Flashback Friday - PitchCar - Love It of Hate It? Do You Still Play It?

The problem with PitchCar is that when you have five other people willing to play a boardgame with you, you aren't pulling out PitchCar.

Anjou Valentine wrote: The problem with PitchCar is that when you have five other people willing to play a boardgame with you, you aren't pulling out PitchCar.

Sure, but I don't think that's the space that PitchCar is trying to fill. While the setup can be arduous, PitchCar is still more a filler or late night game and it fits that bill nicely. It comes out often after the 'main event' games are done and the drink is flowing. Add some side wagers in like $5 per race, winner takes all, and the good times are really rolling. We've had a lot of fun with this one at ConnCon and TrashFest. I love it.

Still my favourite dexterity game. As other's have said, it is a pain to set up and put away, but it's so much fun.

Is this good with kids?

n815e wrote: Is this good with kids?

Mine love it. Younger ones won't be competitive, but they can still have fun, especially if the adults playing make deliberate screw-ups to keep them invested.

Ok, so Dragon Con 1996. I see these dudes playing this cool looking dexterity game on a big, huge wooden race track. All black and yellow. I didn’t know it at the time but it was three sets out together. We got in on the next game and I wound up playing it for a few hours. One of the players was Jay Tummelson, and he had for-sale copies of it- both regular Carabande and the Audi special edition. I bought one of each as well as the jump pack, the chicane, and action set. I think I spent like $200 on it. I played it a lot over the years- always a hit. Eventually sold it for $350. I’ve never even seen a copy of Pitchcar, let alone the “mini” version which has got to be useless.

It is a really fun game, but the logistics are bad. Set up is definitely a thing, as is the rails falling out, and uneven joints, and putting it all back into boxes..

Michael Barnes wrote: It is a really fun game, but the logistics are bad. Set up is definitely a thing, as is the rails falling out, and uneven joints, and putting it all back into boxes..

Setup with three people doing it takes a minute or two. I don't have a problem with my rails falling out, just a problem with one of my Extension 2 copy's rails not going in. Hammer fixed it, I leave them there now. Uneven joints are part of the game as far as I'm concerned. We've put salt on the track, salt shakers on the track, dimes under the edges of some pieces to make mini-jumps or bumps in the straightaways, etc. That's part of the beauty of a game like this, where it's more a pile of parts like Lego than it is a particular structured product. Add what you like and play, and if the cat goes after a disk that's in the game.

Logistics . . . you have to look at Pitch Car like Heroscape or 40K or Wings of Glory. You need to get a plastic tub for it and figure on doing a little maintenance now and again. My original base set is 15 years old, has about 100 plays on it, and some of the pieces started to split between the surface and the bottom on the outside of the rail. Wood glue and a clamp fixed it. It isn't a fraction of the maintenance that people spend on minis games, on custom inserts and sleeves for euros with 500 pieces or, god-forbid, clipping the corners on wargame counters. Part of the hobby that you do when you're sitting in front of the TV. Keeps you from snacking.

Do you setup using suggested layouts Sag or do you freestyle it?

When we've played it's always been just make up your own course. This takes quite a bit of time for us, much longer than 3 minutes no matter how many people help. Often the problem is that the track won't align or join up correctly so you have to swap out pieces and nudge things a bit.

Exactly the same problem as a Tyco race track.

charlest wrote: Do you setup using suggested layouts Sag or do you freestyle it?


When we've played it's always been just make up your own course. This takes quite a bit of time for us, much longer than 3 minutes no matter how many people help. Often the problem is that the track won't align or join up correctly so you have to swap out pieces and nudge things a bit.

Short answer -- Extension 2.

I have a lot of track (two base sets, two Extension 2s and one Extension 5). Extension 2 is the key to happiness, as it allows you to free-form your shape, cross over existing track and snap a piece on the far side in place that wouldn't otherwise fit. Magic -- your pieces can all lay down super easy. Here's a super simple example:



Generally we have a straight piece between the two flat-ended Extension 2 pieces and that opens up some interesting possibilities.

Our May Getaway is first weekend in May and I'll get a photo of our bigger setup. It's not uncommon for us to cross a straight piece like I described above, and move its rail so that there's only a one or two inch gap, making for a really challenging spot in the track. A few years back I took a shot at a one-inch gap (about 2mm wider than the cars) from way-far away. As the car hit the side edge of the piece being crossed, it popped up on edge, rolled lazily through the tight gap, rolled against the edge of the turn of the curve piece and continued along, and then eased itself back down onto the correct side. It was a holy-shit moment where everyone was pissed we didn't film it. You had to see it to believe it.

By the way, an image I promised a couple of weeks back --



Note the spot a bit below dead center in the photograph, where there are two blunt-ended pieces that are flush with opposite sides of a single piece of "normal" track. Those are from Pitch Car Extension 2, which also include the 1/8th turns you see on the track as well. The 1/8th turns and the two blunt-ended pieces are the get-out-of-jail-free cards when it comes to track design, so as far as I'm concerned they are an early buy. Buy the base set, then an Extension 2, then maybe another base set.

This year the house we rented was far from ideal. They had really stretched the truth with their photos of the table space available with the result being that we really needed to pull down any games we weren't actively playing. So Pitch Car went for a while in the box instead of being in a corner of the room for more or less the entire weekend, which is usually the case.

But I brought it out and the red-headed guy in the photo put together a super-simple track. I cracked open two corners and opened it up and then the work began in earnest by the three guys you see here. In about ten minutes they had what you're looking at completed, though the guard rails changed a lot before anyone really got down to playing. The corner in the lower left got called "world's edge" and had the rails removed, so you had to be super careful when moving in that part of the track.