As I wrote when I reviewed Yellow Jersey, Gavin Birnbaum is a London-based game creator who started producing small-run, hand made, (mostly) wooden games in 2009 under the name Cubiko. In most cases, these games were made available on crowdfunding sites and then shown on his website (sadly closed at the moment of writing). However, you had to be fast to get the games since they sold out quite quickly. In this case, I was not fast enough (thanks anyway, Hans). Fortunately, François Cardinet was, and he did not miss that one.
 

 

 

 

The game comes in a fine 25.5 x 25.5 x 5 cm wooden box. The board is on the inner part of the detachable lid. It measures, thus, 25 x 25 cm, while the riders are less than 2 cm long.

 

While the Cubiko Games website is unfortunately down at the time of writing, you can still see the game on its Kickstarter page. According to the author's description, Velodrome is a ’cat n mouse’ cycling race game where you have to outwit your opponents in the race for victory. Well, that is an unusual description, to say the least.

 

Just let me say that, while I consider it a game of no chance since there are no randomisers involved (the die is not used to move the riders but rather to determine how many victory points are available), I have been doubting where I should include it in the non-race games category, since in this game cyclists are not racing each other; they just race around the track collecting points every time they cross the finish line. However, in my mind the non-race games and the track-cycling games are incompatible; the same game cannot be in both. And of course, this game could not be left out of the track cycling games list, could it? So, albeit reluctantly, I had to take into account a broader definition of "race games", one that includes games in which players compete to be the first to reach a goal, in this case a predetermined number of points.

 

 

Fortunately, the rules of the game are still available on Kickstarter, so you can get an idea.
 

 

 

Another interesting thing you can read on the Kickstarter page is that only 62 copies of this game were made (no wonder I missed it) and that only one of those copies went to France. I guess it is this one.

 

The die in this game is not a regular die: its faces are 112233. As said above, it is not used to move the riders but to determine the number of Victory Points available.

The movement of the riders is determined by these "cards". On the reverse of "Attack" is "Hold".

These (left) are the VP tracks where VP cubes advance equal to the number on the die.
On the right, the (reversible) sprint/endurance card.

The game was conceived after the Rio 2016 games, and though the first preview copies were available at Essen 2017, it took a full Olympic cycle to fully playtest the game and have it ready for the post-pandemic Olympics. The Kickstarter page mentioned a possible future availability "not before the game's 5th anniversary". Well, that is soon. Let's see what the future brings.