It’s time for our first Kickstarter preview of 2025 – and it’s a wheely good one to kick off the year! Let me introduce you to the beautifully colourful abstract game that is Spokes, from Radical 8 Games.

Gameplay overview: 

👥 2 to 6 players
⌛ 30-45 minutes
🧠 14 years+

Spokes is a game where players race around a velodrome on cycle paths made up of brightly coloured spokes. Swap spokes to extend or link together a path of the same colour and zoom ahead of your opponents! But be warned – other players can take advantage of your beautifully curated routes too and pip you to the finish line. First player to complete three laps of the velodrome wins!

Each player has an individual bike board representing their country, which has enough space to hold 6 coloured spokes. On your turn, you swap a spoke from your bike with a spoke on the velodrome, before moving your bike pawn along the route you just made with the new spoke. You can stop at any point along the coloured route, and even pass through other players, but once you reach the end of the coloured path your turn is over.

At the start of the game, your bike has one spoke of each colour, but as you swip and swap that can all change and you often end up with 2, 3 or even more spokes of the same colour. Oh, and you can’t just pick any old spoke from your bike – your wheel has an action cube that sits between the spokes, and each turn you can only move it up to three spaces clockwise around the wheel (so, you have to pick from the next three spokes).

If there’s another player  in the space where you would finish your route, instead you finish a space early and get to flip your Slipstream tile to the “Adrenaline burst” side. You can flip this back to the Slipstream side on a future turn to include one non-matching spoke into your route – an additional opportunity to extend your route further.

There are a couple of variants you can play:

• Team mode variant (for 4 and 6 players). The rules are the same as a standard game, but players work in teams of two.

• Two bike variant (for 2 and 3 players). Players control 2 bikes each instead of 1. Players still alternate turns, but use a Bike marker to track which of their bikes they moved last. On your turn, if you don’t have a bike marker on their bikes, you can choose to move either but then place the Bike marker on that bike board. If one of your bikes does have the bike token on it, you have to move the other bike but then remove the bike marker. So once both have had a turn, you can then move either again; i.e., your first 4 turns moving bikes A and B could go ABAB,  ABBA, BABA, or BAAB.

There’s also a simple solo challenge, where you try to complete three laps of the velodrome with 12 coloured spokes (2 of each colour).

Our thoughts:

This is one of those times when judging a board game by its box really paid off. We were instantly drawn to try Spokes by the colourful art and components, despite (for us!) the cycling theme. The colours really do pop! And the coloured wooden spokes are a lovely tactile element. If we had one niggle it would be that spoke holes on the player board aren’t backed so your spokes end up falling through if you need to move your board.

While the colours are what caught our eyes first, the gameplay is what really drew us in. We’re impressed by how well Bert Hardeman (the designer) has implemented Spokes theme into the gameplay. We loved it!

Note: the game we played was a prototype and components may change for the final version. For example, the spoke colours are going to be brighter (and better in my opinion). I’ve included a photo below of the updated colours.

While the colours are what caught our eyes first, the gameplay is what really drew us in. We’re impressed by how well Bert Hardeman (the designer) has implemented Spokes theme into the gameplay. We loved it! Learning the game is easy – swap a spoke, follow the path – but there’s actually a lot of thinking to do. You need to build long routes to win the race, but you don’t want it to benefit your opponents if you can help it. And you don’t want to get stuck by getting to the point where your wheel is full of one colour – nothing worse when all I have is brown when you’d rather use literally any other colour. Can you set up a route now so that you can take advantage of the next lap? All of these considerations make what looks like just a pretty face, a deceptively thinky game. I found it a real brain burner trying to plan my routes ahead!

Spokes cranks up a gear with the 2 bike variant, where each player controls two bikes – and this was our favourite way to play 2-players

Spokes cranks up a gear with the 2 bike variant, where each player controls two bikes – and this was our favourite way to play 2-players. By playing two cyclists on the same team, you can strategise ways for them to support one another, like bumping your bikes into each other to activate the Adrenaline burst. Or using one bike to help set up a route that the other bike can take real advantage of, sacrificing one bike for the betterment of the other. The 2 player mode felt akin to strategies used in actual velodrome cycling: one bike forges ahead allowing the other to bring up the rear until it’s the opportune time to swap, or for that second bike to push to the finish line. Whilst we didn’t get time to play the team variant with our friends, we also think that would work well for similar reasons.

What works well:

• So colourful and tactile!

• It’s an interesting combination of racing and puzzly placement that really works that grey matter.

• The theme really comes into its own in the 2 bike variation, where players control two bikes each, introducing fun ways to play and really taking advantage of what the theme has to offer.

What doesn’t work well:

• We had a few minor niggles with the components and box, but as this is a prototype a lot is subject to change (e.g. box size). 

Final thoughts:

Beauty and brains, Spokes showed us something we’ve not come across before in a boardgame – a winning combination of racing with abstract puzzle.

Do you love cycling? Me neither, but that really isn’t essential here. Beauty and brains, Spokes showed us something we’ve not come across before in a boardgame – a winning combination of racing with abstract puzzle. And as people who are usually playing 2 player, it’s always satisfying when you find a game that plays really  well at your default player count and is still a great game at other counts too.

Spokes will be launching on Kickstarter on 18th February 2025 – the page is live now so head over there and register to get notified when the campaign launches! And Radical 8 Games will be demoing Spokes at Airecon in March, so if you’re going we deffo recommend you seek them out!

---

This game was kindly loaned by Radical 8 Games via the UK Board Game Review Circle. All opinions are ours and our reviews are always honest.