The Seven Faces of Doomsday
January 30, 2004
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Unlike Star Fleet Battles, “doomsday” never came to the Car Wars gaming system. Compendium 2nd edition made great strides towards compiling and revising everything, but several loose threads were left untied while Aeorduel, Tanks, and the new 5th edition came along to muddy the waters yet again.
The net result of this is that there isn’t a definitive edition of the game in existence. (5th edition can resolve this… but it hasn’t yet.)
Off the top of my head, here are the major versions of Car Wars:
* The Original Black Pocketbox Edition
* Scott Haring’s Deluxe Car Wars compilation/revision
* First Edition GURPS Autoduel (featuring Scott Haring’s pre-Vehicles ‘port’ of the Car Wars rules)
* The Car Wars Compendium (Second Edition)
* Second Edition GURPS Autoduel (featuring Christopher Burke’s tweaks to GURPS Vehicles)
* The new 5th Edition Release
Of course, the are several incremental steps between these milestones– what with new gadgets and rules coming out with each ADQ and supplement….
Chassis and Crossbow, the major Car Wars “sub-genre”, comes in 3 flavors: the ADQ 1/3 version, the Dueltrack version, and the “Mutant Zone” version.
I tend to think of GURPS Vehicles as being the ultimate evolution of Car Wars. That may not be entirely true, but it helps to comfort me with a feeling that the Car Wars concept has been supported and developed by Steve Jackson Games over a much longer continuous period of time.
In trolling the web I’ve found a few positive reviews of 5th edition Car Wars like this one:
http://www.rpg.net/forums/phorum/rf08/read.php?f=338&i=10&t=4
However I haven’t found anything positive regarding the GURPS Vehicles varieties of Car Wars. There is some good resources for the brave over on GURPS Net, though:
http://gurpsnet.sjgames.com/Archive/Vehicles/Autoduel/
I do own a copy of GURPS Vehicles, GURPS Mecha, and even GURPS Traveller Starships. I admit that I really don’t have a clue on how to get any play out of them. (And I always thought I was pretty smart for being able to understand Car Wars, SFB, and Battletech….)
