ARTICLE: Crazy Karts – Our First Play

Once in a while we receive a prototype that blows our mind. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. We found Legacy: testament of duke de Crecy in 2012. Tides of Time happend in 2014. Crazy Karts came to us in 2015…

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I remember exactly the first afternoon we played the Crazy Karts prototype. It was a whole day at Portal Games dedicated to playtesting submitted prototypes. After few games I was tired. I was disappointed. I was one step away from leaving the office and heading home. There was nothing new, nothing exciting, nothing immersive in the prototypes we played that day.

Greg put another prototype on the table. “It’s a racing game”, he said. Hundreds of little hexes printed on a small board almost made me run away. Player boards were in French. Player screens  were slender and would fall over. What a mess.

Anyway, we played. Sixty minutes passed like a second.

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I remember looking up from the table and at the other players. I remember looking at Greg and trying to make eye contact with him. I remember the smile slowly appearing on my face.

I remember thinking: ‘Well, that was actually fun. We have something here. Oh, dear, we have something here…’

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There were many issues in the game. The board, full of these small hexes, looked super boring. Moving rules were too complicated. Scoring was… well, there wasn’t scoring in the first place! I  was surprised. I didn’t race to score. I raced to be first across the finish line!

But, below all of that, below the mud and dirt there was a gem. There was pure fun here. There was the brilliant idea of two drivers trying to steer one kart.

We contacted the designer. The work began. Time to polish this diamond.