Car Wars

[JenaRey]

Steve Jackson games are of great amusement to me.  They do come up with some of the most amusing ideas.

Way back when the Car Wars phenomina started with miniatures, maps, complex rules and making my grandmother mad as my cousins and I played all over her kitchen table for hours.  Sooo...when my new coworkers suggested we play during lunch I boggled.  How could such a monstrosity be boiled down to less than an hour?  Come to find out it'd been taken care of with a card game option.

Each player gets a car card, 12 points of armor on front, rear, left and right.  5 points on the driver.  The point of the game...use the machine guns, auto cannons and flamethrower cards in your hand to toast the other players and put them out of the game.  They, of course, can armor, spin, swerve, dud missile, and jam your guns right back at you.  Last player standing takes home honors.  It's a quick moving little game and very fun.  We're playing for points, 10 per kill and 20 for winning the match, first player to 250 gets lunch on everyone else's dime.

Anyone else ever tried it?

~J

[Fellfrosch]

No, but that sounds awesome. Incidentally, I'm slowly beginning a "let's play games during lunch" propaganda campaign in my office, and I think I've almost got them to commit to Settlers. Not as cool as Car Wars, but you have to remember where I work, and what I'm up against.

[JenaRey]

Settlers is a good choice too, particularily for those that aren't quite ready for mayhem and complete weirdness.  I'm finding that the key for lunch time games is something with simple rules that can be enjoyed by several people, players and spectators alike.  The CarWars smack talk gets fierce around here, particularily among those that are just watching and cheerleading.  

~J

[Fellfrosch]

Do you mind if I ask where you work?

[JenaRey]

I don't mind at all.

Geographically:  South Jordan, Utah
Company: XanGo, makers of super juice

Not exactly a company of geeks, but the folks in IT are working on it.  We play CarWars in the lunch room and occassional Friday night LAN games.  Just taught one of our managers how to play Rise of Nations.  He loved it.

~J

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

oh. I was hoping that you were going to talk about Car Wars re-rising from the ashes to be a big thing again.

Not that the card game isn't cool and all, I've seen it around, but man, I loved me some car wars. The first computer program I wrote that wasn't in Basic was to facilitate building car wars vehicles.

[JenaRey]

Heh...I wish.  I'm not even sure it's still possible to get the original, but it was a great deal of fun.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

its always possible to get the original thanks to Ebay and Noble Knight games. Question is, do you want to pay for it.

[Mr_Pleasington]

I've always wanted to play a car fighting game with matchbox cars outfitted with machine guns and rockets...but I took one look at a pdf for the Car Wars Compendium and went into convulsions at the complexity.  The latest version also didn't do it for me either.

I've tried to design my own rules to mediocre effect.

Haven't found quite the right mix yet.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

at least 50% of the fun of playing car wars is building your car. Hence the complexity. This is probably why people don't get excited about it, because we live in an age of "streamlined rules are better" for most systems. But there's a demographic that includes people like me that like complex rules and manipulating them -- so long as they make sense, which is the major failing of many complex systems.

Though I have to argue that it isn't so much complexity as it is a wide array of options, and needing to have the chart and a turning key there. You have an acceleration rate which defines how fast you can change speed, the chart defines when each car makes a move based entirely on current speed, and the turning key has the maneuver difficulty right on it. Other than that it's just acknowledging which side of the car was hit and taking the armor off there. Like I said, it's building the car which takes time: balancing out your speed and weight to make sure you have the armor you need and the weapons to fight back.

Anyway, I have the original Car Wars, the Compendium (which includes Car Wars and Autoduel), Tank Wars, Aeroduel, and Boat Wars. There was a time in high school where my group of friends had around 5 copies of the Compendium floating around.

[Prometheus]

I never played the original Car Wars game as such, but for a while we had a game called Autoduel on our Commodore 64 that was based on Car Wars. Having your own personal pre-programmed clone as your extra life was the best. So were those salvage/courier runs.