Description
In Carpet Racers, five remote-control cars speed across the living-room carpet. Each player has their own controller with a hidden token showing one of the cars, but you may not look inside yours until the end of the game. You can only look inside other players' controllers, so you keep guessing which car is yours while trying to get it across the finish line first.
How to play Carpet Racers
On your turn, you play one card. It shows two cars and a number of spaces that you split between them as you like, but each car moves at least one space. You can move any car, no matter whose it is. Then you trigger the traps the two cars stopped on, take the bonus from the space and resolve the card's effect: you gain boost tokens or new traps, or place traps on the track.
When the first car completes its third lap (its second with three players), the game ends. Everyone opens their controller and moves their car forward for each boost token of its color and back for each stop token. The player whose car gets the furthest wins.
Why you'll love it
- Every turn you move two cars at once, so you're helping your rivals too – the only question is which ones.
- The boost tokens other players collect are visible to everyone and give away which car they think is theirs. Then again, they may be trying to mislead you.
- Hidden traps lie in wait on the track. Some give you a stop token or cancel your card's effect, so every stop is a gamble.
- On the progress track you unlock peeks into other players' controllers, but no more than three, so you never know for sure which car is yours until the end.
Who is Carpet Racers for
The game is for three to five players aged 10 and up, and players like it best with five. It takes 25 to 45 minutes. It is fairly easy to learn: turns are short, and most of the thinking goes into working out who is driving which car. All five cars always race, even with fewer players. The living-room side of the board is recommended for your first game; the other side shows a playground with a catapult and a sandbox.
What you might not like
Since everyone moves every car and nobody knows for sure which one is theirs until the end, the race is quite unpredictable. It may not suit players who prefer races in which each player plans their own vehicle's route.
What's in the box
- double-sided game board
- 5 car miniatures and 5 lap tracker markers
- 5 controllers with 5 stands
- 10 chip tokens (2 sets, one of them a spare)
- 45 cards and 4 player aid cards
- 65 boost tokens (13 in each color)
- 24 stop tokens
- 32 trap tokens
- 20 clue tokens
- 5 progress tokens
- 20 long-jump tokens and a catapult die (for playing on the playground side)
