Overview & How to Play

It’s Fast and Furious as a board game! Drive real fast! Make cars explode!

To win, players need to perform the scenario objective. They lose if they take too long.

Once everyone has picked a character and a car, they take turns doing 2 actions each. Actions are determined by stats from the combined character + car, like having 4 speed. Some actions make you roll dice equal to your stat, so then you would roll 4 dice for 4 speed. If you have enough green dots on that roll, it succeeds. Everyone also has something called Boost tokens, which can be spent to boost symbols to green dots.

After each turn, players will roll bad guy dice, which will activate them! SUVs can activate to crash into your cars, or bad guys can start jumping onto your cars! Then, there’s outcomes that will flip over and activate scenario specific cards, that lead to all sorts of bad things for your crew.

The end of round upkeep, after every single player has gone, is just wrecked cars moving backwards because everything else is moving forward at high speeds, and a new Stunt Card action will get unlocked for players to later use as an action.

Pros

Did someone say Hot Wheels though!!? The game’s miniatures are quite well detailed, from the machinery shown on the bottom of a car, to a semi truck that opens up. There’s even plastic pegs (humans) that fit into the top of cars very nicely.

Fast and Furious: Highway Heist is able to give novel moments with cinematic stunts to achieve, all while also deciding how to do your 8 possible actions: like speeding across the board or deciding to jump out of your car. There’s PLENTY of communication opportunities as you debate on what gambles to take, how to drive to not block out your Dom Toretto lackies in your crew, etc. etc.

The Fast and Furious theme is just so incredibly fitting here. You can mix and match your favorite car with driver, there’s crazy stories on leaping from car to car while going 100 MPH, and you can even steal guns.

There’s moments of using other burning, wrecked cars as a RAMP to soar into the air, crashing into the main boss that is a helicopter, then landing unscathed… oh and also the enemy that was clinging onto your windshield for dear life during that is perfectly healthy still.

We repeat, you can NEVER die in this game. YOU NEVER DIE! Your car can get totally trashed, and you can jump, and hijack an enemy SUV, then you flip your car board over, and that SUV has its own stats. Rather, the only way to lose is running out of time, where the game puts a great tension with the progressively epic stunts, where when the only 3rd tier Stunt card comes up, you better be ready to wrap it all up.

And wrap it up, it does! Endings of Fast and Furious can come down to the wire with very careful tactical positioning, where you save your team’s nitro for the very best moment, to fling some wreckage, or steal the last bit of loot from a truck.

Cons & Nitpicks

But what’s going on with this rulebook!? It’s just not good, especially for a game with this disarming theme found at Target. There’s just TOO much reading and loves to waste your time- terrible things for a lighter game all about speed.

Also, why the heck are the stunt cards at a sideways angle, they should have been straight.

We mentioned the cooperative elements: but hey, unfortunately the FAMILY-ness of this can get a little intrusive with the quarterbacking. Everything is open information for your ragtag crew of car addicts, with fairly simple turns that lend to situations of: “Me Fast and Furious expert and tell everyone what to do.” This may definitely happen in harder difficulties, where this game can get extremely tactical.

Oh, and replayability just won’t be too amazing. While you can mix and match your favorite movie actors with sweet rides, the scenarios don’t have such great repeat novelty with their small decks of cards, and an always identical finale.

Final Thoughts

Fast and Furious: Highway Heist is this quite strange game, where you likely want to have some board gaming experience under your belt to tackle the rulebook, but its not something that is going to blow snob minds with its gameplay. Rather, you really get this to revel in the family theme.