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So, at the FLGS we've recently had a resurgence in Car Wars. For those who are too young to know, this was an amazing Steve Jackson game from the 1980's set in a somewhat dark future reminiscent of a not-so-post-apocalyptic future as Mad Max. Cars, trucks, and vans are fitted with all manner of armor and weaponry, and fighters duke it out in arenas for the entertainment of the masses.

Well, apparently one of the guys at the store has found rules and templates online to play Car Wars at a 3x scale. It's a great scale where we can play on a 4'x6' table as the "arena" and use a lot of the same terrain used for skirmish games (walls, shipping containers, etc.) to make the arena a little more exciting. This is at a scale where you can use Matchbox cars for the majority of the vehicles you want to use, though you'd probably need to look elsewhere for larger vehicles like tractor-trailers. The vehicles should be roughly 1/64 scale. We've had two gaming sessions so far, and the excitement about the game is hilarious. Any time someone much older than 30 walks over to see what we're doing, they invariably exclaim, "Oh my God! Car Wars!?" We've even gotten to the point where people are going out to buy Matchbox cars to convert up with turrets, ram plates, gun ports, external weapon pods, etc. and then finish them up with a custom paint job. For those of us who grew up in the 1970's and 1980's at the FLGS, there's actually more buzz about this than there is about 40K 7th edition....which is kind of odd, I guess. We've even started a league that has a half dozen people who have already gotten in a game and at least that many more planning on coming next week. Haha...there might be as many tables going with Car Wars on it next week as there are playing any single other current game system

Anyway, has anyone else seen any of this where you play? Who else remembers playing Car Wars back in the days before the Berlin Wall came down?

Wasn't this supposed to see a new edition alongside OGRE or am I mistaken?

Apparently there is a newer version than the Deluxe Car Wars I bought like 25 years ago where there are actually updated rules and such. They're downloadable for like $15.00 from Warehouse23, but I haven't gotten my own set yet.

Also, is this like Battle Cattle, or is it a completely different type of game?

Awesome! Good to see it is still alive somewhere.

My former GM has piles and piles of old games, we played Battle Cattle for a good few hours to kill time. Amazing how such a simple game can be so amazing.

 BrookM wrote:
Also, is this like Battle Cattle, or is it a completely different type of game?

Not really. Battle Cattle was based on Car Wars, but is much more tongue in cheek and nowhere near as complicated.

Car Wars is actually pretty involved. It uses maneuver templates for example, and each player has accounting that is done with each turn to keep track of things like speed and relative control over the vehicle (you can get too aggressive with maneuvers and/or encounter hazards like being shot with an anti-tank gun that can cause a driver to lose control of the vehicle).

It uses a system similar to old Battle Tech with having damage boxes on each vehicle location and for vehicle components like engines, passengers, weapons, etc.

Oh wow... I used to play Car Wars loads when I was at school...

The main thing that I remember was the little 1/4" squares all over the map, does this version use a movement template?

Take some photos next time you play - I'd love to see them!

Yup, there's a template and no need for a gridded map. We just use the turn template (same as the original one, just bigger) on a table with terrain on it.

Here's a link to one of the threads at out FLGS forum where some people have been posting pictures of their WIP cars:

http://gigabitescafe.com/forum/index.php?topic=11249.45

Usually Rich, the guy who is the driving force behind the local revival, will take pictures when we play various games. He didn't the first two times, I think, because none of the cars had been developed farther than Matchbox cars on a base.

We should get another few games in this weekend, so we'll see about getting some pics up.

Are you basically talking about Car Wars 5th edition, which was scaled to 3x and generally meant to be played with Hot Wheels? It was also slightly simplified from a play perspective. Great fun!

I played a TON of that a while back, and posted a bunch of pictures to the related Boardgamegeek page that might be fun for you to check out: BGG gallery page
I didn't customize any of the cars, since I liked the portability of throwing them all in a plastic bag.

We use small blue/red beads for Handling Status, so +4 would be 4 blue beads and -2 would be 2 red beads. Then it's just a matter of tracking speed and remaining armor on the record sheet. You can see in the last page the taxi SUV that flipped was at a hilarious -6 HS and tried a bold sharp turn.

For pre-customized cars there are some older Ebay-able ones called Jada Battle Machines that look pretty cool:

Yeah, that's pretty much it, but apparently there's a slightly new version out? It's referred to as "black cover" or something like that (as in, the cover of the rule book is black). My old deluxe edition was blue.

We're actually basing the vehicles. They don't roll around that way, and you can put the arc markers to delineate front/side/rear directions on the bases. We're using an actual paper form that has a spot for speed and HC each turn on it, with enough slots for way more turns than you're likely to ever see in a game.

I totally understand your preference for un-modified cars for ease of transportation, but lots of the other players are really into the modelling aspect of the hobby and are getting into the conversion of the stock Hotwheel and/or Matchbox cars into something a little more lethal-looking.

We're doing rules for campaign. Each player has a team of up to five people to start, and as you get more notoriety, it's possible to attract more support. Right now, I've only got one guy who's been in two duels and done ok; won the last one and have enough EXP to advance Drive or Gunner another point. I'm trying to save enough money to build a vehicle with a Gunner station to improve my offensive output and allow my Driver to focus on driving and the Gunner to focus on shooting.

Hmm do you mean the second edition Compendium? The title page looks like this, which is pretty black:


I've seen the basing approach before and it certainly would help for ease of measuring alongside the turn key. Sounds fun to modify the cars though, I kept meaning to try it once or twice but never really did.

The campaign sounds neat. I've always been partial to a cross country highway centric campaign instead of a "work your way up the arena ladder".
Not sure if you've read anything from Jeffro's blog, but it's a great resource for all things Car Wars. He did a series a while back (actually might have been 2011 or 2012) detailing an arena campaign.
https://jeffro.wordpress.com/category/car-wars/
He even has a good post talking about suggestions for a campaign which could be useful to you.

Thanks, I appreciate it. I'll forward the info over to the guy at the FLGS who's running the campaign.

Really cool to see Car Wars back on the table.

I've got a ton of hot wheels and matchbox that I disassembled (ground out the rivet to get at the interior for painting) and many that I even stripped the paint off of for an auto battle project that never worked out. None of them even got to the repaint stage.

If anyone's interested, send me a PM. I'm not asking much for them.

If anyone was stupid enough to get out of their vehicle and go it on foot, what scale miniature would work? Is it 15mm?

Spot the guy that frequently bought Heavy Body Armour "just in case"!

Some folks do use 15mm, as they are affordable and there are a fair number of post apoc and sci-fi minis avaialble in that scale, however, 15mm does look pretty small next to matchbox cars. Most games that use Matchbox and Hot Wheels scale vehicles size well with 20mm figures, or some of the very-old 25mm figures that were measured from sole of foot to top of head, rather than the sole to eye by which most figures are measured today.

Steve Jackson games and a few other companies manufacture post-apocalyptic 20mm miniatures and there are quite a few folks making 20mm historical figs.

20mm is also the rough equivalent of 1/72 scale which is the scale of the 50-to-a-box plastic figure sets sold by Airfix, Caesar and various other companies. They are mostly military in nature, but they're cheap and many could proxy as post apoc figs.

Just remember to use plastic-specific spray paints and wash the figs before painting otherwise the soft plastic has a tendency to not hold paint well. I recommend Krylon Camo sprays as a basecoat as they have the "fusion" plastic bonding chemicals.

 Chillreaper wrote:
If anyone was stupid enough to get out of their vehicle and go it on foot, what scale miniature would work? Is it 15mm?

Spot the guy that frequently bought Heavy Body Armour "just in case"!

Starting with the Sunday Driver expansion for Car Wars, guys on foot started to become annoyingly hazardous to cars.

Car Wars was one of the first games I played as a small child. I believe SJG is planning a kickstarter for a redo, much like they did with Ogre a couple of years ago (this was, I think, one of the stretch goals for the Ogre campaign - a promise to do Car Wars as well).

Car Wars was always mildly interesting to me, but if anyone is interested in a game that plays to the same theme but is a little lighter as a ruleset, you could try the game Outrider. It's a print-and-play, but is free. You use templates to plot movement courses, and lots of people go the Matchbox car route for vehicles, if they decide they don't like the flat car game pieces that come with the game.

I found it not too long ago on Boardgamegeek while checking out Car Wars. Really cool little game.

Well, after this past weekend's arena event, my driver is officially an "Ace." Went up against three other opponents, disabled two of the cars and accidentally killed the third driver with a bigger than average damage roll.

My team has about $60K in Car Wars bucks in the bank, so it might be time to build a customer car for the next event.