Spin me right round
The race is a basic expression of our desire to win, to beat those around us and prove our superiority. The appearance of this in tabletop games is often associated with roll & move, a much maligned mechanism that still has relevance today. Hot Streak and Magical Athlete have been occupying the columns, reels, and videos of the marketers, critics, and commentators of the tabletop games world. Race games though have a long history, back to the origin of snakes & ladders, Victorian morality games, and more besides. The race game will always be a fundamental part of the DNA of board games.
Spokes from Radical 8 Games, designer Bert Hardeman, and artist Rusembell, carries this tradition with it into the arena of bicycle velodrome racing demonstrating those fundamentals in a riot of colour and tactical planning.
In velodrome racing, competitors ride fast around a wooden track on bikes with massive gear ratios and no brakes. Its a sport of skill, planning, and enormous physical effort. The board game is thankfully a less strenuous affair, at least physically speaking. It will certainly exercise the little grey cells.
I adore a satisfying game setup and Spokes has that. The board comes as 4 thick cardboard jigsaw pieces, with double layers on the surface. There are loads of rectangles cut into the surface around the depicted track. A bag of wooden pieces, the “Spokes” of the game, are shaken out across this board and shoved into the awaiting spaces. Each slots in with a satisfying click and it doesn’t take long before you have a board to play on. It is a lovely group activity at the start of the game and gets everyone handling and connecting with the physicality of the game. There are 6 different colours of the spokes, and that initial blast of colour can be a little overwhelming.
Each player gets a bike card which is just single layer cardboard, depicts a bike, and the front wheel has 6 spaces like on the board. Each of these spaces will take up one of the possible colour of spokes in whatever order you want. You have a little cylindrical token that you put on the board at the starting line and the first person to manage 3 laps is the winner. Finally a cube goes on one of the spaces between two of your spokes and you are ready to go.
To move around the board the cube on your wheel moves 1,2, or 3 spaces around the wheel. Taking the last spoke it passed on its journey, you now swap a spoke on the board with the one on your wheel. Your bicycle then moves along a line of one colour that must include the spoke you just placed. You can move through other players as well! Sounds simple enough, and it is. Well. Sort of.
As you replace spokes on your wheel you ability to move around the board warps. Where you started out with all 6 colours to use, you can quickly start narrowing your options to fewer colours. You can box yourself in if you aren’t careful. All the other players are of course doing the same thing: trying to manipulate the paths around the velodrome, avoiding boxing themselves in, and looking to get further than their opponents with each move. This does one thing that I have not seen in other racing games. It puts the racing lines in the hands of the players, not the designer of the game.
When you go along your line, you are not restricted to just going forward, as would be traditional in a race of this nature. You can zig-zag all over the place, exploring strange lines, going backwards, and Escher-like paths to victory. As the game progresses, more and more lines emerge from the rainbow of options. Each player is looking to move as far as they can with each decision, taking advantage of previous moves, and maybe even blocking another player’s line. It is a brilliant feeling to spy a huge move you can make that no-one else has spotted. You curse as other players, and frequently past you, cause you issues by changing the line you were about to take. There are moments of delicious frustration as the puzzle ebbs and flows in complexity.
You aren’t stuck to one colour all the time however. The one other mechanism available to riders allows us to break this rule just a little. When you move along a path you can stop anytime you want. If you land on another player, you drop in behind them to the penultimate space you passed over. This allows you to use the slipstream power on a later turn.
When you activate Slipstream you can move over one spoke of a different colour to the path you are on during your turn. This can be at any point during the move and opens up a world of possibility. You could trump tracks between two white lines by using that green someone just dropped. String together two blues by placing a pink piece between them and travelling over it. Even keep it in reserve to get yourself out of a situation as other players try and carve up your lines. Slipsteaming is just a great little twist that allows players to have just enough flexibility to pull off a surprising move. It allows you to further bend the velodrome to your will.
Spokes comes with a team and solo mode, neither of which I have tried but it is good to see a game lean into the tropes of its sport (both team and solo velodrome efforts are part and parcel of the sport). My only criticism of the game would be that those with Colour Vision Deficiency may have a hard time distinguishing the different spokes from each other. I took a quick photo with an app to demonstrate what I mean.
Spokes impressed me a lot when I first played it at Airecon, I think back in 2023. The simple mechanisms allow for players to plan and manipulate without worrying about the minutiae of rules overheads. I’ve enjoyed it at different player counts and its easy teach means I will be showing it off at every opportunity. It is a very impressive piece of design that evokes the feel of velodrome racing while avoiding the trap of sticking rigidly to the reality of its inspiration.
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