If you saw my post on Mario Kart Gaslands, you know I used Pitch Car track for my kart races. I mentioned that I would get some Stratagem Paved Roads off of Amazon, as they looked really nice and are much cheaper than Pitch Car. In fact, I was kind of regretting spending the money on Pitch Car when the Stratagem Paved Roads looked to serve the same purpose, but much cheaper.
I no longer have that regret.
I finally decided to mess around with the two packs of Paved Roads I bought some time ago. As I played around with layouts, I was running into trouble. I couldn’t get the pieces to work in ways I thought they should. I thought I was just an idiot and couldn’t figure it out, so I pulled out the carrying case that has an example setup printed right on it.
Ok cool, I thought, I’ll just recreate some of these loops…
As it turns out, you can’t recreate the layout without these gaps.
I tried finagling the curved pieces to close the space, but it doesn’t work.
Maybe I’ll just try a simple figure eight, I thought.
Hmm, the nature of the curved pieces won’t allow that either.
I tried a couple different permutations.
Let’s compare these pieces to Pitch Car pieces:
As you can see, very similar, but Pitch Car has two different curved pieces. And it makes all the difference. If you look at my track in my previous Gaslands post, you will see I have much more layout flexibility with Pitch Car track (and even with Pitch Car track, I wish some pieces could be flipped over to curve the other way).
Bottom Line
If you need a small round or bigger oval track, Stratagem Paved Roads will work and look great. Additionally, if you just need some random roads that enter and leave the game table ends, these will work great. But if you need a track layout in interesting or challenging designs, these will not cut it. It’s like the set is incomplete. It needs at least one more type of curved piece and a shorter straight piece as well. Until they come out with an additional set to address these issues, I can only recommend these for the former options, but not the latter.
Geek Orthodoxy 