Driving Me Crazy

“Driving Me Crazy” is a light, chaotic card game all about racing your friends to your holiday destination, ideally without them completely ruining your journey along the way. It’s quick to learn, easy to get to the table, and very much leans into that classic “take that” style of gameplay where progress can be undone in an instant.

At its core, the game is a race to reach an exact distance, usually 1000km, though this drops to 700km in larger player counts. Each player builds a “road” in front of them using distance cards worth either 50km or 100km. On your turn, you simply play a card, resolve its effect, then draw back up to four cards. Blue cards help you, letting you draw more cards, play extra cards, or chain actions together, while red cards target opponents with things like missed turns, discarded progress, or blocking them from playing distance cards altogether. You can’t go over the target distance, so there is a bit of tension as players try to land exactly on the right number while also dodging disruption.

This is very much a “play a card, cause a bit of chaos, see what happens” kind of game. Turns are quick, the rules are simple, and it’s easy for pretty much anyone to jump in within a couple of minutes. There’s a nice idea in how the action cards can chain together, and occasionally you’ll get a really satisfying turn where everything clicks and you surge ahead.

At higher player counts, the game does come alive a bit more. With more players, the chaos spreads out and it feels less like you are being directly targeted and more like everyone is collectively causing problems for each other. It’s also very accessible, and this is the sort of game you can pull out with non-gamers, families, or mixed groups and get going almost instantly.

That said, at two players it really doesn’t land. Because there is only one opponent, any negative card feels very direct, and the game often turns into a simple back-and-forth rather than something chaotic and fun. We also found that most players naturally drift towards just building their road rather than disrupting others, as it often feels like the more effective strategy, which takes away some of the decision making. Over time, it can feel a little repetitive, and the chaos doesn’t quite have enough depth to keep things interesting beyond a few plays.

We had one situation where unless you were using a card that directly either gave you road or stopped the other person getting road we both just kept laying road consistently over the course of the game.

The components are nice and the box is really lovely and it all looks cool on the table but didn’t really grab me in a way that made any of the people I played with (the boys and teenagers) want to play again after we played once (hence why I kept having to look for other people to play with to get a number of games under my belt.

Overall, “Driving Me Crazy” is a perfectly serviceable, light “take that” card game that works best in larger groups where the chaos feels more shared and less targeted. It’s easy to teach (although there are a lot of card effects some of which aren’t obvious by the icons), quick to play, and will get a few laughs, but it didn’t quite have enough staying power for us to keep coming back to it.

Disclaimer – A prototype copy of the game was provided by Simplexity games via the UKBG Review network.