Rainbow Raceway was designed for two of my youngest children as a simple board game, patterned off much older games such as Uncle Wiggily and Candyland. It follows the same concept of moving down a pathway to a finish line, facing various obstacles along the way.
The main difference that separates Rainbow Raceway from these older games is the method used to advance the game pieces. Both Candyland and Uncle Wiggily use colored cards that players draw from a stack to advance their players. Rainbow Raceway uses eight-sided dice that have both colors and numbers on them.
The original game was invented around 1990. In 2022 I made a few changes to the gameboard, adding the Pit Row detour and the Runaway Ramp near the finish line. The Tachometer sign on the right was also added, as well as the red line near the finish line that allows a player to roll only one die instead of two when playing certain game versions.
There are six “Races” or versions of the game that become slightly more complicated as you go down the list, allowing children to advance their skills as they get older. The first two races are fairly simple and require either moving a race car forward to one color or counting a simple number of spaces. The next four involve using simple arithmetic skills and/or making decisions concerning a racer’s best moves.
To read or print out a PDF copy of the complete rules and examples click the Green Button. The Purple Button contains only the Rules and Race versions. These may be printed out for reference when playing the game
Fun with Photoshop
Make your own Rainbow Raceway game by clicking the blue button below. Make it a family project! Build, then play!
At the beginning of the instructions for making a Rainbow Raceway game, there is a little section explaining what CAD/CAM is and how it makes manufacturing easier. This section may be skipped over.
All of my dice that have colors on them use the configuration shown in the picture on the left. If you roll a 5, for example, it would also stand for Purple if colors are being used in the game. Click on the pictures for a bigger image.
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