Heat Weather and Road Conditions: Racing the Conditions

The Weather and Road Conditions module is the easiest way to make a track you know feel new. It is also a setup step in the Championship, and the 2026 World Boardgaming Championships event used it too. This lesson goes through what the tokens do and how to adjust the lap plan from the track planning lesson. The effects below follow the Advanced Play and Championship System booklet, version 1.1.

Setup, in order

1. Shuffle the 6 Weather tokens and draw one. Put it on the Weather billboard space on the board. Its car setup effect applies to everyone.
2. Shuffle the 12 Road Conditions tokens and draw one per corner on the track. Reveal them in racing order. A token with the sector symbol goes beside the stretch of track after that corner, up to the next one. A token without it goes beside the corner itself.
3. Then, if you use the Garage, draft upgrades. The booklet puts weather first so you can build for the conditions.

Weather: your car before the start

Each Weather token changes every car the same way before the race. The possible setup changes are:

• One extra Stress card shuffled into your deck.
• One Stress card removed from your deck.
• One extra Heat in your Engine.
• One Heat removed from your Engine.
• Three of your Heat cards shuffled into your draw deck.
• Three of your Heat cards placed in your discard pile.

How to adjust:

• More Heat in the Engine: you can afford one more spend corner per race. Upgrade it.
• Less Heat in the Engine: drop a spend corner to a slip, and value cooling cards higher in the draft.
• Three Heat shuffled into your deck: expect dead cards in your hand early. Plan a cooldown on the first lap, and do not shift so high that a cluttered hand stops you.
• Three Heat in your discard pile: they arrive after your first shuffle. That is a good reason not to cycle your deck fast early with heavy discards.
• An extra Stress card: more random Speed. Keep a low card or two for corners, and clear Stress on straights.

Road Conditions at corners

A corner token changes that one corner for the whole race:

• Speed Limit 1 higher. A spend corner gets cheaper. A cool corner may stop being one.
• Speed Limit 1 lower. Plan to cross slower, or slip through.
• Overheat. If your Speed is over the limit when you cross, the total Heat you owe goes up by 1. Going 1 over now costs 2.

Overheat changes the math more than it looks. Small overshoots, the ones you normally accept, get much pricier: 1 over costs double. At an Overheat corner, either cross at or under the limit, or make the overshoot big enough to be worth the extra Heat. Slipstream across the line is the cleanest answer, since it never adds to your Speed.

Road Conditions in sectors

A sector token changes the stretch of track from that corner to the next:

• Slipstream boost: slipstreaming from this sector moves 1 extra Space.
• Heat control: Boost costs no Heat while your car is in this sector, still once per turn.
• Weather: the Weather token’s sector effect applies here.

Heat control is the strongest. A free Boost on a straight is 2.5 Spaces on average for nothing. Plan to be in that sector, and to Boost there every round you can. Just watch the corner at the end: the Boost is free, but its value still counts toward your Speed.

Weather effects in sectors

Each Weather token also shows a sector effect, used only where a Weather Road Conditions token sits:

• Slipstream boost: 2 extra Spaces when you slipstream from this sector.
• No slipstream: you cannot start a slipstream here, though you can slipstream into it.
• Cooling bonus: 1 extra Cooldown here in the React step.
• No cooling: no Cooldown at all here.

A No cooling sector after a slow corner can ruin a plan built around cooling down there. Find those sectors first, then move your planned cooldowns to another corner.

Mandatory or optional

Road Conditions tokens marked with the mandatory icon must be applied. The others are optional: you choose when to use them, just like optional symbols on Upgrade cards. Check each token’s icon as you place it, so nobody argues about it at the corner.

Drafting for the conditions

With weather set before the draft, ask what this race will be short of. Less Heat or more Stress points to Cooling System or Body cards. A track full of higher limits and slipstream boosts rewards speed. The Garage lesson has the four questions; weather is the context for all of them.