Clash Karts

What makes a good battle arena

A race track only has to take you somewhere. A battle arena has to keep a handful of drivers finding each other, over and over, for minutes on end. That is a harder job, and the games that get it right share a few ideas.

Published 12 October 2026.

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Walls give a fight its shape

The very first kart battle arena was a mistake. Super Mario Kart's Battle Mode began, its director Hideki Konno remembered in the game's 1992 strategy guide, as an open field with nothing in it: "spinning around and around in this open field with no obstacles or landmarks, after 5 minutes you'd get really dizzy." The team added walls. (The interview is in a fan translation by Shmuplations.)

Walls and landmarks do two jobs. They give drivers something to steer round, which is where the skill comes from, and they tell you where you are, which is where the plan comes from. Big Wave Beach is walled on all four sides, and every side has something you can recognise at a glance: the boardwalk and its huts by the sea, with the Ferris wheel out on the water behind them; the lifeguard tower and the ice-cream van at either end; the cabanas down one side and the strength tester down the other.

Small enough to find each other

In 2014 Mario Kart 8 tried battles without arenas, on its race courses. Its director, Kosuke Yabuki, told EDGE that "Players won't know when a rival will appear from around a corner," and he was right, but not in the way he hoped: Kotaku's reviewer found the courses so big that players were lucky to meet more than once or twice, and called the mode "horribly tedious, borderline unplayable." Arenas came back in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe three years later.

Nintendo had met the same problem before. Mario Kart 64's course designer, Tadashi Sugiyama, wrote that the team cut a big city course with a castle and a pond because "it was a very large map, and it took too much time to race through." Writing about Halo's multiplayer maps, Andrew Yoder praised one for being "small enough that disorientation doesn't matter."

Size is about the number of players as much as metres. Big Wave Beach is a square 100 metres across for up to eight karts: a kart at full speed crosses it in about six seconds, so nobody is ever far from a fight.

A middle worth fighting over

An arena needs reasons to go somewhere, and in a kart game the reasons are item boxes. Put them all at the edges and drivers circle the walls; put them in the middle and the middle becomes the fight.

Big Wave Beach puts its sixteen boxes everywhere, but leans to the centre: two sit on top of the Sandcastle Mound, and four more make a ring round it. The eight spawn points do the opposite. They stand on a ring near the edge, every one of them facing the mound, so a kart coming back into the match starts out looking at the fight.

Cover, but not too much

The Level Design Book, a free guide to level design for games, puts the case for restraint in a line: "For PvP gameplay, err on too little cover." It also argues that "It should be impossible to cover all chokepoints from a single point," and that most multiplayer maps balance "a mix of short and long sightlines."

Kart weapons make that balance easier to strike than it sounds, because some of them ignore cover. On Big Wave Beach, anything built into the beach stops a shot and soaks up three quarters of a blast: the huts, the rocks, the van, the cabanas and the sandcastle keep. Between them lie long open stretches of sand where a rocket can fly the whole width of the beach. A hut stops a rocket fired straight at you, but the Seagull turns after its target as it flies, and the Grand Piano comes down from above. No hiding place is safe from everything, which keeps hiding from being a strategy on its own.

Height, used sparingly

Height arrived with 3D. Sugiyama wrote of Mario Kart 64's arenas: "things can be hidden behind other things, and you can look up or look down on your opponent. It makes the strategies in battle mode very different from the first game."

Big Wave Beach has one real height: the Sandcastle Mound, 1.4 metres high with sand slopes all the way round, and a keep on top to circle. That small rise does a lot. Shots fired level from the flat beach run into its side, so a kart in the middle of the top can only be reached from up there, or by the Seagull, which climbs to its target, and the Grand Piano, which falls on it. In King of the Mound, that makes the hill a fortress worth fighting for, and the sand slopes mean it can be stormed from any direction. The ramps scattered round the beach are for fun, and they cost you: a kart in the air cannot speed up, slow down or hold the hill.

Coming back fairly

Nothing spoils a battle faster than being knocked out the moment you come back. Yoder notes that in the map he studied, "the game blocks enemies from respawning nearby." Clash Karts does much the same: a wrecked kart comes back at the spawn point furthest from the other karts, and cannot be hurt for its first three seconds. One spawn point was even moved a few degrees round its ring so that the strength tester would not stand between a returning kart and its camera.

An arena that joins in

The best arenas are not just obstacles. Big Wave Beach is full of things to knock about: beach balls that fly off anything that touches them, sandcastles that burst under a fast kart, parasols that snap. Its two fireworks crates are weapons that belong to nobody until someone hits them, and then belong to whoever hit them last. The computer racers have learned to shoot a crate when their target is standing next to it, and so should you.

For a tour of the whole beach, see the map guide to Big Wave Beach; for how battle modes got here, a short history of battle mode in kart games.

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