Wouter & Ymke 
The cars are lined up, the finish line is ready, and everyone is waiting to start. In Vroom, you’ll be pushing little wooden racing cars across your table, trying to get them across the finish line in the correct order. The problem is that nobody knows how fast the others are supposed to go. Everyone has their own hidden speed cards, and you’re not allowed to talk about them.
That leaves you watching how far the other cars move and trying to make sense of it all. What seems like a perfectly reasonable distance to one player might look completely wrong to someone else. And just when you think you’ve worked out how everyone drives, the next race adds obstacles and new conditions. We were curious to see how well this rather unusual way of racing would work with our family. Vroom is heading to Spiel Essen ’26 this October, so we had the chance to try it ahead of the fair.
👥 3-6 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designer: Antonin Boccara
🎨 Artwork: Amélie Guinet
🏢 Publisher: Big Moustache Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Vroom is a cooperative racing game in which everyone controls a small wooden car. Together, you’re trying to finish in the correct order based on your hidden speeds. There’s no game board or measured track. You simply place the cars on a table, the floor or another suitable surface, with two checkered markers creating the finish line.
A game consists of three races, each lasting five turns. At the beginning of every turn, everyone secretly draws a numbered speed card. Starting with car number one and continuing in numerical order, players push their cars forward according to their cards. There’s no fixed distance for each number, so you decide how far your car should travel.
You’re not allowed to discuss your speed cards, and after each turn they’re placed face down. You can’t look at them again until the race ends. Nobody may cross the finish line before the fifth turn, or the whole team immediately loses. However, at least one car must cross by the end of turn five, otherwise you lose as well. Apparently, arriving too early is just as bad as arriving too late.
After five turns, everyone reveals their speed cards and adds up their totals. The cars should be ranked according to these totals, with the highest total at the front. If the ranking is incorrect, you’ll need to remove cars until the remaining order is correct. Removing one car costs one spare wheel, while removing two or more costs two. Your starting number of spare wheels depends on the player count and difficulty. You can continue after losing your last one, but another penalty when none remains ends the game.
The second race introduces an event card, while the third uses two events together. These might involve driving around obstacles, passing through a tunnel without overtaking or changing the racing surface. Breaking an event’s requirements costs another spare wheel. Between races, players pass their car cards to the left and reset the track. Survive all three races and everyone wins. Winning also allows you to open one of five sealed modules with additional rules. Win with a module to unlock another, and eventually you can combine them.
Artwork & Components
Vroom has a colourful, slightly retro racing style, with bright turquoise, pink, orange, yellow and green across the box and cards. The illustrations by Amélie Guinet use checkered flags, speedometers and other racing details. It’s all quite playful, and the little wooden cars fit that style nicely.
There are six cars, each with its own colour, number and four wheels that actually roll. They look like miniature toy cars, and I particularly like that they’re used directly on the table rather than on a separate board. Two small checkered markers create the finish line. The cards have a glossy finish, with easy-to-read numbers on the speed cards and illustrated signs on the event cards.
The box also contains five sealed modules called Boost, Slide, Ghost, Weather and Podium. Each envelope has its own design and gives a small indication of what to expect without revealing the contents. There are also stickers to give the cars funny faces and other details, along with trophy stickers for recording achievements in the rulebook. These include challenges such as completing a race in under two minutes or playing after midnight. They’re not essential, but they’re a nice little addition.
Our Experience
We played Vroom with our family at three, four and five players. We’re already fans of The Mind and Hanabi, so the idea of working together without sharing important information was familiar. What wasn’t familiar was communicating by pushing little wooden cars across the table. Our first race quickly showed that we didn’t all have the same understanding of what a speed number should mean. Someone would push their car a distance that seemed perfectly reasonable to them, while the rest of us wondered what number they could possibly have drawn. And because nobody could explain their card, we were left guessing. Apparently, our family has rather different ideas about how far a car should travel.
After a few races, we started recognising how far certain players usually moved and sometimes adjusted our own movements to match. In our first game, we were mostly concentrating on our own cards. Later, I noticed I was paying much more attention to what everyone else had done, even when it wasn’t my turn. We also had to keep an eye on the finish line, and sometimes we were so concerned about reaching it on the fifth turn that we lost track of which car should be ahead. There were races where we felt we’d done well, only to reveal the cards and discover that two cars should have finished the other way around.
Player count made a noticeable difference. Three players worked fine, but we preferred four and especially five. More cars meant more movements to follow and more uncertainty about the finishing order. The events also changed how we approached the race. Suddenly, an ordinary object could become something everyone had to drive around, making distances harder to judge. Our table probably wasn’t designed to be a racing circuit, but it did the job.
The basic game entertained us for the first few sessions, and we gradually became more familiar with how everyone moved. That’s when we started opening the sealed modules. We won’t spoil what they contain, but they changed some of the things we’d started relying on during the basic races. We tried them separately before combining them, and I preferred having those extra rules available once we understood the original game. Choosing the next envelope without knowing exactly what we’d find inside was also part of the fun.
Our Thoughts
Your movement is also the only way to communicate the value of your card, and that’s what I find most interesting about Vroom. You can be perfectly consistent with your own distances and still get the finishing order wrong if everyone else interprets those distances differently. Nobody can simply take charge and tell everyone how far to move, because they don’t know the other players’ cards either. Designer Antonin Boccara mentions in the rulebook that a live-audience adaptation of The Mind inspired the game. Having played both, I can see the connection, although Vroom approaches the idea in a more physical way.
The wooden cars aren’t just there to look cute. You’re constantly pushing them around, sometimes into each other, and the surface you’re playing on matters. The events make use of that freedom too, especially when you have to involve objects from around the room. Of course, the result of a push isn’t always entirely under your control. If you’ve spent several turns carefully judging distances, it’s annoying when a car rolls farther than intended. I guess that’s the risk of using actual toy cars instead of moving pieces along a track.
Our main criticism is that the basic gameplay becomes repetitive. Most turns consist of drawing a card, watching the others and pushing your car. There aren’t many different choices to make, and anyone expecting a lively racing game with lots of action might be surprised by how much time is spent concentrating on distances. Once your group becomes familiar with estimating them, the basic races start to feel similar. They’re not necessarily easier to win, but you’re usually dealing with the same kind of problem.
The modules add some welcome variety without changing the basic idea. You’re still estimating distances and trying to finish in the correct order, with additional rules changing the conditions around that task. Without the modules, I think we’d have put Vroom away after a few sessions.
I’d happily bring Vroom out with the family again, especially with four or five around the table. Fans of The Mind or Hanabi will probably recognise what it’s asking them to do, and I think it could also work well with families with children and adults playing together. For us, it’s a nice option when we’re looking for something short to play together. There’s something rather satisfying about gradually understanding what the person pushing that little wooden car across the table is trying to tell you.
📝 We received a review copy of Vroom from Big Moustache Games.
Going to Spiel Essen ’26? You can find Vroom at Big Moustache Games in Hall 6, booth G400.
You can also find all of our pre-Spiel ’26 coverage here.
