Ruling — Heat: Pedal to the Metal

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Heat: Pedal to the Metalbg-366013-en-1e

To play 'Heat: Pedal to the Metal™', follow these procedures:

**Setup**

1. Place the game board in the middle of the table.[1]

2. Each player chooses a color and takes the car, player mat, Gear pawn, and 12 Basic cards in their color, as well as 3 Starting Upgrade cards in their color.[1]

3. Check the game board to see how many Heat and Stress cards each player must add to their car.[1]

4. Place your player mat in front of you.[1]

5. Shuffle the 1s Basic cards, 3 Starting Upgrade cards, and 3 Stress cards together and place this draw deck facedown on the left spot of your player mat.[1]

6. Place the Heat cards faceup on the Engine spot in the middle of the player mat and set your Gear pawn to first gear.[1]

7. Place any remaining Stress cards faceup near the board as a reserve.[1]

8. Randomly place all participating race cars on the starting grid to determine player order for the first round.[1]

9. Draw 7 cards from your draw deck into your hand.[1]

**Gameplay Sequence**

All players complete steps 1 and 2 at the same time:[2]

1. Adjust your gear by checking your current gear and deciding whether to leave it, shift one gear up or down, or (by paying one Heat) shift up or down two positions.[2] Your gear determines how many cards you must play.[2]

2. Play cards from your hand (all types except Heat cards) and keep the 1-4 played cards facedown in your Play Area.[2]

Starting with the frontmost car closest to the Race Line, players complete steps 3 through 9 individually:[2]

3. Reveal the cards in your Play Area; for each symbol played, flip the top card of your draw deck and add its value to your Speed (if it is not a Basic card, discard it and keep flipping until a Basic card is found).[3][4] For Stress cards, flip and discard cards from your deck until a Basic card shows up, then place that Basic card in your Play Area on top of the Stress card.[4] Add all values together to determine your Speed.[3]

4. (Situational) Use Adrenaline if you are the last car to move (or one of the two last cars in races with 5 or more players) to gain extra symbols for the next step.[3]

5. (Situational) React by activating any available symbols from your current gear (Boost and/or Cooldown) in any order.[3]

6. (Situational) Move your car forward by exactly your determined Speed on the track, attempting to stay as close to the Race Line as possible; if a space is blocked by cars on all spots, you must move to the first available free spot behind them.[3]

7. (Situational) (No specific step text provided for step 7).

8. (Situational) (No specific step text provided for step 8).

9. Draw back up to seven cards; take all cards from your Play Area and put them into your discard pile, then draw until you have seven.[2][5]

**Ending the Game**

1. The game continues until all cars have finished the race based on the number of laps indicated on the board.[2][6]

2. You win by being the first player to cross the finish line after the required number of laps.[6]

3. If there is a tie in the same round, the winner is the player furthest ahead (the spot closest to the Race Line is the tiebreaker).[6]

4. At the end of each round, remove cars that have crossed the finish line and place them in order on the Hall of Fame Space.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook · p.3

[2] RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook · p.4 · PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!! · 1. Shift Gears · 2. Play Cards

[3] RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook · p.5 · 3. Reveal & Move · Stress Cards · 4. Adrenaline · 5. React

[4] RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook · p.5 · Symbol

[5] RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook · p.6 · 8. Discard · 9. Replenish Hand · Running out of cards

[6] RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook · p.7 · Cluttered Hand

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 85 ms · ask 7393 ms · total 41619 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 34138 ms · generation 7481 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "'Heat: Pedal to the Metal™' is played over several rounds. Each round all players ALWAYS complete 4 steps: ➊ - adjust their gear, ➋ - play cards, ➌ - move their car, ➒ - draw back up to seven cards. These mandatory steps are highlighted thanks to the following icon . The remaining steps (4-8) are al", "headingPath": "PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!! · 1. Shift Gears · 2. Play Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.048172, "snippet": "This booklet will teach you all the rules to play the core game. We suggest you play your first few races following these rules before trying the Advanced Play and Championship Rules found in the other booklet.", "headingPath": "Read this booklet First!", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.047619, "snippet": "For each symbol played you will add an unknown value between 1 and 4 to your Speed. This is done by flipping the top card of your draw deck: If it is a Basic card ( ), add it to your Play Area. Otherwise, immediately put it in the discard pile and keep flipping until you find a Basic card ( ). The a", "headingPath": "Symbol", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047379, "snippet": "In “Heat: Pedal to the Metal™” everyone races a car around the track for a given number of laps to determine the best driver. At the start of each round you can shift gears, which dictates how many cards you play that round. You control your car’s speed by adding the value of these cards to move tha", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045921, "snippet": "In 'Heat: Pedal to the Metal™' everyone races a car around the track for a given number of laps to determine the best driver. At the start of each round you can shift gears, which dictates how many cards you play that round. You control your car's speed by adding the value of these cards to move tha", "headingPath": "PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!!", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.045228, "snippet": "Reveal the cards in your Play Area, then add all values together to determine your Speed. Values from Upgrade and Stress cards (see below) contribute to that total Speed. Move your car forward by exactly that many Spaces on the track. Always put your car on the Spot closest to the Race Line if avail", "headingPath": "3. Reveal & Move · Stress Cards · 4. Adrenaline · 5. React", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "In rare circumstances you can get stuck with so many Heat cards in your hand that you don't have enough playable cards for the gear you're in. If this happens, use as many playable cards as possible and cover the difference with Heat cards. In this case, your car does not move this turn. Instead, wh", "headingPath": "Cluttered Hand", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Register your board game We invite you to join our online community of players at Days of Wonder Online , where we host a number of online versions of our games. Head to our website and add your Days of Wonder Online number to your existing account or create a new one and follow the instructions. Yo", "headingPath": "Days of Wonder Online", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!! · 1. Shift Gears · 2. Play Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "3. Reveal & Move · Stress Cards · 4. Adrenaline · 5. React", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Symbol", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "8. Discard · 9. Replenish Hand · Running out of cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Cluttered Hand", "sharpsignalDocId": 175}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 175 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 175 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.91019 of 2650 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 13, 2026 13:37

retrieval — what the passage search returned

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!! · 1. Shift Gears · 2. Play Cards	p.4	0.048652 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Read this booklet First!	p.1	0.048172 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	210
#3	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Symbol	p.5	0.047619 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)		p.3	0.047379 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!!	p.3	0.045921 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	3. Reveal & Move · Stress Cards · 4. Adrenaline · 5. React	p.5	0.045228 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Cluttered Hand	p.7	0.045037 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Days of Wonder Online	p.8	0.029851 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300

what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 13 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!!	p.3	#5	0.045921 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!! · 1. Shift Gears · 2. Play Cards	p.4	#1	0.048652 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Read this booklet First!	p.1	#2	0.048172 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	3. Reveal & Move · Stress Cards · 4. Adrenaline · 5. React	p.5	#6	0.045228 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	8. Discard · 9. Replenish Hand · Running out of cards	p.6	#9	0.028992 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Cluttered Hand	p.7	#7	0.045037 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)		p.3	#4	0.047379 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Symbol	p.5	#3	0.047619 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	PUT YOUR PUT YOUR PEDAL PEDAL To tHE To tHE METAL!!! METAL!!! · 1. Shift Gears · 2. Play Cards	p.4	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	3. Reveal & Move · Stress Cards · 4. Adrenaline · 5. React	p.5	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Symbol	p.5	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	8. Discard · 9. Replenish Hand · Running out of cards	p.6	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Heat: Pedal to the Metal — Rulebook (corpus doc 175)	Cluttered Hand	p.7	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 85 ms · first delta 1516 ms · total 41619 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 34138 ms · retrieval 85 ms · ask 7393 ms · gateway work 7481 ms · total 41619 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 2792
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 823
tok/sec: 138.8 tok/sec — 823 output tokens in 5.928 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 55s ago)
stream path: streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog: first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture: both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 56), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.