Ahhh… the squeal of the tires. The roar of the blast cannon. The smell of napalm. The retinal glare of targeting lasers… it’s AUTODUELLING TIME.
In case you haven’t noticed, autoduelling is alive and well in 2051. I’ve been playing Car Wars in So Cal regularly for the past year and participation in our duelling club, SCAB (Southern California Autodulling Brotherhood) has been growing. We have a very aggressive group of drivers, and are always looking for more duellists.
Even better, we’re having a Division 25 duel this weekend at Brookhurst Hobbies in Garden Grove, CA. Saturday July 28 at 1pm. Any and all Doper Duellists are invited!
Also, I’ve updated a popular vehicle design spreadsheet to eliminate most bugs and incorporate the latest rules. Check out the CWVD at my Car Wars Page. This is not a substitute for the rulebooks - you still will need the Car Wars Compendium 2nd ed. to make a legal design. Or you can just show up and use one of the pregenerated cars that our referee provides.
Finally, if you just want to talk about Car Wars, this is the thread. How about this: I hate ram cars. Ram cars are for wussies who can’t shoot. Put a fricking gun on your car, you redneck!
A fairly complex strategy game with some role-playing elements, set in a rather dark future where a plague wiped out most grasses, leading to mass starvation and desertification. The US has broken up into dozens of city-states, kingdoms, and small dictatorships, the wilderness is terrorized by anarchists, and the most popular sport is the dueling of heavily armed and armored cars (which are also used for escorting traffic through the anarchy between the havens of civilization.
I never got the full game, but I used to love the Fighting Fantasy-style game books, especially the first one where you have to rescue a kidnapped princess from Louisiana from some Oklahoman warlord-type, because the route you followed mirrored the semi-annual trip we made from Dallas to Oklahoma every year.
Ah, the sweet sweet memories. The thrill of driving a truck into a subcompact automobile at 45 miles per hour at my favorite arena, the Hammer Down.
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I haven’t played in years and I wasn’t aware that anyone else had been playing. CW was one of those classic games that introduced many of us to the world of strategy games. I’ve been hoping that they’d adapt the game to be played with miniatures intead of just slips of paper. But the slips of paper do keep the game in the affordable range for more people.
I always liked driving school bus and I always laughed at people who drove the motorcycles. What was the name of the famous arms dealer, Uncle Al? Those catalogs were hilarious.
Actually, we play at 1.5x scale of the original game, using MicroMachines for miniatures. There is an amazing assortment of MicroMachines available, replicating almost every make and model of car, truck, and van. It makes the counters a whole helluva lot easier to manage when your vehicle counter is an actual mini instead of a slip of cardstock.
Some groups go so far as to use wads of cotton to represent smoke and flame clouds and such, like the hardcore miniature (tank) combat folks like to do, but we don’t. It makes for some great photos, though. I’ll look around on the web for some.
Unfortunately, MicroMachines are suddenly collectors items. Except for some NASCAR series, they are only available on EBay anymore. We Car Wars players consider ourselves lucky when someone puts up their kid’s collection of a couple dozen abused Micromachines for $5. All we want is some realistic looking counters for our games, not collector-quality items still in the blister pack. We wind up supergluing them to 1.5" x 3/4" cardstock bases anyway.
If you want more info on SoCal Car Wars events, email me at the webmaster link found on the CWVD page I linked to in my earlier post. We have a tournament coming up at the Strategicon convention this Labor Day weekend.
Actually, it’s a tactical game, and the role-playing elements are entirely optional… we don’t use them at all.
It’s basically just a fire and movement game. You design a vehicle with weapons, armor, and other accessories like targeting computers, ram plates, and defensive or maneuvering aids.
You have so many points to spend on maneuvers per turn. The faster your speed, the more risky it is to spend your maneuver points, and the more likely you will have to make a “control roll” to maintain control of your vehicle. Once per turn each crewmember can fire a weapon or operate an accessory.
The object is simple: blast the hell out of the other players, and not get blasted yourself.
The game play is not complex - just move and fire. But the vehicle design rules have a lot of depth and there are enough design options to give the game a lot of replay value. Some people get caught up just in vehicle design and spend more time doing that than actually playing.
It’s quite fun! The SCAB events have had an average of 10 players per event lately, two or three times a month.
When I left Oklahoma for NYC my friends threw me a going away party and at my request we played Car Wars. We didn’t use the role playing side just the fighting side. We would choose an arena and dollar ammount allotted to each player. Then a week of design and then it ladies and gentlemen start your engins.
For the last game I was the lone car against three buses and a half track. I took out two of the buses but the half-track was too much me.
Old School ram plates *ruled.[/] A metal-armored gas burning ram car was evil back in the day. Now that the ram plate has been wussied out, it’s back to big guns, and plenty of them.
My opinion for the thread: I love killer kart matches! It’s like Tie fighters going at it!
Y’all forgot the most important part: the game was inspired by The Road Warrior with the setting transferred to the US and given a set time frame. I’ve never played but while I was living in a homeless shelter, I passed the time by designing vehicles. Wish I still had that list, had about five college-ruled notebook pages.
I remember my first Car Wars vehicle - a motorcycle with a recoilless rifle in the sidecar. I spent a lot of time deciding how to allocate my $$$ and arrived at that design. Unfortunately, in the first 10 minutes of my first game, I failed to make a roll to keep control of my vehicle. Then, I immediately rolled a 6 and the bike rolled over and burned. I was so pissed.
IMHO, this game was completely ruined by the presence of ridiculously powerful weapons like surplus tank guns. Basically, if anyone had one of these on their bus or whatever, it was the role-playing equivalent of trying to fight a 36th level fighter with a 1st level thief in D&D.
Yes, they did. Now they suck. I remember the first time I threatened to put a ramplate on, everyone ran screaming whenever I’d show up. I didn’t actually do it, but lots of people radically changed their designs on just the possibility (I couldn’t find the weight, so I stuck to guns, lasers and rockets) that I might do so. Shoulda seen the look of shock on the faces when my $45,000 luxury set a car on fire with the first shot at 18 inches! HEHEHehehehehe…! Sucker burned to the frame before it stopped rolling…!
Those were the days!
There was a Murphy’s Rules bit about the action sequence in Car Wars, something about “…in one second, a driver can accelerate or brake, make up to two 45[sup]o[/sup] turns, talk on the radio and fire weapons, all done safely…”. Unfortunately, Murphy’s Rules require a money subscription for the archive, so I can’t link you the actual comic…
Another of Murphy’s rules is “In Car Wars, death of the driver only constitutes a -2 penalty to actions.”
We’re constantly reminding ourselves that it’s a mistake to try to apply any sort of common sense to Car Wars rules. The latest set of rules will cover most situations, but they’re not organised very well. Fortunately, up until this year, Steve Jackson Games and the AADA had appointed a Head Referee who managed a couple of documents covering things the published rules don’t.
But suddenly, with the confirmation that SJG will be releasing a new, streamlined version of Car Wars, their support for the old version has all but dried up.
I’m going to try to not hate the new version until I see it, but from what I hear, they’re trying to make it less complicated and easier to learn. That’s fine if all you want to do is sell copies the first three months, but a game like that has much less replay value than one with a deep and convoluted ruleset.
Oh, and Sealemon88, you’d enjoy our regular “Amateur Night” events, where we give everyone identical 5k or 10k cars, and no skill points. The last one was 10k: sloped compacts with forward mounted ATG/APFSDS and light armor.
