating the leaders. The components are of good quality, and it’s easy to set up. There's a choice of cards to purchase available for each game, five different 10-stage courses and a five-stage training course, so there’s plenty to keep coming back for. There is a solo mode which is ok but we haven't found it as enjoyable as multiplayer because you end up spending a lot of your actions stopping the AI getting points rather than doing the good fun stuff - playing your own cards.
We’d recommend Dirt & Dust to anyone who likes puzzly games, deck builders and racing games even tho' it isn’t, but it is, but it isn’t...
(Review by Greg White)
