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Ozvortex — 2003-08-18T12:45:05+00:00

Closeup of playing pieces

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Ozvortex — 2003-08-18T12:45:01+00:00

Closeup of game board

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Ozvortex — 2003-08-12T12:41:25+00:00

Thread: Session Report

PBrennan — 2001-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

9 tee'd off at the PGA - Andrew, Kevin, Iain, Garth, Jeff, Ken, Nick, Rick and myself

This is a 1996 Australian game by Bedford and Grigor for 2-8 players which Iain picked up as a hugely marked down special. As far as I know it's their only game, which may be a good thing because, to put it bluntly, it's a shocker. One of the designers commented on r.g.b that they couldn't understand why the manufacturer (Spears) marketed it as a kid's game rather than an adults game. Uh-huh. Take the cards from Car Wars, add lots of dice and a track to move around, make it long and boring, and you've about got it.

It's billed as a car combat game as befits the title (although it's not a direct tie-in to the Mad Max franchise). Each player gets a bike, car or truck. To move, you roll dice - 3 for bikes, 2 for cars, 1 dice + 2 for trucks. You can ram someone by moving on top of them, higher die wins, loser goes back a space, both cars suffer hit points equal to the opposite roll. If the mover wins, they can keep going.

If you move, you can also play an action card. These can fire missiles / guns / etc at other cars, allow you to roll more movement dice, ignore terrain effects, etc. Unless the defender has a defense card, the attack card will specify a range (in range if vehicles are less spaces away than eg result of 2 dice) and the number of dice to roll to determine hit points. Trucks start with a lot of hit points to counter their low movement, bikes start with not many. Lose all your hit points and you can start again at half hit points, or attempt to hijack another car (more dice) and so on.

The track is maybe 100 spaces long, with some bridges / crossovers and 5 different terrain types. For example you need to roll multiples of 5 to move each snow space, 4 for oil spaces. There are obstacle spaces which allow you to pull an instantly applied obstacle card. These are a mix of mostly good and occasional bad events.

You can also pass and simply pick up an action card. Last car standing or first one past the finish line wins.

There are simply nothing but the most simplistic decisions to be made in this game. Roll the dice to move, play a card and attack someone if you can. Don't have decent cards left? Pick up a card instead. Additionally we came across numerous situations which weren't covered by the rules - even simple stuff like can you move diagonally.

In our game, Kevin's truck needed to clear an overpass by landing within 1 or 2 spaces and then rolling a 5 or a 6, otherwise he crashed and had to go around a loop again. As he got there first, other vehicles had to fluke a ram (he got two dice to their one) to get past. As he said, it was maybe fun the first 4 times going around - the next 27 wore out their welcome real fast. He couldn't pull an action card to help him and once you hit your hand limit, you have to move. So while everyone was beating themselves around that loop, I had scooted off only to get stuck in the snow. There are 12 snow spaces. Meaning you have to roll 12 multiples of 5 to get through, plus the bridge which requires an 8. SLOW. BORING. God help the truck with only one dice to roll ever getting through there in a timely fashion without a host of traction cards.

After 75 minutes, we had only completed three quarters of one lap of what was meant to be a two lap race. At this point, for the first time in PGA history, we called the game done from sheer boredom and I was declared the default winner being in a huge lead (after just shooting out Garth's leading car and killing his warrior after a failed attempt to hijack my car).

A rating of 2 for "extremely annoying game, won't ever play this again". The first 15 minutes were fine, which is the time Car Wars takes. It is after all an appropriate time length for a mindless luck-fest of mindless combat. Tedium set in after that.

Game: Road Warrior

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Thread: Session Report