Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Car Wars, Star Fleet Battles, and Battletech are transitional games that exist in a bizarre border zone between Historical Hex-Based Wargames and the modern 3-D First Person Shooter.

Compared to other systems, Classic Car Wars is a great value. Out of the 1990’s Compendium box a huge variety of scenarios can be played: adventures on the interstates, arena battles, racing events, off-road duels, and city fights. Some moderate rolepaying rules are tacked onto the system that are reminsicent of Traveler and derivative of GURPS, but there is not much need for them: between the detail of the vehicles and the death-rates among duelists, drivers are viewed merely as a “free” vehiclular component.

Star Fleet Battles is superior as a solitaire game: it comes with several “monster” scenarios that are helpful in learning the vast amount of rules before you faced off against a live opponent. Unlike Car Wars there are no real design rules– each ship is crafted into existence by hand with its own refit history. Each race has their own rules, and games run exponentially longer than the typical Car Wars match.

SFB is more expensive– both in time and money. (You really can’t play the game seriously without getting both the Basic Set and Advanced Missions.) But a great deal of effort has been invested in the SFB system to produce balanced ship designs and scenarios. On the other hand, many Car Wars scenarios are more or less of the “each side gets $40,000 to buy their stuff” variety.

Note that both Car Wars and SFB have been folded into the GURPS system of roleplaying supplements– along with Ogre and Traveller. This provides a huge library of campaign supplements for both games– though on more of a personal level than a tactical/strategic one.

Battletech has cool miniatures. The illustrations in the technical readouts are nice. It is also supported by a series of novels. Like SFB, you have to get several boxes of stuff before you have anything close to a complete “system.” (Maybe classic Car Wars stalled in part because it’s compendiums were too complete??)

Coming up with decent scenarios and maps for Battletech is a much bigger chore. Battletech does not use phased movement, so games can run quicker– but as a consequence game play can begin to resemble chess with dice. The design system is poorly conceived and easily abused. Instead of fixing it, later releases merely added even more levels of ill-conceived/abusable rules. Any problems I might have with the game are made up for by the fact that one version of the Basic Game came with twelve plastic mecha miniatures. (Too cool!)

I’ve heard reports that recent releases of Battletech use the “clicky-base” miniature format. This is frightening, but probably the right move: the design (or lack thereof) of the the original rules does not merit further development. A simplified version of SFB would be interesting, but the computer game “Star Fleet Command” probably allready fills that particular niche. (There has also been some work on the Cadet version of SFB, but this doesn’t quite capture the spirit of the game.)

These games represent attempts to develop complete futurisic wargaming systems. Their flexibility and attention to detail are as yet unmatched in the world of computer wargaming. Car Wars in its 5th edition is the only system that is being revised, redesigned, and redeployed. Have times changed so much that such a project is unsustainable? I hope not! Though currently the signs are not good, things can still turn around once Steve Jackson releases the new design rules. (Please do it soon, guys!!)