Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Game Session #4 of our 2033 campaign resulted in the Green Mountain Van (now armed with a laser and a minedropper) taking out a luxury sized stock Moose.  We rolled 2d6 to get the distance between the cars at the start of the duel– 3 inches on the map… 45 feet in ‘reality.’  This was outside of Memphis, so we figured TV coverage on a 6 on 1d6… and we of course rolled a 6.  This would be the second time this van was on the six o’clock news in the past couple of weeks!

The Moose pulled up behind and tailed the van.  The van’s laser hit and the opening shot of the Moose’s ATG’s missed completely.  The van left a mine at the end of the turn.  On the following turn, the Moose swerved to miss the mine… and the van turned with him.  The vehicles traded shots again, and debris flew off of both vehicles.  The van driver then cleverly dropped the next mine in such a way as to force the Moose to make another maneuver or eat mine.  The Moose had to choose between shoulder, mine and debris… and chose debris.  The driver barely managed to maintain control.

During the next seconds, the Moose blew off the Van’s rear armor and destroyed the minedropper.  At the start of the next turn the Van began a J-turn to get that vulnerable rear armor away from the heavy guns.  The van failed to complete the turn and skidded to a stop.  The lack of a turret meant that the Moose could only get a random shot against the thicker right side armor on the van.  The van’s low speed meant it could repeatedly pivot to change armor facings and the turret meant it could repeatedly get good shots off.

As the Moose went by, the Van took out a tire with a point blank shot from the laser.  Two more shots would take out a second tire while the Moose’s rocket launchers did moderate damage.  The Moose was going 35 at this point and rolled– ending up helplessly upside down.

No one was hurt, though the Moose’s driver may need to seek out chiropractic care.  The Green Mountain Couriers took possession of the car, however, and the damages look like they could repaired for less than $5,000.  The driver picked up a point in driver skill and the gunner picked up a gunner skill point, they each earned 3 prestige.  The value of the Moose very much exceeded the amount of money they had been scraping up doing small run courier jobs.

This duel illustrated the futility of closing the range against a laser/MD/Hi-res computer type vehicle.  Those things can eat tires for breakfast if the gunner has even low skill levels.  Such a vehicle should be engaged from the front, if possible, so that the MD can’t be used against you.  Dropped weapons can also be effective if played correctly even if they don’t drop every phase or inch of movement– or even if they aren’t in the HD model.  Without radial tires, HD shocks, and spoiler & airdams, handling penalties from maneuvers and weapons fire can quickly add up to big trouble.  It’s difficult to do it, but sometimes its better to just roll over a mine rather than take a D3 maneuver.  Your underbody armor can take a hit or two, but you’ll not do much if you end up crashing and burning.

We played with Compendium 2nd edition rules– but no speed modifiers, and handling tracks reset at the start of each turn.  We assessed the speed penalty on crash table rolls, but also subtracted driver’s skill.  We did not give a penalty to to-hit rolls to drivers that maneuver or take a hazard, but I wonder if we should work that in next time.  It would give vehicles with a dedicated gunner a big advantage….  The entire duel took place on three deluxe road sessions, so this was a very compact game.

The more or less lo-tech equipment combined with a couple of rules simplifications make for a very playable game.  We had to look up rules for pivots, hazards, j-turns, and tire losses, but other than things moved very quickly.

The main problem with 5th  edition is that the design system was never released.  I’ve since gone back to using Compendium 2e for my games, but I regret not being able to use my full color laminated vehicle record sheets from 5th edition.  What to do?!  My solution is to use the Compendium’s design rules to make vehicles as close as possible to the 5th edition designs.  I use a seperate sheet of paper for tracking armor anyway, so this will hardly make a difference at all.

The stock Napalm with a 30 point ramplate carries 51 additional points of armor at the other five locations and has a top speed of 95 mph.  (This would be the standard “heavy” ramplate of the old rules.)  Without the ramplate, the car can carry a total of 126 points of armor and has a top speed of 92.5 mph.  Both versions would change the power plant DPs to 8 and have an acceleration of 5.

The stock Dagger carries a 30 point ramplate as well and carries an additional 36 points of armor at the other five locations.  The power plant DPs would increase to 10, the vehicle’s acceleration would be 10, and the top speed increases to 140 mph. 

That’s a pitifully small amount of armor on the Dagger, though.  If we use a tricked up medium power plant (with PC’s and SC’s) instead of the large, we can do better.  This car keeps the 30 point ramplate, has 65 additional points of armor elsewhere, has 8 DP for the power plant, and acceleration of 10, and a top speed of 122.5 mph.

(By the way, the Napalm and Dagger vehicles above both use standard tires and light suspension.  The Napalm has a heavy chassis and the Dagger has a standard chassis.) 

Every other facet of these designs should match the stats on the full-color vehicle record sheet perfectly.  If you own Division 5 Set 3, then you should be able to understand the rest of these designs easily.  Now I can use the record sheets from 5th edition with my 2e games… or I can use the 2e design rules with my 5th edition games– and you can, too!

The notes in the back of your rulebook include info about costs, but leaves out info on space and weight.  Here is the relevant missing information pulled from earlier editions.  Keep in mind that the Light Ramplate did not exist in earlier editions and that some rules may have been changed in the new design system.

Weapon     Weight     WPS     Loaded Wt.     Space
——     ——     —-    ———-     —–
MG            150      2.5           200         1
FT            250      5             500         2
HDFT          650     10             750         3
MML           100      2.5           125         1
RL            200      5             250         2
SD(exp.)       25      5              75         1

Compact Armor:     $13 and 6 lbs. per point
Ram Plate (Heavy): Costs 1.5 times front armor $
                   Weighs .5 times front armor wt
Ram Plate (Light): Costs .75 times front armor $
                   Weighs .25 times front armor wt                  

We continued the third gaming session of our Car Wars: 2033 campaign.  In the last session, our team of Vermont duellists had just barely squeaked through the last encounter of Convoy with the algae ladden rig intact.  The mechanic was left behind to salvage a laser from a modified Intimidator station wagon while the rest of the team attempted to make it into town in less than two hours past the deadline.  While loading up the laser, the lone mechanic was spotted by an agent of the Cyclones….  [Evil laughter] 

As he headed for town, 6 pink cycles appeared in his rear view mirror.  There were two Road Misers and a Shogun 200 (RR option) out front and three Santa Cruz cycles in the rear.  (I chose to give the gang three MD equipped cycles because I felt they needed to be a balanced unit.  My player was already certain he’d loose.)

The cycles approached in two waves of three seperated by 4 inches (60 feet) of road.  They targeted tires only in the hopes of causing the Van to wreck due to the hazard– they wanted to win the cargo intact, too.  The Van had three MG’s in a turret and quickly destroyed the front armor and weapon of the Shogun.  The Shogun breaked and then swerved behind one of the lead Road Misers and successfully broke the sustained fire bonus of the Van. 

(As we continued down the road, I rolled a die to determine the next road section.  Straight on 1-3, Curve on 4-5, steep curve on 6.)

The Van decelerated much more than the gang anticipated and the cycles were soon right on top of him.  The cycles did poorly with their shots even though they got to point blank range.  We used the 5 phase movement chart with the faster cycles moving first.  This gave the Van an opportunity to sideswipe a cycle.  I feel that the cycle would have lived if it had been played out on the 10 phase chart– or if they’d alternated movement one inch for the cycle, one inch for the van, then one more inch for the cycle.  Two points of ram damage hit the cyclist and one point hit the power plant.  Body Armor was bypassed because of ram damage and the cycle went down.  I feel a nimble cycle ought to getten a saving through to avoid such lumbering Vans, but maybe next time I’ll just be real careful if I get in the vicinity of such monsters.

During the same second, the van shot one of the Santa Cruz’s on its unarmored side, nailing the cyclist in a clean kill.  The other two Santa Cruz took point blank shots an each front tire and then sped on ahead.  On the following second they laid mines diectly in front of the Van.  The Van went between the two counters so there’d be just a one in three chance of setting each of them off.  The van would have made it, but a killed cycle rolled right over it and set it off anyway!  The tire damage on the van was light and it even damaged a rear tire on one of my lagging cycles.

The damage was not enough to immobilze the Van.  He still had tires on all four corners.  On the following second, the four remaining cyclists tossed grenades towards the Van that was moving only 30 mph now.  At the start of the next turn, the Van had come to a complete stop.  A single grenade bounced close enough to finish off a front tire.  Yippee skippee.

The cycles chose to cruise off into the sunset.  My force had its firepower cut in half.  The van was barely damaged at all and still had those turreted triple MGs.  If they ever tried such a foolish thing as taking on a duelling class vehicle again, they plan on hanging back, attaining Gunner-1 or better before the fight, buying a targeting computer, and aiming for the rear armor even if it means a strong chance of damaging the cargo.

(The Van player really wanted to have the duel televised so I told him there was a News Helicopter covering it on a roll of 5 or 6 on a single die.  I rolled a five!) 

There was much discussion at the end about the plausibility of the grenades being tossed at 75 mph on a highway.  Of course, “reality” didn’t count for much when my cycle got sideswiped, so why should it matter when my cyclists are tossing grenades?  I haven’t got my compass die yet, but the grenade rules were sufficiently irritating this time, so I’ll being open to using a simpler way of handling the scatter rules and such next time….

We had some folks over and I sprang Carcassonne on the lot of them.  When you’re playing with 5 players, you get a lot fewer tiles to place in the course of the game– and a lot of things can happen before your turn gets back around.  With five players, you will have to vie for control of each road and castle that begins construction and you’ll have to try to go for double or triple points in order keep control of the construction you begin. 

In our game, two players did everything they could to twart each other.  If they could place a tile to mess each other up, they did.  One of the guys even played a castle tile on a castle me and another player were attempting to complete– and he did it in such a way as to make it impossible to finish!  The other guy manage to draw just the tile he needed to complete a set of roads that looked impossible. 

A third player mostly stayed out of all the commotion, but myself and the fourth player ended up working together.  We had that one giant unfinished castle that wasn’t scored until the end of the game.  We also ended up placing the monastaries next to each other and then helping each other to complete them.  I think we each scored 16 points like that.  Towards the end of the game, I managed to pick up 8 points by playing a farmer on near two completed cities that were isolated from the rest of the board.  But not a lot of cities had gotten completed, so there wasn’t a lot of points scored for farms at the end.

When the dust had settled, the players that had cooperated were in first and second place.  The two players that had spent there turns making things difficult for everyone else had scored much less!  I had several men in my hand and so regretted not playing more of them.  If I had gotten just four or five more points even on unfinished construction, I could have won the game!

We were surprised at the end that the no scores went above 50 points at the end.  The score card was just the right size!  It was a fairly fun game even though most players were new to it.  Cooperation seems to be the key to victory when there are 5 players in the game.  But what looks at first as cooperation can suddenly turn into domination if one player happens to get the right tiles to take over what was once a shared castle!

The Amatuer Night rules presented over the years in the various editions of Car Wars have all been a bit different.  In the 3rd edition pocket box rules, there was no limit on the number of times a character could try it and there was no suggested limitation of the dollar value of the cars.  (The Deluxe edition rules, however,  suggested that the cars rarely stray over $6000 or $7000.)  The cars would not necessarily be identical as the players could choose from a variety of options for their stock car.  If you could survive thirty seconds of chaos, you’d get to keep your car if you could still drive it out.  You could also salvage your kills.  Strangely, the winner was the character with the highest prestige– but there was no additional prize for “winning” and not even any additional skill points awarded for that back then, either!

Playing by the original rules, you’d probably have to play at least two or three amatuer night scenarios before you could graduate to “real” duelling.  Chances are you’d only get one kill and probably get your car “killed” yourself during your first time out.  Even if you survived three events, you still couldn’t count on going up a skill level in Driver or Gunner back then unless you had gotten more than 6 kills!  But you better keep returning to Arena every week– living expenses in the original game were $50 a week.  (You can’t eat Machine Guns….)  The Deluxe edition raised this to $150, but was much more liberal in handing out skill points and even rewarding “winners” a little extra.  Characters that dropped to less than zero wealth were out of the game permanently….  (Sissies!)

Note that Jim Gould observed in ADQ 2/2 that “few arenas can afford to run Amateur Nights with anything more expensive than a Joseph special, although second round Amateur contests occasionally use Vigilantes of Intimidators.”  So a possible first round event might use Stingers… second round contestents might use Joseph Specials… and third round contestants might get to use Hotshots or Piranahs!  In this series of games, several duelists could potentially earn enough salvage and vehicles to graduate to Divivsion 5– or at least have a nice car to take courier jobs in.

In the 5th edition rules, Steve Jackson simplified things greatly by eliminating the headache of calculating all of that salvage value.  Survivors simply got $500 a kill.  An extra $1000 in prize money is to be split among the most crowd pleasing duellists of the bunch.  The living expense rule was dropped in order have even less to bother with, and hand weapons were forbidden altogether!  (In the other versions, returning duellists could come in with an SMG and several grenades.  “A brace or LAW’s, however, is definitely not kosher,” as Jim Gould pointed out in ADQ 2/2.

Aaron Allston had a slightly different take on Amateur Night.  His version stayed with the really inexpensive cars all the way through.  The winner is the last surviving vehicle– and he gets everything.  Hopefully he’ll be albe to salvage enough to repair a car and upgrade it a bit.  Of course, the other duellists earn nothing to pay their living expenses no matter how many kills they got!  In Aaron’s rules that appeared in Autoduel Champions and GURPS Autoduel (first edition), a character could go into Amateur Night events up to three times or until he won an event. 

So theres a lot of variety in how you could launch a campaign with several Amateur Night events.  Do you want a little bit of reward being spread out to several duellists each game, or would you prefer a winner-take-all approach that forces the players to graduate the Divisionals immediately after winning their first duel?  Do you enjoy the finest detail of each bit of accounting, or would you rather streamline things so there’s time to squeeze in more events?  Take your pick or mix and match….  Me, I’m kinda inspired by a sort of “American Idol” approach were the dollar value of the cars steadily increases with each match and the contestants steadily dwindle as they die off or go broke. 

This just in from the man himself…

Dear Jeff,

Wow. Thanks for posting a summary of our Car Wars session on your blog.  I have a few comments and clarifications that may be interesting to you and your readers.

Road Sections:  

I did not forget to bring road sections. I did not take road sections with me because I have at the moment misplaced them.  This reason is the same one why we used the standard Midville maps instead of East Midville for Brothers in Arms. (I am organizing my gaming files to find all of these items as I write this message.)

MegaMats:

 I have discovered Chessex still produces my MegaMat. I have printed below ordering information from the Chessex Web site.

Chessex
http://www.chessex.com
http://www.chessex.com/mats/Battlemats_&_Megamats.htm

Catalog Number: 97148
Description: Megamat (TM) with 1/4″ Squares and 1″ Marking Lines
Cost: $29.98 U.S.

Metal Turning Keys.

I obtained my metal Turning Keys from the Spokane Game Faire convention in the early 1990s. The convention is no longer held, regrettably.

Counter Containers:

The gray plastic organizer that holds my counters was obtained from a ShopKo store in Spokane, WA. I saw it being used by Warhammer 40K players at each Game Faire. Sadly, like the Spokane Game Faire, ShopKo has also gone the way of Highway One.

Grenades and Dice

I use my very small d6 for grenades because I usually play with 1X scale materials. When playing with 3X scale materials (Hot Wheels and Matchbox, the same scale of Car Wars Fifth Edition), 12mm d6
should work well.

Koplow Games
http://www.koplowgames.com

Catalog Number: 13281
Compass Eight-Sided Dice Bag of 10

Dice and Phases

The large red d6 is from the Las Vegas International Airport. A family member was traveling through the airport 10 years ago.  During a layover the individual picked up the large d6 for me. I have seen this type of d6 at several gamestores in Seattle, WA.

Miniatures

The plastic cars I had for your opponents are called World’s Smallest Matchbox. I acquired several sets in the early 1990s. They have been out of print for many years, however they appear very infrequently on eBay. The cars were sold in packs of six vehicles and city playsets each with two cars. Like with the metal Turning Keys, I will work on getting photographs of these miniatures posted to my Web site this year.

Record Sheets

You do not need to apologize for wasting time when filling our your two record sheets. Brothers in Arms had approximately 20 vehicles for opponents. If I had to fill out these record sheets during the game, we would have not progressed past the first encounter.

Drive offensively,

Michael P. Owen
July 8, 2006

We got in our third game last night (not counting the evening I introduced it to some friends.)  The first game was just working through the rules, the second was to hammer out our understanding of the finer points of the rules… and this third one was very close to being a real contest of wits.  We honed our skills a bit more, but we were still surprised as we blundered into mistakes and saw the consequences of our actions way too late.

We played the with “the river” expansion.  My opponent played all her pieces, but I was holding mine back.  I took such a large lead early on that my opponent was ready to quit– but then midway through the game she scored a HUGE city with a knight for 30 points. 

I played rather cunningly in that I posted two farmers around 3 citied that I had completed.  My opponent had gotten the bad luck of isolating her three farmers– one was completely hemmed in by a road and the other two seemed impossibly far apart!

The most critical move of the game was when I played a monastary tile to complete a road that I had a thief on.  I racked in 8 or 10 points while giving my wife an extra tile around the monastary she was trying to complete.  A few turns later, I noticed that I had not only connected my wifes two farmers with that move, but I had also connected her two farmers to my two…!  We were suddenly tied for “ownership” of the majority the cities on the board!  (If I had continued the road section out, I could have isolated her two farmers permanently.  Doh!)  During the endgame I tried to figure out a way to get a third farmer into that field… and worried that my opponent might do the same, but it was very difficult to see a way to do this.  Neither of us felt it could be done, but I think there might have been a way if we were a bit more creative.

As the game wound down, I still held onto a reserve, but my opponent played everything that she had.  I picked up a good string of small scores by playing a tile that could be immediately scored: two points for a quick thief… 4 points for a quick knight.  When I completed a couple of cities that were seperated from the main farm, I played a farmer to pick up eight points from them at the end.  Both up us scored a few points for unfinished roads, cities, and monastaries.

When the dust had settled and the last city was scored for the farmers… I was ahead by just a single point.  It was somewhere in the vicinity of 84 to 83.  Wow!

So here’s the basic tensions of the game as we see it now:

Playing farmers early is good because the central farmers will have a good chance of serving a large number of cities.  Always keep an eye out for a way to isolate an opponent’s farmers– perhaps you can punish them for deploying them too early in the game.

If an opponent completes a city and then begins trying to score another knight nearby, consider playing a farmer nearby.  On the down side, he will want to build out there and so may have more opportunities to play more farmers out there to nullify yours.  If he succeeds… you’ve at least tied up two of his men… and if he fails, you’ll pick up 8 or 12 points in the endgame.

Scoring double points for having a pair of knights or thieves on the same road means that each tile you play to complete them counts twice as much.  If you connect them into the same city or raod, it will be impossible for your opponent to outnumber your men there… but it may be worth his while to play a tile in such a way as to prevent you from scoring either of those men.  (But most people play a friendly game and won’t stoop to such mean tactics.)

So far we tend to build in our own little corner of the board and don’t really mess with each other’s patterns, so the game is more about how well you can manage what you draw.  We are completely evil when it comes to scoring the farmers at the end, though– and so far its the farmers that determine the winner at the end.  I expect future games to have the players in each others faces a little more– especially if there’s a chance to isolate farmers or connect fields.

Haven’t got time to bother with pesky bandits?  AADA statistics show that the Cortez Tractor Trailer combination suffers over 60% less damage due to highway duels– and those duels will be over in your favor in less than a third of the time than those of comparatively priced competing rigs.  Whether they come at you by land or by air, the Cortez has got you covered!

Only the Cortez gives you so much bang for your buck!  With three KillTech Blast Cannons mounted in universal turrets and twenty heavy rockets, no foe can withstand your withering firepower.  And each Cortez tractor and trailer come with an electronics package that will ensure your targets are hit the first time.

Contact your local Conquistador dealer for a test drive today… and conquer the road with Conquistador Motors!

CORTEZ — Standard Cabover, x-hvy chassis, large power plant, 10 PR tires, trucker, BC in 4-space universal turret, HRSWC.  Plastic Armor: F 63, R 35, L 35, B 15, U 15, T 25, 6 10 point wheel-guards, 10 pts CA around trucker.  HC 1, 11,982 lbs., $77,740.

CORTEZ TRAILER — 40′ van, 8 PR tires, standard kingpin, 2 gunners, 10 HRs linked left, 10 HRs linked right, 4 additional links, BC with extra magazine in 4-space universal turret TF, BC with extra magazine in 4-space universal turret TB, 2 hi-res targeting computers.  Metal/Plastic Armor: F 0/20, RF 20/16, LF 20/16, TF 0/30, UF 0/20, RB 20/16, LB 20/16, TB 0/30, UB 0/20, B 20/16, 4 10 point wheel-guards.  21,140 lbs., $66,200.

COMBINED TRACTOR and  TRAILER — Cargo: Up to 25,878 lbs.and 50 spaces.  Total: 33,122 lbs., $143,940.

Yep… I did meet Michael P. Owen.  I guess he’s the first person I’ve ever met via the internet.  It was kinda spooky: I mean… how can there be anyone that’s more into Car Wars than me?  Maybe it was someone pretending to be into Car Wars in order to lure 30-something geek types out into the open for their own nefarious purposes?

So I get to the Genesis Gadgets and Games in Redmond….  There’s a huge selection of games there, better than any other place I’ve been.  There’s several tables in the back….  At one there’s this creepy archetypical overweight gamer type… and at the other there’s a clean cut slim dude.  “Please don’t let it be the smelly looking one with hair coming out of his clothes in strange places… please,” I thought.

Whew!

It was the clean cut guy after all. 

He had a huge erasable Car Wars map sheet and a giant box of counters.  He had really cool metal turning keys that he must have picked up from a con or something.  He had the usual tower o’ counters– but all meticulously sorted.  (I just stick with the most commonly used counters stuffed into a few little zip-loc baggies, myself.)  He had a little tin of mints full of tiny six sided dice.  “I use them for grenades,” he said conspiratorially in a hushed tone.  Instead of the usual white and red dice ripped off from Monopoly and Risk sets, he had 12 identical top-o-the-line marbled six siders.  He had ultra rare lead minis for my tractor trailor rig.  (I had some of those when I was a kid– the Hotshot and the mid-sized Courier miniatures.)  And to top it off he had these killer miniature matchbox cars mounted on the 1 inch counter bottoms.

While we were playing a couple of gamer geeks came up to us and asked what we were playing.  “It’s like Mad Max,” we said.  One of them nearly had a geekasm: “Dude!  I love Mad Max!”  They watched me blow up a car: “Hit… hit… uh… this one needs a 5 to hit… hit… that’ll be twelve dice damage.”  Love those blast cannons!  We probably blew them away with too many Car Wars factoids, but they listened appreciatively.

The guy at the store with the Formula De board was not quite as nice:

Us:  “Wow… you play Formula De?”

Him:  “Uh… actually I don’t.  I haven’t played in four years.” 

Us:  “I love this game… maybe you can get some other folk together at XYZ Game Store for a game some time.”

Him:  “I know about XYZ Game Store.  Actually, I hate this game.  I don’t know why I brought it out today.”

Or something like that.

Mike was totally prepared.  I still had to waste 30 minutes of our game time drawing up a vehicle sheet, but he had all his done ahead of time.  He’d forgotten to bring road sections, but I had some straight sections.  To do curves we just drew onto his giant map sheet.  No problem!

Oh yeah… one last Car Wars tip from Mike.  Use mini-dice to mark the location of grenades… with the number showing being the phase that they go off.  To determine the placement of grenade when it goes off… use an eight sided die!  Ha!  (I never thought of that!)  They even make directional dice just for this purpose.  Finally… to track the current phase during each turn… use an oversized six sided die.

Amateur night will never be the same again….