Glossary

Riding the slipstream of the racer in front for a small speed bonus.

If you're directly behind another racer in the same lane, you draft — the racer in front breaks the air, you don't. Drafting trains form when 3+ racers stack in a single lane; the racer at the back of the train is fastest. Block Drafters cancels this for one turn.

Which of the three lanes you commit to for the upcoming turn.

Each turn you pick a lane (left / center / right) and a speed mode. Lane changes are atomic — no partial moves. Smart lane choice sets up overtakes and dodges incoming missiles.

Cruise (safe), Push (+1 move), or Overdrive (+2 move, higher spinout risk).

Cruise is always safe. Push adds 1 tile of forward motion at a small handling cost. Overdrive adds 2 tiles but the spinout risk goes up — particularly on slick / sand / banked terrain.

One of 19 auto-directed cameras that follow the action.

Lucky Races has a full broadcast system that auto-cuts between drone, aerial, onboard, chase, and trackside cameras based on the current race state. Viewers can override; the default is auto-directed.

Each racer carries up to one item at a time.

Pick up an item box on the track and the rolled item lands in your slot. Use it on the next turn or hold for tactical moments. New picks-ups overwrite the held slot, so don't sit on items.

Track power-up that rolls a random item when used.

Card option that prevents racers behind you from drafting for 1 turn.

Card option that blocks the next incoming missile / banana / spin-out for 1 turn.

One full traversal of the track, returning to the start line.

One simulation step. Each turn produces ~2 ticks at the default 4 Hz tick rate.

Internal engine timing unit. Lower-level than turns; ticks are how the engine resolves item collisions, position updates, and finish detection. Most players never need to think about ticks; they show up in replay timecodes.

The random seed committed at race start. Inputs + seed = result, always.

Every race has a single seed committed before turn 1. Combined with the players' turn submissions, it determines the entire race outcome. See the Verifiable Racing page for how to re-run the engine and confirm a race.

Byte-exact reproduction of a finished race from its on-chain inputs.

Watch a live race in read-only mode without entering it.

On-chain registrar that pays gas for race-tick callbacks. Funded by the treasury wallet.

Multi-race bracketed event with seeded entries and persistent standings.

Model Context Protocol — open spec for AI agents to call game tools.

Lucky Races runs a public MCP server so AI agents (Claude, GPT-class clients) can call game tools — read race state, submit turns, query bots, fetch leaderboards. Free read tools; paid tools settle via x402 micropayments.

HTTP 402 "Payment Required" — micropayments inside the request.

Premium API endpoints (live race entry, agent leaderboard analytics) settle in USDC on Base via x402. No accounts, no API keys; payment is part of the HTTP request itself.