Heat: Pedal To The Metal is undoubtedly the (ahem) hottest race game out there at the moment, listed at a sizzling #9 on Board Game Geek’s Hotness Chart for family games. If you’re lucky enough to have a copy, you may have noticed two areas where the game could be improved: the play mat and the gear selection phase of each round. Let’s start with why the play mat needs help.
Play Mat
(Photo of playmat)
Heat comes with a set of 5 playmats printed on cardstock, and the playmats are central to the game experience. There are three spaces to organize your cards–a draw deck, the heat deck and the discard pile. Plus there’s a space to place your gear shifter to indicate which gear you’ll be in on each turn.
But the playmats are printed on flimsy card stock. The cards tend to curl up a bit and all your components slide around, which is annoying and messy. Ideally the playmats would be printed on 2 layer chipboard with indented spots for the 3 decks of cards and an indented area for the shifter.
My playmat organizer solves the curly cardstock problem by providing a stiff frame to tame your unruly play mat. It’s a two layer design. The bottom piece holds the play mat in place. The top piece is an interlocking overlay with cutouts for the shifter and organizing fences for the cards.
(photo of organizer) The Heat play mat is a little bit bigger than the bed on my Prusa Mk3S, so I’ve sliced the top and bottom each into two interlocking pieces. If you’ve got a bigger printer (300 mm or wider), I’ve also got an unsliced version. If you print the sliced version, I recommend gluing the two slices together for a permanent fit.
Gear Selection
If you’ve played Heat, you’re familiar with the gear selection phase at the start of each round. In Heat, the current gear your car is in correlates to how many cards you must play on your turn. So at the start of each round, everyone sets their gear shift to a new position while trying not to look at what other players are doing, lest it influence their decision. But there’s a cleaner, faster way than doing a “3,2,1” shift countdown.
Instead, each player secretly places the cards they are planning to play next turn into the “card garage” that’s part of my organizer. Once everyone has put their cards in their garage, they reveal their cards, and however many cards they put in their garage, that’s what gear they MUST shift into. We’ve tried this out and I can honestly say, it’s a smoother way to start each round.
Color suggestion
You could certainly just print five copies of my play mat organizer, but the thing is there are five pre-set colors in Heat. My suggestion is to print each play mat organizer in a matching color to the five car colors in Heat: Red, Blue, Yellow, Green and Black. (check this)
(photo of 5 organizers)
Print Times
Though I usually try to minimize filament usage, in this particular case, I’ve made the play mat organizers a little bit thicker. At almost 300 mm wide, I feel that the organizers need a little bit more structural rigidity.