Virtual Formula De Racing

I thought having to be at home and having a 5 month old would impede my ability to play board games but as I told my wife the other day I think I am playing more than ever. My group of gaming friends are finding new and innovative ways of playing. There are a lot of offerings out there for playing tabletop games. I have played a few of them before all this COVID-19 quarantine business I would play on Board Game Arena, its a good one to learn games as it has the full rule set and tracks and enforces all the rules. In my opinion it makes the games seem more like video games.

For our very short and scaled down game of Formula De we used Vassal Engine for our game board. Vassal is an open source gaming engine. That means most of the games modules are community made there are some official versions of games too. On the Vassal page you can search through tons of game modules. For each game you want to play you have to download the module and run it in the Vassal Engine.

So one of the pros of playing on Vassal is the games are usually pretty bare bones. Meaning that it usually just the board and pieces and maybe some built in intelligence for basic game functionality. The games usually don't have the rules enforced and moving the pieces is pretty free form. I like this a lot because it makes it seem more like I am at the dinning room table playing with some friends. Also the addition of having zoom going with them helps that atmosphere too. Nothing beats seeing your opponents reaction to an amazing die roll.

Formula De or Formula De depending on the version you have is really fun. The rules are very easy to learn we picked them up in about 5 minutes (Thanks Rick for the tutorial). Formula De has you racing around an F1 track. The basics are first picking what gear you are in, that will determine what die you roll and how many spaces you can move. There are special turn sections that require an amount of end of turn stops if you blast through the turn you damage your car or loose valuable resources. You could play this game up to 12 players using the teams of 2 feature to make it more F1 like racing.There are a few optional rules that include weather and other race conditions. We had fun playing one lap of the bare bones rules. It took about 90 minutes to finish our race (Congrats Adam).

Designed by: Laurent Lavaur, Eric Randall

Players: 2-12

Published by: 999 Games, Asmodee, Descartes Editeur, Eurogames, Show More

Year Published: 1991

Recommended Ages: 10+

Time to Play: 120 minutes