When I was a lad, I played a lot of Car Wars. I played it with Tim, who eventually became Orthodox and moved to Isael, I played it with Fred, who made fantastic cat barfing sounds and beat me every fucking time, and I played it with my cousin Michael, who I'll get to Nerdly one of these days. I have several Uncle Albert's catalogues, a couple of years of Autoduel Quarterly, and at least two editions of the rules. I've got rules for planes and hovercraft, which I remember tinkering with and deciding that more enjoyment could be extracted from them by eating the books.

Michael was up visiting with me a week back and we stopped into a game store. In said store, they had a selection of 5th edition Car Wars booklets. They'd trimmed down the rules to fit them all in a little booklet, complete with two cars you could cut out, mines, pedestrians viewed from the top, debris, and so forth. It turns out the game is much more sleek than it used to be. Sadly, though these booklets were published in 2002 and promised full car design rules, they never materialized.

No matter, though; the game remains fun. We played some Division 5 cars ([Edit:]≤ $5000 ) and had a good time. There was one strange and hazy rule, but the game's pretty sleek, taking out the tedium that marked the game before. So much fun that I'm going to be playing it with some folks at Camp Nerdly next month. No one's signed up yet, but I promise, it's a good time. It plays in 90 minutes or so and there's a lot of shit talkin'.

Anyway, I remembered that Eppy had told me about a game he'd seen Jimb playing.

It's called Darkwind. It's free, it's a Java app, and you're pre-assigned cars unless you subscribe. The pre-assigned cars are plenty of fun so far. It's everything fun about Car Wars, but the computer does all the computing instead of doing it wrong in a piece of scrap paper and arguing about it later.

I just won a race for the first time. I recommend the experience!

See you on the track!

Oh, I go by my regular name. My number is 18061. My team is The Knight Riders. We are men... who do not exist.

Signed up at last. Jalopies from Hell.

Posted By: RogerHot Wheels.

That is a huge win. We up-converted but it was pretty awkward with the old rules.

I played the hell out of Car Wars back in the day. It's a great game. There was a supplement for Mad Max style play called Chassis and Crossbow. We got that and pulled out the highway tiles and played a long campaign. It never bothered us that the game doesn't have any real role-play rules. We just made sure all our problems could be settled with an autoduel; essentially "say yes or face the highway." I have fond memories of the big finale, a long chase across trackless desert driving a bus loaded with high flammable fuel drums. Good times.

I can bring a Dremel and all my old car bits. Plus painted NC Department of Transportation guys in orange vests.

Ha! Sweet!

I'm also thinking about Mechaton-style building rules. I'll get back about that.

Also, I notice you're not signed up for the game. How am I going to shoot off your wheels if you don't show up?

So.... are you coming to Nerdly?

Every now and then, I check ebay for a full version of Car Wars, for nostalgia's sake. It was my first ever gaming convention purchase. We played it a lot, and I ran it for my group as an RPG. We modified handgun damage against characters to make that more interesting (2 damage became D2, 3 damage D3, etc.), and did all the rest via GM fiat.

Thanks for the Darkwind link, I'll definitely look into that :)

Great Googly Moogle, that's hugely baroque! Part of the charm of the 5th ed. rules is their sleekness. Maybe I call paw through there and figger out just the relevant stuff.

Cars Wars was my second game that I learn back in the day. I wish I still had my little black box. I do have the new edition of which is pretty cool. But no design rules. :(

For a story game version of Car Wars I would just use Vincent's Apocalypse World. I think I drafted up some notes on that somewhere.

SJG produced a new version of Car Wars without vehicle design rules? That's just... wrong. I still have my Car Wars Deluxe box set that I won in the first convention tournament event I ever entered. Never played it after that. I'm totally up for crashing cars at GoPlayNW though!

Hmm, isn't division 5 for vehicles up to $5000? Amateur night games, where everyone drives dinky subcompacts with too little armor and a single weapon in one facing. Good for quick games with beginners tho, you only have to learn the movement rules and the special rules for your weapon of choise.

What you are talking about sounds like divsion 10, where things get tricker, you get turrets, multiple weapons (that can be linked) and more extra stuff.

I like the game, but I do not like the flimsy maps and counters. Perhaps I should get some matchbox cars and scale up the movement templates and run games on the 8 seat diningroom table.

-- Edit --

Read the Wikipedia article. We played 4th edition, and you played 5th, the things I mentioned above were how we did things back in the good old days. :-)

The lack of vehicle construction rules for 5th edition has kept me from upgrading, so I have not looked closer at that release at all.

-- Edit again! --

Found an article on the net about playing Car Wars with minis. I am very tempted.

www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=250

www.sjgames.com/car-wars/adq/2/3/upscaling.html

If you're willing to make your own turning key, you can go for any scale you choose. I've been tempted to go the other direction, to a game that could be played on graph paper.

I remember very little about my days of Car Wars, except this: Bootlegger's Reverse!

As a side note: I used to work with the guy who invented the turnkey (Keith Carter). He didn't exactly reap much of a reward for it; he got some minimal salary, no royalties for sales or anything. That was before I knew about creator-owned publishing, or I'd have suggested it to him :)

Just going to add to the CW love. We played when they came in approximately digest-sized plastic boxes (Car Wars / Truck Stop / Uhh... the aircraft one?) and had a blast in our afterschool gaming group. Never forget blasting through the chains blocking off the Mall map--I think I saw Blues Brothers not long after and thought, "Yep... done that."

As for CW LARP? I think they do that in LA every weekend. No weapons on machines, yet (they just carry them, and the gunfighting only starts when bets are shirked). And recall that it all started, in the fiction, from Demolition Derby--butt a guy added a machine gun one event. You can go see a derby in the south pretty regularly... or be IN one.

That gem-polisher trick makes me think. I imagine there's something of a divide between the "sleek dueling machin" school of car wars and the "Mad Max beater" school. I always imagined my cars as high-tech killing machines (except when I played Chassic & Crossbow of course).

Posted By: tony dowler... the "sleek dueling machin" school of car wars ...

MechaShan!

Mmmm...nice. Now I need the fucking Mechaton rules. :-/ From what I understand of Mechaton, this looks really good.

Gunner: Maybe that's your "turret". Either your driver is pushing his thumb buttons and letting loose with hardmounted HMGs or rockets or whatever, or you've got a guy riding shotgun who can literally shoot any direction. Is that too complicating?

p.

Can I just say that the original cover art is fantastic?

Joshua, the Lego Racers Super Speedway game gives you parts for four cars, if that's the scale you're looking at.

Speaking of LARPing Car Wars...

Have any of you played the World of Warcraft minis game?

It uses a master clock that divides time into rounds of 10 'phases'; combat actions 'cost' a certain number of phases.

So if it's Phase 3 and your guy does a Difficulty 4 attack, he can't move again until Phase 7 rolls around.


Very similar to Car Wars maneuvers.

But the WoW version is much quicker.