2026-07-15 WORKSHOP NOTES

THE BOARD GAME ON THE WORKBENCH

People ask what this game actually is — a racing game with cards? A deckbuilder with wheels? Here's the honest origin: it exists because of Heat: Pedal to the Metal, the racing board game. Heat's genius is that you never steer. You manage a hand of cards, pick a gear, and decide — every single corner — whether to play it safe or push your luck and cook the engine. All of racing's tension, none of its steering wheel. We've lost whole evenings to it.

SUPER SLOT CAR '98 is what happened when we wondered what that racing brain would feel like transplanted into a real-time toy world. The race genuinely runs — physics, slipstreams, pile-ups — and then dips into slow motion to deal you a hand. You commit, the car drives your decision, and the corner agrees or it doesn't. Cardboard tension, sixty frames a second.

A mid-race card draft in SUPER SLOT CAR '98: the race frozen in slow motion with three cards fanned over a top-down toy circuit, the pit board tracking the field on the left. — Heat asks you at every corner. We ask you at 200 scale-mph.

It isn't a Heat adaptation, and it doesn't want to be — if you're after the board game itself on a screen, it has official digital tabletop homes, and the cardboard box remains a masterpiece. What we're building is the other answer: a roguelike deckbuilder racing game where the deck persists across a whole championship, rivals hold grudges, and a bad gamble follows you to the next town. Slay the Spire's run structure, Heat's cockpit, a slot-car set's heart.

If you found this page searching for something like "Heat board game video game" — welcome. The demo runs in your browser, free, nothing to install. Tell us if it scratches the itch.

Small print: no affiliation with Heat's designers or publisher — just admiration, and a well-worn copy in the workshop.