Car Wars

I have played Car Wars twice now. Each time has been with a scenario that was organized and reffed by the highly creative and talented Toronto Autoduel Association (TADA) . This group scales everything to the size of hot wheel cars, and they spare no time or expense on producing eye-popping terrain and visuals.


TADA Logo

Both times I've been struck by how amazing this game is. It has great depth and realism in its reconstruction of the laws of physics, but each game also produces a memorable narrative. Each game plays out like the highpont in a car chase action movie, only it's less predictable, more realistic and much much more satisfying.

It is unlikely that I would have had the discipline to learn Car Wars if I didn't have the privilege of being able to play with die hard Car Wars fans who have done everything to make the game easy to learn and a blast to play. I am curious to know what you folks think of Car Wars, and whether there is an autoduel association near you that you check out.

Man, this type of stuff takes me back to high school. I was an avid CW player back then. However, the game takes a bit of commitment to play, as well as a set of players with the same mindset.

Would I play again? Casually, yes. But the days of me being a die hard autoduel fan died out many moons ago.

Awww, alright, I'll let the cat outta the bag> I was gonna do a bog write up one of the coolest websites I've seen to date: Darkwind. It's essentially a web version of Car Wars. Turn based, rpg elements icluding a unique mythology, worldmap and real-time economy, and time passage (a la Travian).

If you're a fan of Car Wars then you should definately check it out. There is a free trial version and a more involved pay version. My guess is that you'll be re-naming your firstborn after me in no time.


www.dark-wind.com/

Ah, Car Wars. We had a complex and turbulent relationship when we were young. Haven't thought of you in years...

In 1979, I read a neat short story by Harlan Ellison called "Along the Scenic Route." It was a nasty near future where some drivers on the road had weapons mounted on their vehicles for self-defense. Although I wasn't old enough to drive yet, I lived in the very car-obsessed town of Indianapolis, so this story really captured my imagination. Almost immediately after reading the story, I started writing up combat rules for a game along those lines. A couple days later, we started play-testing my very first game design. Working title? Car Wars. It was brilliantly obvious to my young mind, only two years after the blockbuster hit by George Lucas. My friends loved the game concept but mocked the name, so I changed it to Freeway Melee. Makes no sense, but had a certain sound to it.

By summer of '80, I got the rules working okay and then seized upon a new-fangled idea of the day: Play-By-Mail. I worked up a rough map of the region, and a Wild West in the future kind of setting where my players would be fighting on the highways and county roads of desolate region out west, robbing innocent travelers and battling each other. We played for less than a month, then went off to start high school. Freeway Melee started gathering some dust. In early '81, I started working on Freeway Melee again, planning to sell the game to TSR. Until the day I walked into the Game Preserve and saw Car Wars on the shelf. Ugh.

Turned out Steve Jackson had read the same story plus a couple of others, and saw a couple of inspirational movies. It was immediately obvious that he had designed a much better game. Movement rules! How had I designed a game about cars without detailed map movement?

My friends and I quickly took to Car Wars. We were all going to be taking driver's ed that summer, so we were obsessed with cars. And just as we were finally getting burned out on the basic maps for the game, SJ Games started publishing better maps. The truck stop was okay, but Midville was amazing. Then the Road Warrior came out, and I started buying every issue of that Car Wars mag, AADA something or other.

Flash forward several years... we played Car Wars on a steady basis through the decade, until one fateful night when we staged a big event. 12 players, 6 teams, and 1 custom multi-level map so big that it covered a pool table. There were ramps, jumps and dangerous curves. Everybody wanted to play, so we stupidly recruited the only non-Car Wars fan in our crowd to judge the event.

The event lasted five hours, until midnight. The carnage was spectacular. My car was one of the casualties, but my driver got out, jumped on to the car that rammed him, causing it to bottom out from the excessive weight of all that armor plus my driver. His turret was ruined, so he got out to shoot me with his heavy pistol, so I shot him with a LAW rocket. Later, the judge made some dubious decisions, biased in favor of his closest friends in the group. Although the event itself was fun, the rules arguments began in earnest at midnight, and lasted until 5:00 AM.

After that, several of us stopped playing for good. The game was still great, and the rules discussion wasn't that traumatic, but some of the newest weaponry that showed up in that scenario seemed unbalanced, particularly the flame cloud ejector. I felt that the pressure to keep cranking out Car Wars products was really hurting the overall quality of the game.

For several years after that, some of my friends kept doing one big annual event, with two teams and one experienced player as a judge. By then, I had moved away, so I just heard the session reports afterwards. By '94, my whole crowd had lost interest in Car Wars and moved on to CCGs, never to return.

To this day, I still feel zero interest in Car Wars. I have some great memories, and a few bad ones. The car design process was always time-consuming, and nobody ever did a perfect job of auditing the legality of every car, so there was probably some errors and maybe some cheating. The movement was fiddly and the components looked increasingly crude as better games got published. If there was a group like that Toronto crowd around here, I might give it a try again, but probably not.

I've played car wars a few times. It's an enjoyable game. It could stand the mini treatment though.

Car Dueling is one of my favorite themes in games. I would play Car Wars in an instant if I could get my group to play it. Its not a bad system- not great either. Because of the phase system of movement, the cars never seem to be going fast enough. Consequently I always wipe out going 95 when I should be moving 35. I have a bunch of other games in the same genre (mostly unplayed sadly)

Road kill
Battlecars
Racer knights of falconus
Wreckage
Thunder Road
Circus Imperium (but with chariots and spears)

Steve"Road Warrior"Avery

My friends and I were obsessed with Car Wars from the end of elementary school until we started playing Warhammer 40,000 in 9th grade (1988 or 89). We cut apart G.I. Joe weapons and guns from model kits, attaching them to Matchbox/Hot Wheels-style cars, with 1"x2" cardboard bases, and played on pool tables, kitchen and basement floors, and eventually in one of the science labs at school. It was a blast.

There are a good five people here at FFG that played it when we were young, and we've tried to get an occasional after-work game going.