Rallyman Dirt was a game I had originally eyed on Kickstarter, but decided to hold off on backing. At the time, my kid was a little young for the game when I thought it would get delivered, and I also thought he might outgrow a love of racing. Unfortunately for the backers, Holy Grail Games went belly up before fulfilling the game. Games became available in retail, and I picked up the base game a year and a change ago.
Short version of my thoughts on the base game, it’s a fun push your luck racing game that, at the time, I wished had more options for cars and track. That leads right into today’s review of the Monte-Carlo expansion, which largely features different cars, tracks, and tires.
Expansion Overview:
There are multiple modules included in this expansion. The first is called 110%, which covers the track itself and the weather. The second is Co-pilot, which adds a bridge to Dukes of Hazard yourself off of and soft tires, which I’ll explain later, and the third module is R4 and R5, which are two new types of cars.
The base game had you racing on dirt/gravel, which, for a game called Dirt, seems obvious. So What’s a Monte-Carlo? Pavement and Snow, respectively. Well, not really, it’s a mathematical model that uses random sampling of a city in Monaco, but I’m sure both have asphalt and maybe snow.
But back to asphalt and snow, which are the two new track terrain types for Rallyman Dirt. Depending on the type of tires you select, your car will have different limits for dice that can be used on each terrain.
Going flat out is a little riskier as the hazard value is the lowest of the terrains, making snow, understandably, riskier than dirt or pavement. Two other additions are a handbrake turn, which allows you to navigate some hairpins by starting on the outside and drifting into the inside, and weather, which will impact the condition of the roads during the race by flipping the tiles over, making it snowy (or not).
The soft tires degrade a little each turn until, after 7 turns, they can only handle two hazard icons during a roll. Meanwhile, the bridge is a regular piece of terrain, but it’s in 3D, so it’s cooler and allows you to have over and under passes.
There’s also 12 road effect tokens that add chicanes, jumps, or water hazards to normal spaces.
The R4 and R5 cars are two more options to play with. R4’s gain an extra coast die but can’t use gears 5 and 6. While R5’s can’t use 6th gear, they get a special green boost die. A boost die can be combined with a gear die to advance an extra space. Each of these comes with new car miniatures, too.
Expansion Experience:
First off, I feel bad for backers who never received their games. But as fellow reviewer Brian Biewer, who was a backer, said “Time heals all crowdfunding frauds” on our Discord server. So time has helped him heal, and hopefully others can too.
I like a lot of what this expansion offers, and I appreciate the modularity of it, where you can mix and match various things as you’d like.
Starting with what I like the most: the new terrain types and cars. The variety of tracks that you can build now is impressive, and you can tailor custom tracks to your liking, including having a bridge in the middle of it, because you can. And don’t sleep on how hazardous snowy track is, I blew it on my first roll of the game, wiped out, and lost two gears to damage. Meanwhile, the different cars offer subtle differences that are fun to experiment with and, in the few plays I’ve had so far, seem to be balanced with each other.
I like how each came with their own model, but as long as there’s only one of each color on the track, you should be able to just pick your favorite to use. However, I’m more neutral on the soft tires, and that’s probably mostly because it adds fiddliness without really adding any substance. Basically, after 7 turns, your tires are worse on pavement and have an extra hazard associated with each roll.
The randomness of the weather and road tokens earns the expansion its mathy name. I like the variability of the road tokens as they affect everyone and are something to react to as you approach. Meanwhile, weather, while a real thing that impacts races, is going to be a low probability effect as they only go into effect when one of the six weather tokens are drawn from the damage bag during a shortcut or a loss of control event.
The bridge is fun and adds some dimensionality to the board. It’s not a make-or-break feature of the expansion, but it’s cool. Lastly, it’s a small thing, but you can fit the expansion into the base box for those who are always struggling with shelf space (*waves at self in mirror*).
Final Thoughts:
Despite being hot and cold on some of the modules included, overall, I think Monte-Carlo is a must buy for Rallyman Dirt. It adds variability and more content to a game that already had plenty. Even racing the same track with different cars will be a slightly different puzzle to tackle. Add in the randomness with road tokens and weather, and those races could really end up being different experiences.
And like with most expansions, if you didn’t like the base game, this probably won’t change your opinion unless you stan snow and/or handbrake turns. But if you liked the base game and wish you had either more options or chaotic randomness in your life, than Monte-Carlo is that expansion that will fill that drifting around a corner so fast you wipe out hole in your gaming collection.
Hits
• Modular content allows you to add what you want
• New cars provide slight twists
• Variety of track terrain adds a lot of variability
Misses
• Weather feels too random
• Soft tires add too little for the upkeep required
