Players Take on More Risk When Relief Is Automatic

In Heat: Pedal to the Metal, players race their cards around a racetrack by playing cards and shifting gears. Throughout the race, they have opportunities to add heat cards from their engine to their deck to push past their limits. Taking on Heat creates short-term risks, as the cards may clog your hand at a crucial moment. But the game makes one design choice that gets players to embrace the danger: make them fear missing out on free relief even more.

Gears in Heat determine how many cards you play. In the lowest gear, you play one card; in the highest gear, you play four. You don't always want to play aggressively, since you need to go slow through tight corners to avoid spinning out. When in low gear, you gain a cooling bonus and can remove up to three heat cards from your hand. This is where the urge to take risks kicks in: at some point in the race, you will certainly shift into low gear, and if you have no heat cards in your hand, you will waste a golden opportunity to get rid of them. Players want to take on risk so they can get rid of it later.

The fact that the cooling bonus is automatic is what makes this so effective. By contrast, consider Le Havre, a game in which you either feed your workers every round or go into debt to pay them. Going into debt is a viable strategy, as long as you find ways to repay it before the game ends, such as using the Local Court to get your debts forgiven. Unlike free cooling, interacting with the Local Court is optional; it costs a turn, so players who ignore it don't feel like they missed out on anything. Where free relief creates pressure to benefit from it, relief that has a cost just feels like unexercised options if unused.

Risky strategies are one of the things that make games so exciting, providing opportunities for positive surprises, but you need to encourage players to take those risks in the first place. Framing relief as an opportunity to miss, rather than as one option among many, changes how players evaluate their incentives. Nothing is ever really free, but that doesn't mean you can't present it that way.