Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

[Exerpted from Jeffro's ultra-brief interviews by email series.  Scott Haring was editor of ADQ, developed Deluxe Car Wars, and co-wrote GURPS Autoduel first edition.]

Jeffro:  I noticed the other day that you were listed as being a part of the first Car Wars playtest back before the first edition was released. How did you get involved with that?  What was it like?  Did “Kong” kill your car?

Scott Haring:  When Steve and Chad were playtesting Car Wars, I was just out of college, working at a newspaper in a little town about 50 miles south of Austin called New Braunfels. I knew Steve when we were both in college, and I got invited to Friday night playtests.

I don’t recall ever playing with “Kong”; his glory was earned at some local conventions I didn’t go to. The best thing that happened to me in playtest was when I was getting the hell blown out of me and was trying to make it to an arena exit. I had already lost my power plant, so I was at a fixed deceleration and could no longer steer, plus I was on fire. That, and I was going to miss the exit gate — until somebody trying for the kill took one last shot at me and caused me to fishtail into a new direction that took me straight throught the open gate and to sweet survival. I got voted bonus prestige for incredible luck for that move.

Had a blast a couple of weekends ago playing Ogre Miniatures. Here’s a photo:

It was the closest I’ve come to playing a Convention-quality type game.

The geomorphic hex map pieces were really cool. They’d be perfect for Battletech. That was my biggest irritation with that game back in the day– the maps for it were lousy! Especially after you played a lot of Car Wars….

The ground rules were $25,000 for each of two teams. Each side could have as many men and vehicles as they wanted.

I chose the Dragon and the Napalm HT. My opponent chose a Terminator-X, a Sprocket, and an Assassin. The arena had a large square obstacle in the middle of a fairly big table. There were 4 smaller square obstacles that could be driven around in each corner.

We rolled into the arena from opposite sides and both teams veered to the right. I turned to circle around the small square obstacle on my right side as my opponent cut accross to meet me. We were going to intercept each other about 4 inches from my starting gate.

My Napalm cut the corner fairly strong in order to stay in formation with my Dragon– but it rolled a 6 for its control roll. The Napalm skidded straight towards the wall and recovered almost exactly next to the wall. This broke up my formation– now the Dragon was ahead of my Napalm by a few inches.

As our forces met, I focused all of my vehicles’ firepower on the Terminator-X scoring fire markers. We were all so close together that my Napalm could ram one of my opponents cheap cars. We applied the confetti rules and I took only minimal damage– but my Napalm’s speed dropped to practically nothing and debris covered the field choking up the passage between my gate and the small square obstacle.

My opponent’s cars circled around to make another pass while my Napalm slowly tried to turn around to avoid the debris. As my opponent’s other small car came in to take pot shots at my Napalm, the collective hazards of the drebris, maneuvering, and weapons fire caused him to loose control and ram the wall. He was out of the game.

Meanwhile my opponent’s Terminator-X was punching it up to 80 and taking d3 maneuvers to get rid of his fire markers. He took off to the other end of the arena. I pulled around my Dragon hoping to get back in formation with the Napalm. Both my cars were damaged and I figured they’d be defeated if they were taken one at a time.

The Terminator managed to make a pass at my Napalm and then wheeled around for another attack. My Dragon cut speed to attempt to stay near the Napalm. Things were ugly as we maxed out our Handling Tracks to keep our guns on each other. We both chose to keep our cars’ weak armor facing towards the enemy in order to keep piling on the weapons fire.

In one final exchange, my Napalm triggered his rear RL at the Terminator. The Terminator’s return fire destroyed the Napalm’s power plant, but the crew of the Terminator took a direct hit. The Terminator had taken exactly enough fire damage throughout the game for the shot to put them completely out of commission.

The stunned Napalm driver could not believe that he’d even survived– much less that he’d scored 3 kills! Incredible!!

This game took about four hours to play out– and every moment I was sure my guys were about to die. Intense!