Titanic Tussle: Titan Race Brings Mario Kart to the Kitchen Table… and It Isn’t Alone

I see board games in the store and they always look so cool and then I buy them and bring them home, I’m so excited to open them, and then I play them, like, twice… This column is dedicated to the love of games for those of us whose eyes may be bigger than our stomachs when it comes to playing, and the joy that we can all take from games, even if we don’t play them very often.

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Ever since videogames first showed up on the scene, there has been a certain amount of cross-pollination between gaming on screens and on the tabletop. Sometimes, this takes the form of direct adaptations from one format to the other. Here in this space, we’ve covered tabletop versions of popular videogames including Tetris, Resident Evil, Doom, World of Warcraft, and others, and it isn’t uncommon for board games or RPGs to make the jump to the digital world, either.

Other times, rather than a direct translation from digital to tabletop, board games borrow elements of visuals, gameplay, or other aspects of their electronic counterparts. Sometimes, these are obvious, and other times less so, but this feedback loop is common in both the tabletop and videogame spaces.

At first glance, however, Mario Kart seems like an unlikely inspiration for a board game, despite its massive popularity. The rambunctious racing game is such a kinetic experience that it appears virtually impossible to translate its charms to the more necessarily sedate world of board games – yet more than one game has tried to do just that.

While we’re here to talk about Titan Race, a 2015 game created by Julian Allain (Dungeon Academy), there is a more recent (and higher profile) Mario Kart-alike out there in the form of Dungeon Kart, funded by a successful Kickstarter in 2024 and released by the makers of Overboss and Boss Monster, two other games with very obvious videogame DNA.

I haven’t played Dungeon Kart, so I can’t compare it to Titan Race, but it seems significant that the two games are sampling from the same electronic well. Nor is either one of them shy about announcing it. While Dungeon Kart may look more like Mario Kart, the logline of Titan Race on BoardGameGeek is “Mario Karts on the Kitchen Table!”

The gameplay in Titan Race feels every bit as videogame-y as that implies. As the name suggests, Titan Race is about big things. Specifically, giant monsters (the titans of the title) and the people who ride them around, having races. These monsters include a couple of big furry freaks, a bat-like dragon, a Chocobo-esque bird, a mechanical crab, and a monocular, tentacled brain called “Chtooloo.” (In case that wasn’t enough to give the game away, Chtooloo’s rider is named Ftag’hn and his board looks like an Elder Sign.)

The ”courses” on which these races take place are represented by small, square boards, the same 8×8 size as the box they come in. Racers begin play at the bottom of these boards, and their goal is to move to the top. Once they do so, they wrap around, appearing back at the bottom to make another “lap,” with the first racer to complete three laps winning the game. What makes this really feel like an early-era videogame, though, is the fact that moving off either side of the course also puts you back on the opposite side.

There are plenty of other videogame touches throughout Titan Race, too. Ramps, areas that deal damage when you move over them, the ability to bump other titans into one another, setting off chain reactions, you name it. When you are racing on the “Icy Plains of Estengaard,” a player who hits a patch of ice as part of their movement slides the rest of the way across it before completing their turn.

If all of this sounds a little fraught, you’re not wrong. “As quick and as chaotic with a magic touch,” says the rest of that description on BoardGameGeek. Besides everything I’ve already mentioned, the various courses all have their own special rules, and each of the titans has a special ability unique to it, which range from swapping places to attacking other titans. You can also gain Bonus cards throughout the game that give you single-use abilities. In keeping with the Mario Kart theme, a titan that is “K.O.ed” is merely removed from the game for one turn before coming back with full life on the next one.

Even among all that chaos, the most unruly aspect of Titan Race might be the dice mechanic at its heart. Like many modern board games, Titan Race uses proprietary d6s, with faces indicating six different possible actions. These range from “move two spaces straight ahead” to “move two spaces diagonally and then deal one point of damage to a titan in front of you.”

Hence, it is the fall of the dice that determines where your titan goes and what it does. Odder still is how you actually access these dice. There are always a number of dice in play equal to the number of players, and the first player is the one who rolls them. They choose the die that they want to use for this turn, and then pass the remainder to the next player, and so on. The last player then re-rolls all the dice, and chooses an action from among them, thereby ensuring that only the first and last player actually get to roll the dice, while everyone else is limited to the pool of actions that the initial dice roll sets up.

This cedes much of the control over your careening titan to the game itself, forcing you to make strategic use of not only the actions granted by your dice but also your special abilities, Bonus cards, and any unique attributes of the course itself to try to make your way to the top of the board before anyone else.

As you can probably infer from that dice mechanic, you can’t really play the game with fewer than three people, though the rules allow for a two-player variant in which each player takes control of two titans. It’s probably not as much fun as when you’ve got a big group of people all bouncing off one another, however, and Titan Race seems like a game that is ideally suited to a full complement of possible players. (BoardGameGeek agrees, suggesting that the optimal number of players is a full six.)

Most of the games we cover here at I Played It, Like, Twice are big games. They come in big boxes, crammed to the gills with boards, cards, tokens, miniatures, and assorted other gewgaws. Not so with Titan Race, all of which is crammed into an 8×8 box that still manages to have a lot of empty space inside, despite coming with very small miniatures for all the titans.

This deceptively simple packaging hides some relatively complex game interactions, however – ones that I haven’t fully gotten to experience, due to not really being in a position to very often gather six boisterous gamers around a table.

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.