Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Strange things are afoot in the realms of major league baseball.

Billy Beane has decided to play the game by the numbers. Instead sinking all of his money into good looking “super star” types, he’s invested in a hodpodge of losers that collectively can win games.

Sabermetricians (baseball stat geeks) have long known that there are traits that are undervalued in major league baseball. It turns out that having the ability to steal bases, having a high batting average and looking good isn’t statistically worth all that much when compared to the ability to just make it onto base. Beyond just acting on this sort of information, Beane ignored players that didn’t yet have enough of a record to predict their future potential.

Beane was scorned by his peers, but his record surpasses teams that have bigger budgets. Unwanted players purchased for peanuts joined his team and years later were sold as “super-stars.” Losing these players to the other (richer) teams did not hurt Beane because he could take the use the money to buy more “losers” that were collectively more valuable than the guy he lost! Meanwile other teams that had made less careful decisions were finding that many of their “super-stars” weren’t living up to expectations– yet they were saddled with huge long-term contracts with these guys!

When I heard a story on the radio about this, I couldn’t help but think… “That’s Car Wars!” Somehow building the perfect baseball team is not so different than coming up with the ultimate Car Wars design. But Beane goes beyond the ability to carefully balance tradeoffs. What he’s done is the equivalent of a Division 20 car taking second place against a half-dozen opponents driving $30,000 vehicles!

If you’re interested in more on this, The book is Moneyball. Check it out:

http://www.failuremag.com/business_content.html

(Watch out for the blank pop-up screen that obscures the article!)

If you’ve never actually read the rules for Monopoly, you might be surprised by what’s not in them: there’s not one word in there about putting money on Free Parking.

Really.

Now let me give you a piece of advice. After you go verify this fact for yourself, don’t bother sharing this fact with anyone in conversation! I’m serious. More than likely you’ll be met with looks of stark incredulity. The whole idea of taking money on Free Parking is inseparable from most people’s concept of the game.

Of course, most people also think of Monopoly as one of the most interminably boring games of all time. The reason for this is simple. Monopoly was carefully designed to keep the average income of the players low enough that they’d go bankrupt fairly quickly once the game gets warmed up. It turns out that the additional money entering the game on Free parking is just enough to keep the weaker players from going bankrupt. So there’s no winner– more than likely, people will give up on the game well before anyone can establish a vicious land grabbing empire.

The net result of all this is that not many people have actually played Monopoly. Not the real Monopoly, anyway. On top of that… most people think that Monopoly is a stupid game.

But again, I warn you… don’t think that just because you’ve read this that you can become some sort of Apostle of the True Monopoly. No one will believe you if you try reason this out. They won’t even believe you if you’ve got the rulebook with you. It’s difficult to prove that something’s not there. (It requires perfect knowledge to prove non-existence… so by even raising the question you will unavoidably assume the appearance of a know-it-all. And taking you down a peg will be much more fun for them than actually sitting down and reading the rules!)

No… if you’re ever find yourself about to play a game with a small group, suggest that you’d like to play an interesting new variant of Monopoly that doesn’t allow money to be put on Free Parking– just to try it out, you know.

Then get ready to enjoy the adrenaline rush when the money gets short, the deals get rude, and the players start eviscerating each other.

Oh…. And if you’re playing any new game… why not try playing it by the real rules a few times before you start adding in house rules? You might be surprised to find that the designers knew what they were doing. This is especially so in venerable games such as Car Wars and Ogre that have been tested and played and tinkered with so much.

“These changes are based on empirical curve fits to data gathered on real cars. These rules are the culmination of 3 years of extensive playtesting at Cornell University….”

http://www.serv.net/~owenmp/daemon/cornell.html

Gunners in vehicles without computers get to add in their +1 to-hit bonuses… but if their driver has a computer they don’t.

!?

Yep. It’s true. This is because the vehicle sheets have already absorped their bonus into the to-hit roll! (Compare the stats for the Hot-Shot’s MGs to the Piranha’s to illustrate this.)

Evidently the designs in the 5th edition consistently put the targeting computer in the driver’s position. This is supposedly ’simpler’ because the to-hit rolls for both the driver and the gunner are the same now. One less bonus to calculate during play….

Before a duel you may want to move the targeting computer over to the gunner’s position. Then during play, the gunner now gets a total of +2 on his to-hit target. (Or, if you’re going by the calculated to-hit targets on your vehicle sheet… the gunner gets +1 and the driver gets -1.)

Tricky….

The Dragon (Division 15 Set 3) mounts two linked Heavy-Duty Flamethrowers. At first, you might think that the fire rules work against this car.

“Check seperately for each incendiary attack, even if they occured in the same phase– but linked weapons of the same type are combined into one attack.” (page 10)

If you hit with the linked weapons, you’re only going to score a single flame marker. That’s no better than a pair of standard flamethrowers can muster….

The trick with the Dragon is, let your gunner fire one HDFT and let the driver fire the other. Each HDFT gets its own fire roll then. If you hit with both and score at least 6 points of damage in each attack, then you have a pretty good chance of nicking 2 flame markers!

And two flame markers are of course much better than one. Even if your opponent rolls “Remove one fire marker” at the end of the turn, he’ll still take fire damage.

Keep on Duelin’!

Ever since ADQ ran an article on a small min-bus franchise, I’ve wondered what it would be like if players could operate such a business.

http://www.sjgames.com/car-wars/adq/4/4/custom.html

I’ve thrashed out some rules and I’m just now putting them through their paces….

Here’s a sample year’s action for a small company– 3 standard buses and 1 “Q” variant. Looks like not such a good year for them: they’ve earned barely enough to pay for the bus they lost!

Month 1…….$3,500
Month 2……$14,000
Month 3……($7,000)
Month 4…………0 Standard Vehicle lost in combat.
Month 5……$10,000
Month 6……($2,500)
Month 7……$10,000 Q-Vehicle repels attack.
Month 8……$12,500
Month 9…….$5,000
Month 10……$7,500
Month 11…..($2,500)
Month 12……$2,500

Yearly Total:

Profits…………$53,000
Vehicle Losses………..1
Q Vehicle Losses………0

I nearly had an incident today over the definition of “war game”. I was trying to explain to someone why “Starcraft” isn’t really a wargame…. after a quick google I found a great book here:

http://www.hyw.com/Books/WargamesHandbook/Contents.htm

Here’s a few passages from the introduction:

“Manual wargames were quite different. While the rules may have sometimes been unclear (or worse), most players adapted by (intentionally or otherwise) changing the game procedures to suit their own tastes or opinions. I was quick to make the most of this problem by doing what many computer game programmers did, I turned a bug into a feature. Players who regularly mucked about with game mechanics, I noted often, were performing one of the more important tasks performed in game development. No prototype of a game went far without a lot of tweaking. Computer wargames go through the same process. But once the code is closed and the gamma version is shipped, the users cannot further tweak the game. This has caused a significant divide between those players who played a lot of manual games and those who have known only computer wargames. In effect, there is software generation of gamers and a mushware generation.”

“Mushware is my term (borrowed from a programmer who worked for me years ago) for what people do with complex procedures in their brain, without benefit of a computer. Mushware was also the reason why the market for manual was never that large. Only a small portion of the population comes equipped to handle mushware. The ones who were exposed to manual wargames became, whether they wanted to or not, wargame designers. The mushware gamers could not avoid understanding how the games worked, and in excruciating detail. It did not surprise me that many of today’s (middle aged) programmers were manual wargamers. The grognards were the first geeks. If you could handle manual wargames, programming was no great challenge….”

“Many manual wargamers went on to develop computer games (wargames and games in general.) But in the 1990s, you saw the emergence of developers who had no manual wargames experience. This trend will continue, meaning more and more wargames will be designed by people with no mushware experience. This may not be noticed for quite some time, if ever. The mushware generation grew up with games that emphasized accuracy and historical realism. Manual games kept the designers honest, as the players could see how the game worked and figure out for themselves if they thought the designers approach was on target or not. Computer wargames plunged the games inner workings into darkness….”

What we didn’t like about other games:

1) Role playing– we never quite understood the whole concept. Why have elaborate rules if it’s not really a real game– just complicated “pretend”. We liked the idea of designing GURPS characters… but people that liked to ‘get into’ their personas just scared us.

2) Strategy Games– We enjoyed games like Axis & Allies and Shogun… but the bookkeeping could become a bit tedious. The length of playing time was a down side, too. The strategy dimension was increased here at the expense of color on the tactical side.

3) Abstract Strategy Games– No problem with bookkeeping here… but it takes a great deal of effort to master opening and endgame tactics. We want a game we can relax with.

4) Competitors– SFB was neat… but had way too many rules. Also the universe was limited by the weirdness of some of the technical contradictions. Battletech was just plain goofy. It was easier maybe… but not very well designed.

What we liked about the original Car Wars:

1) It was a battle of engineers more than anything else. The technological pallette was changing every quarter thanks to Uncle Al. No other game offered this level of tinkering and trade offs.

2) The setting was actually moderately plausable.

3) There was even a very plausible reason for setting up a series of balanced fights to play.

4) You can play a team, a gang, an organization, or a corporation.

6) The concept of adventuring across an apocalyptic United States is just plain cool.

7) Something interesting ALWAYS happened. Once my ped fled a wrecked vehicle… dodged bullets and dived under another wreck… began firing at the weak underbody of the vehicle– only to get smooshed by a dropped spike plate!!

It’s the Compendium, stupid! The black Car Wars boxed set with “over $14.95″ worth of bonus supplements is the coolest game I’ve ever bought. (We can’t wait for a NEW compendium to come out for 5th edition!!)

What we didn’t like about the original Car Wars:

1) Too much paperwork to get a game together.

2) Too many charts and rules to look at during play.

3) Rules changes made old designs obsolete way too often. The Combat Showcase is almost useless in a Compendium 2nd edition campaign.

4) Metal-armored gas-guzzling tire-shooting ram-cars. Nuff said!

What we like about the NEW Car Wars:

1) You can just get together and play.

2) Everything you need’s on the turning key

3) There’s no need for maps– and thanks to SJ’s PDFs, we can just tape dropped items to the tabletop!

4) Laser-Guidance-Link doesn’t dominate the battlefield.

5) The fire rules are just plain FUN!

6) Each weapon exists for a purpose… and each adds something to the game.

7) The game’s back to being about driving around and shooting at each other. (There was something about the later vehicle designs in the old game that just got away from that some how.)

Mere mortals can play Car Wars again… and referees can run games quickly and with no headaches.

9) It just looks cool!

This blog is dedicated to the Car Wars table-top game. It was initially released in 1982 in a nifty black “pocket box”. It was a rare hobby shop back then that didn’t have a rack of Car Wars expansion sets in zip-loc bags…. (sigh!)

Steve Jackson Games has released a 5th edition recently that is especially well designed. Few shops seem to carry it today and support for it seems to have stalled temporarily, yet it’s still a really fun game to play. It may be that the Car Wars concept will appeal only to the generation that still thinks that Tron is a great movie, but I hope it will catch on again as the economy picks up.

Here are some links to get you up to speed:

FAQ–

http://www.sjgames.com/car-wars/faq.html

PDF’s of counters–

http://www.sjgames.com/car-wars/pdf.html