Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Ron Edwards says on The Forge that “you remember [role playing games from your teenage years] fondly not because the game itself was good, but because it wasn’t.”  Ouch.  He’s right, though.  The things just flat out didn’t work, more often than not.

I remember this quirky guy we met that said he Dungeon Mastered.  We rolled up characters and he took us through a cave.  We examined everything and he wanted to know exactly how we went about with everything.  It took maybe half an hour just to cross an underground river.  Nothing ever really happened in the game and none of us ever saw him again.

Then there was the guy that gave me a copy of the 3rd edition Gamma World boxed set.  Man, I wanted to play that game.  On my birthday the following year I had set him up to Game Master.  He stood me up.  I’d probably never been so disappointed.  My pals rolled up characters and I tried to run things.  The “rank 1 wimps” fought a few mutant bunny rabbits and could hardly ever hit or do any damage.  Oh, the pain!

Then there was my friend that had cool games like FASA’s Doctor Who, GDW’s Twilight 2000, and Victory Games’ James Bond.  I borrowed the Doctor and even bought a few supplements but hadn’t watched the show much and couldn’t figure out how to run it.  Twilight, we rolled up characters one night and then couldn’t figure out what to do next.  We started playing Octopussy for James Bond one time, but I couldn’t get over the fact that the Faberge egg was just a blood spattered drawing on a crumpled piece of paper.  The props were really cool, but as a player I had no clue how to proceed with any sort of investigation.

I attempted to run the adventure that came with GURPS Humanx one evening.  It featured two bars/night club locations and I ended up arguing with the characters about what had happened where.  Evidently two night clubs was way too much setting for either me to communicate or for my players to comprehend.

Then there was the time that I thought that Dungeon Magazine’s short and simple adventures would be the key to making this stuff work.  I tried to run “Roarwater Caves” from issue number 15.  I was always the mapper in our group, so there was no one that cared to do that if I was Dungeon Mastering.  The players wandered aimlessly through a few rooms and then backtracked….  They were completely lost.  The bad guys of the adventure weren’t goblins or orcs, but… xvarts.  And, boy, did I get my fill of fart jokes that afternoon!

The only way I’ve ever gotten anywhere in a game was to ignore combat– in fact ignore all the rules– make stuff up, and start in the middle of the action.  Don’t require excessive map making or note taking: just present them with a situation and let the players go.  If they start barking up the wrong tree, then steadily introduce a crisis that they have to respond to.  If something’s not working, introduce totally new events until something takes.  Clichés are your best friend in all of these matters, because the players will immediately know what role they have to play.  But never ever name the bad guys something that rhymes with a bodily function!

This is the continuing story of my adventures as a Car Wars crazed youth.  (Part I, Part II, and Part III were posted quite a while back….)

 So the thing about Car Wars… everybody played it.  It was like Magic: The Gathering and Halo put together.  All of my friends played it and lots of my friends’ friends played it.  You’ve got to remember the times, too.  Each of my friends owned a completely different home computer system.  Between the five of us we had a C-64, an Apple ][, an Atari 1200XL, a Tandy, and a random IBM clone.  If you had told us that the future held in store for us a world dominated by IBM clones and Microsoft software, we would have thought you were crazy.  Those IBM clones were ugly, expensive, and had the worst games….

But I digress….

At this point we’d played a few arena games.  Our cars would move like little tanks… point towards each other… and then we’d have a bit of a dice rolling contest to see who lived.  Your odds were greatly improved by having a good design, of course.  There really wasn’t a lot of maneuver and handling checks and so forth….  We pretty much just played point and shoot.  But we loved it.  And there was this one guy who played with us who… no matter what… was the first one to die in every event.  It was uncanny.

So I was at one of my other friends’ house that hadn’t played much Car Wars and he had all his friends over that I didn’t know too well.  One of those guys was a Car Wars nut!  He’d taken all his maps, cut ‘em up… and laminated them at school.  (His mom was a teacher.)  He absolutely had to play a race at the Muskogee Fairgrounds!

So the designing ensued.  The one copy of the lime green Uncle Al’s was passed around and fought over.  We rechecked our math and thought everything out.  Our work was interrupted when Weird Al’s “Fat” video came on MTV.  But finally… the strips of map were all layed out, the counters staggered around the track, and our record sheets were all filled out.

The green flag waved and… our cars literally inched around the track….  I don’t know how long it lasted, but it wasn’t long before everyone had left or gone to bed… and there had been no clear winner and not too much action.  Hmm.  Strange.

I was puzzled a bit but didn’t think much of it.  I mean… we were just kids, you know.  We loved these games, but they so rarely worked like maybe they were supposed to… but we didn’t care.  We had a blast just thinking about them and setting them up and tinkering with them….

It wasn’t too long after this that I was at my other friends house, for example.  This was the guy that was always the first to die in our arena matches.  We had like 9 or 10 people there and decided to play Gamma World.  We got our characters rolled up and the Gamma Master started the game.  Somehow we ended up in a melee and we began rolling the percentile dice.  Each of took a turn rolling… and it took maybe ten minutes or more just to get around the circle.  That’s just for one round of combat!  We might have played for two or three hours just to do one and a half fights.  Of course, only one or two guys every really scored any hits.  Probably the guys with Military Genius or Life Leech or something equally unbalanced.  So that game for most of us was just 3 hours of missing our to-hit rolls against some annoying and weird mutant!  Argh!

But it’s really only irritating looking back.  I don’t think we had any idea at the time that this wasn’t any fun.  No… we were having a blast.  You’ve got to keep in mind that the computer games of the time were for the most part even less fun than this!  And we were real young, too.

But back to Car Wars.  I didn’t really have any idea that there was something wrong with the way we played Car Wars.  Cars just crept along the map moving an inch or so each turn.  We generally kept the speed at 40 mph or so in order to be able to make a maneuver….  How else was it supposed to work?

So one day I’m at my friend’s house again… you know… the guy that always got blown up first in every arena match….  He says to me that we’ve been playing it all wrong all this time.  You don’t move 1/4 inch for each 10 mph of speed….  You move a whole inch for each 10 mph of speed!!

I was floored.  Not just to learn that all those years of gaming were… somehow illegitimate and silly.  But… to have to find out from… him….

Sigh.

(By the way, even after we played by the rules correctly, that guy was still the first to die in every game.  Uncanny!)

This sort of thing still happens, though, even with adults.  When I was playing Settlers of Catan for the first time recently I flipped through the rules during a break.  In a few seconds I noticed we’d been playing the cities wrong– they were supposed to double the production of the hex they were in!  The group I was playing with had just used cities as a way to buy victory points up until then!

Yeah….  It happens all the time.  It generally takes several readings of the rules and several games to find these things out no matter how simple the game is, but in every game there are a couple of killer rules that have a drastic impact on play and tactics.  Most people don’t bother to look for them… but me?  Ever since that gaming disaster with Car Wars… I’ve been… different….

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So I’d gotten off to a rocky start with my new Car Wars game. I’d designed cars and made up a corporation, but hadn’t really played much.

All of my friends liked the game and had bought stuff for it. Dueltrack was out– as was the lime green Uncle Albert’s. Too cool! One of my friends had bought Muskogee Fairgrounds and another had all of the full color off-road supplements.

So my two friends had both made up Corporations, too. And they wanted to have a big fight. It was agreed that they’d meet on a stretch of road. I remember just before we staged it, one of my buddies was marking up his character sheets with extra experience points. Of course, he used different pens to make it look like he’d been playing tons of duels!!

Finally the day arrived. Several 18-wheelers rolled down the highway towards each other. A detachment of gas powered pickups broke away from the formation and zoomed ahead. As the forces clashed, the pickups jumped over their enemy’s 18-wheelers. While they were directly overhead, tons of grenades began rolling out of their beds!

Then the arguments ensued. “There’s no way that can work!!” As referee I ruled a compromise decision and stated that the grenades only did a small amount of damage. (We were using a lot of pretend rules and hand-waving still.)

So the shooting continued and when the dust settled, the guy with the gas pickups had lost.

Funny… he and I didn’t play much after that….

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So months went by and I attempted to introduce Car Wars to my friends. I only got as far as pulling out a road section and pushing the counters around. “Vrrrroooomm! You see? And then they shoot at each other!”

Years went by and I bought the Deluxe edition, the Double Arena, East Midville, and… (trumpets sound!!) and Autoduel Quarterly. Those magazines were great. They were perfect for taking them to school and reading them in class. I remember reading the article on Corporate Autodueling during home room. Too cool! I had to have one! So I gave myself $100,000 and bought some cars. I got a Peregrin, a Rambler, and a Starhawk. (They just so happened to be the other vehicles in that issue.)

Those ADQ’s were so compact, you really could take them anywhere. I took that same issue on a camping trip along with my pocket box. Some of the other boys _really_ wanted to play. That was kind of scary to me because we didn’t have a table to play on. I finally succumbed and we played in a little sandy area. I got out my counters and showed them everything I knew: “Vrrrroooomm! You see? And then they shoot at each other!” Then the sun started to set and we couldn’t really play anymore. Oh well.

It was really fun. Well… at least until someone set a flaming hot pan on top of my magazine. Never leave your ADQ’s on top of a patrol’s cook box!

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I bought Car Wars when I was just a kid. I remember it just like it was yesterday.

We had this gigantic bicycle store in my town. They even had a gigantic bicycle on the front of the building. Odd place; they’re still in business today. You’d walk in, though, and go to the back and up a ramp and they had all sorts of hobby stuff. An electric train ran all around the section. It was mostly model stuff, but they had one little rack of Car Wars stuff for some reason.

There they were… little black pocket boxes and zip lock baggie expansion sets. I was enchanted. I bought the game and went home. I was just a kid, though. It had to be just the 4th or 5th grade or so. I opened it up and read through it. It was the coolest thing I’d ever bought.

I couldn’t really figure out how to play and I didn’t know anybody that could pick it up with me. I don’t know what happened exactly, but somehow I got frustrated. I went to my brother to ask him to help me learn to play it. (He’s eight years older than me.) He wasn’t very helpful and something sort of pushed me over the edge. I think I just wanted him to play with me and he wasn’t even going through the motions of explaining or reading the rules. I burst into tears.

“I just wha-wha-want to play this game!!!”

I’ll never forget that next moment, though. There I stood… hoping that somehow my big brother would have mercy on me and take a couple hours to play the game with me. He looks at me… pauses a moment. Then:

“They should never have sold this game to a little kid!”

He turned and walked off. I pulled myself together and went back to trying to figure it out myself. If only I had bought Ogre instead– and if only Ogre came with some decent solitaire rules– maybe then I would have grown up to be a regular person…. [Rolls eyes and chuckles at self.]

Gaming Note– Good solitaire rules for Ogre appear in The Ogre Book.