I was eight years old when I first played Super Mario Kart. The Super Nintendo title was fast-paced and chaotic, and I spent untold hours racing around the Mushroom Kingdom, dodging banana skins and koopa shells in frantic split-screen battles against my friends.

Over the years, the Mario Kart series has revved its way across generations of consoles. While it has inspired a string of knock-offs and imitators, no video game has come close to matching its furious, frenetic, and gloriously slapstick approach to racing.

Game details Designer: Charles-Amir Perret

Publisher: Portal Games

Players: 3 - 8 (includes single-player support for an odd number of players)

Age: 8+

Playing time: 45-60 minutes

Price: $29.99 ( Charles-Amir PerretPortal Games3 - 8 (includes single-player support for an odd number of players)8+45-60 minutes: $29.99 ( Amazon ) / ~£30 in the UK

Now, a recently released board game attempts to recreate Mario Kart’s high-octane excitement on your tabletop. Can it succeed?

Start your engines

Crazy Karts, from French designer Charles-Amir Perret, is a team-based game for up to eight players. It hands participants control of unpredictable vehicles crewed by an assortment of fantasy creatures. Playing as elves, dwarves, goblins, or mummies, you attempt to cross the finish line ahead of your rivals while struggling to keep your kart in one piece despite environmental hazards, aggressive rivals, and your own vast ineptitude.

At its heart, Crazy Karts is a game about coordination. Players work in teams of two, with each partner controlling different aspects of their kart’s performance. One player takes charge of acceleration and weapons, while the other handles braking and maneuvering. Each turn sees players lay down action point cards to determine exactly how their kart will behave, and they work together to speed ahead of opponents and navigate obstacles. In effect, Crazy Karts is an exercise in collaborative programming, defining a set of actions before executing them on the track. Victory goes to the team that can most seamlessly synchronize its efforts.

There’s one problem, though: teammates aren’t allowed to communicate with one another. No speaking, no gesturing, no furtive glances. You have to coordinate a complex series of actions without so much as a nod or a grunt, and the slightest error could send you hurtling head-first into a brick wall.

This might be a familiar scenario for some Ars readers, and anyone who’s ever worked at a software company with less-than-ideal standards of communication has my deepest sympathies. In game terms, though, Crazy Karts’ ban on communication turns out to be a blast. You might find yourself furiously trying to gain speed, only to discover that your partner has her foot jammed on the brake. You could devote precious action points to firing your cannon, then realize that your teammate has pulled you beyond range of your opponents.

It’s a perfect formula for confusion and misunderstanding, and it elevates the game beyond the boundaries of a simple racer into something that captures the anarchic joy of the video games that inspired Crazy Karts. Every round brings the chance of a glorious moment when you and your partner are working in perfect unison towards victory. But you’re every bit as likely to experience a horrible sinking sensation as you realize that you’ve managed to completely undermine one another, leaving yourselves straggling as your opponents disappear into the distance.

The result is a succession of emotional ups and downs, and one of Crazy Karts’ most impressive accomplishments is that an absolutely terrible turn can be just as entertaining as a successful one. There’s a certain masochistic pleasure in seeing your kart take punishment: being rammed by another team, mis-steering into a huge pile of rocks, or limping across the finish line with one or more of its wheels missing. You’ll lose speed, firepower, and maneuverability as you’re bashed and battered, and, while it’s possible to repair your kart mid-race, it comes at the cost of valuable action points.

While Crazy Karts delights in dishing out damage, it also hands you plenty of goodies to play with. An assortment of power-ups can boost your speed, hinder your enemies, or fix your vehicle. Each team also has its own special ability. Dwarves can ram obstacles out of their way; goblins can steer their kart with greater precision; mummies can lasso enemies and drag them onto a collision course with other racers. Everything contributes to ratcheting up the chaos, and by the end you feel as though you’ve just emerged from a washing machine on full spin cycle.

Crazy Karts’ unpredictability is likely to turn some players off. The game isn’t, and doesn’t pretend to be, a strategic racing title. It’s packed with elements of randomness, and it unashamedly plays for laughs at every opportunity. At its best moments, the game can be genuinely hilarious, but it achieves this by depriving players of control at crucial points and by demolishing any attempt at a coherent strategy. Crazy Karts is far more about reacting to events as they happen than sticking to a coherent game plan, and if you’re after something more serious then you should look elsewhere. (I recommend the excellent Automobiles.)

A more substantive problem is the game’s overall structure. The turn sequence sees all players simultaneously allocating their action points, then taking turns to play out their moves on the board. This creates a burst of action and decision-making followed by a period of inactivity while other teams shuffle their karts from space to space. That said, you can have fun watching your opponents’ faces as they realize how badly they’ve messed up their turn, and the game offers many opportunities for good-natured mockery.

Another shortcoming is how the game consists of two separate races: a Formula One-style qualifier followed by a final contest to determine the overall winner. Like Mario Kart before it, Crazy Karts works best when it provides short bursts of fun; over the course of two rounds it starts to feel a bit thin. My gaming group was more than happy to play a single, all-or-nothing race before moving on to something else.

While it has its flaws, Crazy Karts is a funny, turbulent, helter-skelter ride with just enough of a tactical layer to engage your brain. If you’re looking for a dash of humor at your next game night, this one deserves to take pole position.