Pit Crew

12th July 2019

Friday gaming in lieu of WFRP continues with the 3rd game - 'Pit Crew'

We've all seen it, when a racing car pulls into the pits and the pit crew goes mental changing the tyres and refuelling the car.

Pit Crew is a 'team-based' card game that attempts to emulate this frenzied burst of activity by being a 'real-time' game.
How does this work? Well let's get to it.

What's in a game?
Pit Crew is a team based game and players will be in up to 3 teams of 1-3 people each. Thus the game supports 2-9 players. Components include:

• Game board: Depicting a oval race track.
• Wooden cars: To go on the race track.
• Car sheets: These each depict a racing car, one is given to each team. Each car sheet has 5 numbers, one of each tyre and one for the roof (Which represents fuel in the game.).
• A large deck of cards: Numbered 1-10 in black and white.
• A smaller deck of cards with special abilities.
• 2 Dice: normal six sided dice.

The components are fine, unremarkable and completely functional.

How's it play?
Firstly, all players are split up into teams of up to 3 each.
Each team is given a car sheet and each team is dealt a hand of numbered cards (Split between the team players.).

The objective of Pit Crew is to change the tyres and refuel your car as a team and then race it around the track on the game board. All of this is done in real time!

Changing tyres
To change tyres, the team must play 4 cards next to each tyre.

• The value of the first card must be 1 high or lower than the number shown on the car sheet. Thus if the car sheet has a 7 next to a tyre, the value of the card played by the team must be 6 or 8.
• The value of the second card must be 1 higher or lower than the first card played.
• And so on, until all 4 cards have been played.
• This must be done for all 4 tyres.

Refuelling
In order to refuel the car, multiple cards must be played on the refuelling number on the car sheet. The combined values of all of these cards must equal the value on the car sheet. Thus if the car sheet has a value of 23 for refuelling, then playing a  6, 4, 10 & 3 would equal 23.

Exiting the pits
Once all 4 tyres and refuelling has been completed, the car can exit the pits and enter the race.
However there's a little twist here. The better the pit change, the quicker the car comes out of the pits (The more spaces it moves.).
How is this calculated?
This is where the colours of the cards come in play.
If the cards used to change tyres are of a certain colour combination, then the car gets a bonus when leaving the pits.
The same is the case for refuelling.

Conversely; if the cards played on the tyres or fuel are the wrong numbers, then the car will suffer a penalty when leaving the pits.
If the penalty is bad enough, the car might crash out of the game!

Racing
Once a car exits the pit lane and begins racing, the team rolls a die to move. This rolling is real time and the quicker they roll the dice, the more they can move.
However once all cars have exited the pits, real time rolling ceases. From now on all rolling is done in turn order until the race is completed.

A game consists of several races. After a race is completed, each team is given a 'bonus' card.
Bonus cards confer random special abilities that can help a team or be used to hinder an opposing team.

Endgame
Once all the races have been run, the team that has won the most races wins.

​Overall
Pit Crew is a small, quick and easy game to learn. Which is good, because stopping to query the rules in the middle of a real time game could prove tricky.

This is the first real time tabletop game I've played and I've always been a bit suspicious of the concept. But Pit Crew was fun. I think this partially because each team plays separately and does not interfere with each other during the real time phase of the race. You have your teammates to consider!

Pit Crew is a cooperative game about completing tasks quickly, but accurately in a team. The Pit Crew theme fits it very well.

I think that Pit Crew is a game worth trying.