** 2029 Campaign Games 20 and 21 (October 17, 2009) **

Note: Game 18 (the Grenadier Motors Sortie Trials) and Game 19 (Team Amateur Night at the Retama Duel Center) were presided over by Earlburt without me.

PREAMBLE

After rereading the CAR WARS Compendium, Second Edition, I realized that our sequence of play was not from any particular rules set, but was somehow mashed together from several different editions in order to make our own quirky off-kilter version of the game.  We decided to give the official rules a try this time.  As no edition of CAR WARS ever outlined a concise, step by step, sequence of play, I will post our reading of the rules here:

I. Roll reflexes before the game… and break all ties.

II. At the beginning of each phase, players may secretly and simultaneously declare speed changes.

III. Vehicles are moved when called… in order of speed from fasted to slowest. If any cars are going the same speed, ask each player from best reflexes to worst if they want to move. Drivers with better reflexes may pass, but the driver with the slowest remaining reflex cannot pass. Repeat that procedure until all drivers have moved. [Jeffr0 recommends that vehicles be marked with green dice representing to-hit penalties for hazards and maneuvers acquired during a phase.]

IV. If a vehicle fails a control roll, the crash table result takes effect on his next move BEFORE he executes his movement. Again, note to-hit penalties immediately and remember to keep them when a vehicle skids over a turn break. A vehicle cannot execute a mid-turn speed change while out-of-control. [Jeffr0 recommends that vehicles be marked with red dice representing to-hit penalties for being out-of-control.  Multi-phase to-hit penalties are marked with an extra black die representing the phase in which the penalty is removed.]

V. Players declare fire secretly and simultaneously. Results are applied simultaneously after all fire for the phase is resolved.

VI. At the end of the turn, all players regain handling status equal to their vehicle’s handling class. [If you're following Jeffr0's recommendation, then you will remove dice tallying to-hit penalties except those that are marked to expire on a later phase.]

There are a handful minor flaws in the game that are significant enough that I feel they deserve house rules to fix:

A. Handling status bonuses due to reflex rolls are pretty unfair and few players have used them in competitive play since the nineties.  Having the choice of when to move when two or move vehicles are moving the same speed is a significant edge without being completely overwhelming.

B. Declaring mid turn speed changes secretly and simultaneously is too much work.  I think it makes sense to allow players to declare them while they are making a move, but have them take effect after they complete their movement.

C. Front mounted ATG’s should not cause cars a D1 hazard when they fire them.  [Note: I don't see this rule in the Compendium at all, though other duellists feel this is due to an editorial oversight.]

D. Vehicles with an HC under three should still regain 3 points of handling status per turn.  (HC 1 and HC 2 cars practically become un-drivable without this fix.  The cost savings of “bad” HC cars does not match the pain of the official penalties– and having just your maximum handling status be lower seems to be about right.  The HC of a car represents how much maneuvering they can do without going negative on their handling status.  Punishing HC 1 and HC 2 cars by requiring them to spend effectively forever to recover from dropping to -5 or -6 just doesn’t make sense.)

E. If vehicles are in position to fire, anyone can ask to switch to declaring fire with cards phase by phase.  (Some cards would have “no fire” on them, others would state a target.)  Otherwise, for each separate battle currently going on the board, the first person to declare fire first is the only one that may shoot during that particular phase.

F. The official speed and range modifiers should not be used.  A GURPS, Fourth Edition style combined speed/range modifier should be used instead.  We have a chart for this.  If time is running short, players may agree to just using the original -1 per full four inches and +4 for point-blank instead– ignoring speed modifiers all together.  (Our chart was rigged to approximate those original rules for the most common situations.)

G. A society capable of cloning would have an extremely effective medical technology.  As arena duellists are insured by sponsors and are likely to get immediate medical attention, they may save against death by rolling 3d6 and getting a result equal to or greater than the total damage done in the hit/ram that killed them.  If they survive, they are hospitalized for a number of weeks equal to the difference between the damage done and their saving throw roll.  Characters that are in a vehicle that explodes die immediately and do not get a saving throw.  Arenas should have a medical rating that serves as a bonus or penalty to the saving throw roll.  Note that this rule makes it nearly impossible to die from MG and SMG fire… while RR’s, RL’s, and especially ATG’s are dangerous.  [Perhaps laser damage should be halved and flame damage doubled for the purposes of making the saving throw?]

H. In order to equalize the value of Driver skill and Gunner skill levels, the driver’s Driver skill level should be added to the Handling Class of the vehicle directly.  Note that this will also increase the amount which the driver recovers in handling status each turn.

I. For our campaign, we operate under “stingy” skill point rules.  You have to actually do something to get the usual skill point for “entering combat.”  You have to make at least one control roll to get a driver skill point… or hit something to score a gunner skill point.  Duellists only score a single point for Driver if they successfully score a kill by ramming– in order to discourage excessive use of the tactic.  Finally, general skill points should not be used unless the referee chooses to do so in a role playing adventure.  (If characters need any of the specialist skills available, they can make sure they have a passenger seat for NPC’s with those skills to sit.  This game is about duelists, truckers, and cyclists– not body building special forces journalists!)

J. In executing skids, we play that you move the amount specified in the original direction of the car, then move one inch minus the skid amount in the direction the car is currently going.  This may not be the correct physics, but people seem to agree that this feels fairer than other interpretations of the rules.  Instead of applying to-hit penalties for being out of control until the end of the turn, we slap an even five phases of penalties on everyone starting on the phase that the skid/fishtail is executed.

K. We use the 5th edition fire rules.  They are infinitely more fun than either of the iterations that were used back in the eighties!

L. Some versions of the Amateur Night rules give all salvage to the winner.  We prefer to let each duelist salvage their kills.  This seems to encourage every one to take risks while going for a killing shot, but also encourages duelists to preserve the dollar value of the vehicles they’re shooting at.  Also… every body has a chance to take some salvage money from the game.

Whew!  That covers both the sequence of play and our house rules.  I feel it is important to review both now because the new duellists that have joined us deserve to have this all laid out clearly.  Also, those that are playing along at home can play the exact same game we do by using the above along with the CAR WARS Compendium PDF that has recently become available on e23!

GAME TWENTY: 23 Apr 2029 Four Killer Karts at the Armadillo Autoduel Arena

Our first game for the day was going to be a plain vanilla Killer Kart affair.  We had two more-or-less new players that needed to experience the canonical entry level dueling scenario of the game… plus we kinda like old school dueling.  Here are the characters that were playing in the event:

This was Alonzo Swartz’s (played by Jeffr0) second duel at Armadillo.  In his previous event, he successfully killed on opposing Killer Kart, but was rammed to death a second later.

Snake Pliske (played by Mike) previously was the gunner in a Bombardier in a team amateur event at the Retama Duel Center.  He successfully killed an opposing Hot Shot by setting with on fire with heavy ATG fire to the power plant.  After exchanging fire with the opposing team’s Bomb, he was rammed and then pinned to the wall by the now weaponless vehicle.

Eagle Claw (played by Bill) was engaging in his first autoduelling appearance.  He’s not really a Native American… he just thought it’d make him sound cool.

Bipitie Bathhurst (played by Earlburt) is also returning to Armadillo for her second event there.  Previously she drove a Killer Kart in a four-on-four Team Amateur Night Event.  Her car was killed by MG fire, she caught fire, and she was injured after bailing out.  She also was an SMG toting foot soldier in the Grenadier Motors Sortie Trials in Fort Worth, Texas.

Duelling Facts:  Alonzo Swartz participated in the same duel in which Pastor Molestor Halifax heroically fought on foot with hand weapons after being “killed”, refused to surrender to opposing vehicles, shot an opposing vehicle while taking three full seconds of MG fire and even a ram, killed the opposing vehicle and set it on fire… then… miraculously pulled his opponent from the flaming wreck, saving his life.  Halifax was killed in his second team amateur duelling event by Snake at the Retama Duel Center!  (Solemn voice over while the clips are played: “We’ll never know how many more lives he might have touched with his ministry of God’s love and the purifying clarity of death sport.”)

We rolled randomly for our gates.  That put me facing off against Eagle Claw on one side of the arena while Snake and Bipitie drove in towards each other at the other.

Eagle Claw hit me in our first pass doing four points of damage to my front.  Another 4  point hit would take out my machine gun!  My shot missed badly.  Things did not look good for me, but having better reflexes I was able to cut hard to the left without tipping my opponent off as to what I was trying to do.  The following turn, Eagle Claw slowed down– he didn’t think he could make that sharp of a turn at forty miles an hour.  Elated, I turn sharply again to position myself right behind him and going the same speed.  This required two control rolls: one for the bend maneuver and one for the deceleration.  I made them both, then declared fire on my opponent’s three points of back armor.  The to-hit penalties were not that bad on the following phase and I managed to pull it off.  I rolled a five for damage– just enough to knock my opponent unconscious.

On the other side of the arena, Snake and Bipitie exchanged fire and each did minor damage to each other’s front.  Snake sideswiped Bipitie for two points of damage as they passed.  Bipitie cut sharply to the right and then went straight for a phase in order to clear the movement penalty.  Snake was crossing Bipitie’s ”T” and I couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t turned sharply as well to bring his weapons to bear.  He didn’t have a chance to fix it, though.  Bipitie struck and the damage penetrated Snake’s right armor and knocked him out.

Bipitie and I then accelerated towards each other for the final pass.  As we closed, we both missed shots to each others’ fronts.  On the next turn we closed to point blank range and exchanged fire simultaneously.  Bipitie missed while I hit….  As this was the side that had gotten sideswiped, it didn’t take much to penetrate.  Damage (again!) went directly to the driver and knocked her out.

This was, intentionally, a very quick game.  It only took 45 minutes to play out.  I don’t think it was quite fair for Earlburt and me to get to face off one-on-one with relatively new players– we had previously played eight four-on-four Killer Kart team events and had a tremendous advantage because of that.  We could have perhaps rigged the game such that Earburt and I took each other out before dealing with the other players, but I’m not even sure the new guys would have accepted such an offer.

Final stats for the event:

Alonzo Swartz– Driver Skill: 0 + 3 = 3, Gunner Skill: 2 + 3 = 5, Kills: 1 + 2 = 3, Prestige: 3 + 10 = 13, Wealth: $5,343 in salvage money from three Killer Karts

Eagle Claw– Driver Skill: 1, Gunner Skill: 1, Prestige: -1,

Bipitie Bathhurst– Driver Skill: 0 + 2 = 2, Gunner Skill: 1 + 2 = 3, Kills: 0 + 1 = 1, Prestige: -1 + 1 = 0, Wealth: None, Salvage: one Killer Kart (2 shots fired, no right armor, 2 hits damage to left, 1 hit damage to front)

Snake– Driver Skill: 1 + 1 = 2, Gunner Skill: 33 + 1 = 4, Prestige: 4 – 1 = 3, Kills: 1, Wealth: $1150, Salvage: None

GAME TWENTY ONE: 23 Apr 2029 Four Acme Chimaeras at the Armadillo Autoduel Arena

Four drivers were given the chance to try out Acme’s new 2029 Chimaera.  While costing less than seven thousand dollars, the vehicle manages to feature a different weapon on every facing.  Its light armor could not survive a pair of its own heavy rocket hits, but once they’re shot, they’re gone.  The drivers were unprepared to fight with primarily side mounted weapons.  While all of us could destroy any other car with a single point blank pass, none of us were eager to divest ourselves of our deterrent.  (FNORD Motors currently has litigation against Acme for the use of the name, Chimaera.  FNORD has previously marketed a Hot Shot variant under that name featuring heavier armor, two front mounted RL’s, two rear mounted FT’s, and an MD with an extra magazine.)

Mid-Sized.  Standard Chassis, Medium Power Plant, Improved Suspension, Heavy Duty Front and Rear Tires.  Driver, front: 3 HR, left: VS, right: FT, back: PS, 2x Weapon Link (2 or 3 HRs).  Armor F15, R15, L15, B15, T8, U8.  Accel. 5, HC 2.  4193 lbs, $6916.

Here is the run down on the drivers competing in the event:

Wayne Hertz (played by Jeffr0) narrowly survived a four car melee in his first event.  (It was the same Killer Kart event that Alonzo Swartz and Pastor Hallifax participated in.)  After losing his side armor to a shot fired by a heavily damaged vehicle, he set himself up for the final “joust” style pass of the match with the only remaining survivor.  His opponent missed while he in turn rolled a natural twelve!  In a four-on-four Stinger event at the Rubberway, Wayne was killed by Ho Ho Gingwain after a major skid put him into the worst possible position.

Angelo Mozillo (played by Bill), a new driver.

Laser Bob (played by Earlburt) was returning to Armadillo after being killed there early on in a four-on-four Killer Kart event.  He also carried an SMG in the Grenadier Sortie trials.

Ricky Bobby (played by Mike) was the driver of the Bombardier that famously killed Pastor Hallifax.  Before that, he drove a Sortie in the Grenadier Motors trials in the ruins of Fort Worth, TX.  He earned a small bonus for fancy action there.

Random starting positions ended up pairing Laser Bob with Angelo Mozillo on one side of the arena… while Wayne Hertz tangled with Ricky Bobby at the other.

Wayne drove straight into the arena so as to hug the mall as he closed range with Ricky Bobby.  Ricky displayed a little more panache: he drove such that he could get a shot of with his vehicular shotgun while Wayne’s weaponry was all out of arc.  Ricky then turned so as to get his flamethrower set up for a shot on the following turn.  Wayne and Ricky exchanged flamethrower fire for three full seconds before passing each other by.  Wayne manage to hit and roll fairly good damage every single time, while Ricky missed consistently.  This brought Ricky’s side armor down to only maybe six points or so….  In spite of Wayne’s above average damage rolls, no fires were started.  Wayne did not want to close to point blank range with anyone just yet, so he triggered his rear paint sprayer.  Ricky’s flamethrower was outside of its effective range, so this was perhaps a wasted effort, though it maybe encouraged him to temporarily give up the chase and head towards the other duelists….

Meanwhile, Laser Bob was giving Angelo Mozillo a hard time on the other side of the arena.  Laser Bob was hitting more often and also scoring damage.  He set two fires, but they both went out quickly.  Angelo Mozillo then failed a control roll and ended up skidding towards the wall.  This put him under some pretty strict to-hit penalties at a really bad time.  Laser Bob continued to harry Angelo Mozillo with flamethrower hits… and the D2 hazard caused by a particularly fearsome six point hit caused a fishtail that would keep Angelo Mozillo underneath a horrible to-hit penalty for the rest of the game!

Ricky Bobby then arrived to the scene.  Strangely enough, Laser Bob chose to fire at Ricky instead of Angelo Mozillo.  The hit dropped Ricky’s handling status ever so slightly.  Then…

Laser Bob T-boned Mozillo!  The damage was enough to take out the remaining facing armor for both cars.  Laser Bob’s heavy rockets each took one DP of damage.  Angelo Mozillo and his power plant each took a hit of damage… but then we rolled to see where the odd damage point would fall and it went to the driver.  Angelo Mozillo was unconscious!  The first kill of the game….  Ricky Bobby sped past the collision and triggered his paint sprayer for cover.  Laser Bob… now without any front armor… closed in menacingly.  Ricky executed a minor thirty degree bend away from the arena wall, but the D1 difficulty dropped his status enough that he was required to make a control roll.  He failed the roll and entered a spin out.

Laser Bob, undaunted by the bright pink paint clouds, continued to close.  The spin out, however, brought Ricky Bobby’s rear in contact with the arena wall.  He was now stationary– with his rockets facing his opponent!

Laser Bob and Ricky Bobby exchanged rocket fire simultaneously.  Laser Bob fired two rockets and hit with both.  This was enough to destroy the power plant and put Ricky Bobby in the hospital for nine weeks.  Ricky Bobby had fired all three of his rockets, but only one hit.  It was enough to knock Laser Bob unconscious, though… and set his car on fire due to power plant damage.

Unaware of the events on the other side of the arena, Wayne Hertz continued his multi-second drive towards the grandstands as the crowed booed him and opened up with small arms fire.  Wayne gets to keep the car, but… it is imperative that he participate in some seriously aggressive combat soon in order to retain some semblance of honor.  The fact that he was taken down by a *girl* in his last game does not help him much right now– this guy is in for some serious razzing.

Final Stats for the Event:

Wayne Hertz– Driver Skill: 1 + 0 = 1, Gunner Skill: 3 + 1 = 4, Kills: 1 + 0 = 1, Prestige: 6 + 3 = 9, Wealth: After salvaging his Killer Kart and Acme Chimaera, he has $5,157.

Angelo Mozillo– Driver Skill: 1, Gunner Skill: 1, Prestige: -1

Laser Bob– Driver Skill: 1 + 2 = 3, Gunner Skill: 1 + 3 = 4, Hand gunner Skill: 1 + 0 = 1, Kills: 0 + 2 = 2, Prestige: -1 + 6 = 5

Ricky Bobby– Driver Skill: 3 + 2 = 5, Gunner Skill: 1 + 2 = 3, Kills: 0 + 1 = 1, Prestige: 2 + 4 = 6

AFTERWARD

The big lesson this time was that Amateur Night events work better if they are either in a much more confined space or if there are lots more cars involved.  The new guys got stuck facing off against an old grognard in both of their games this time as well.  If I could do this over again, I would have perhaps played the Killer Kart game with each player having two cars each… and the second game I would have confined to one end of the arena.  Also, four players seems to be just about the perfect number of players for a CAR WARS role playing adventure: a set of ongoing characters pooling their funds and setting off to battle outlaws with only having had a handful of amateur duels in which to scrape together some random low end vehicles?  Perfect!  (Say… if Wayne and Alonzo get together, they could probably get a Conestoga station wagon….)

We did run a complete duel with four players in forty-five minutes– with the full-on Compendium rules at that.  That was pretty cool.  A Killer Kart event at J. Random Arena seems like the perfect way to kick off just about any game session.  Flamethrowers and Paint Sprayers saw a lot of use in the second game: I really like breaking the dropped weapons counters out like that.  If the arena had been really small we might have filled the entire place up with smoke in five seconds, though….

This was my second session using mid turn speed changes.  I sort of dreaded those because I thought they would over complicate the sequence of play.  It turns out that they are not hard to adjudicate– especially if people are restricted to calling them when they are executing their movement.  The rule gives the feeling of a lot more control– you can break exactly when you need to, for example– and it takes out the blocky low-res feeling from the turn break.  Similarly, being fastidious about applying to-hit penalties from weapon hazards means that people are much less likely to fire on phase five and then immediately follow up with fire on phase one of the next turn.  Making a point to apply to-hit penalties for crash table results likewise adds a lot of flavor to the game, and makes losing control at low speeds a lot more dangerous to boot.

As far as tactics are concerned, free for all duels appear to fall into a pattern of individual and group passes… some of which end up in entanglements that last longer or are more decisive that what the participants expect.  Before now, I referred to these intense short range melees as “fur balls”, but black holes may be a better analogy. Duelists think they can slingshot around the worst of a fight, but they too often come too close and get sucked into a terminal orbit of sorts.  The ram option and the point blank fire bonuses are the culprits here.  You need to close in order to obtain these benefits, but your opponents get them as well.  Making things worse are the feeding frenzies that are spawned when a vehicle is damaged or off balance enough to appear to be an easy kill.  Reckless driving and greed are more dangerous than enemy bullets.  The lust for easy salvage, prestige, and kills overwhelms the average duelist’s strategic impetus to hold back so as to gang up on the less damaged “leader” that happens to be staying out of the blood bath.  The logic of the knife fight must be followed to its bloody conclusion… and only taunting, honor, and pride can be counted on to keep wimpy duelists fully engaged in the blood letting.

With an influx of new players, our campaign is getting a second wind.  We had tried playing a classic corporate style campaign at first, but allowing me to design cars every game was not good for Earlburt’s chances.  The prep work of vehicle design was hard on family guys like me as well.  We then tried another set of six game sessions, with Earlburt running a team of characters rpg style.  We ran Convoy, the big Midville scenario, and Badlands Run.  I ran out of steam on that one when I let Earlburt pick up his second $100,000 adventure completion prize.  Looking back at the games, the most fun we had was in the simplest situations– salvaging a laser from a wreck, then defending it in a Pack Attack scenario… or chasing down a van that dinged your car in a parking lot.  I think we sort of agreed that stretching out the climb from nothing to owning a $20,000 car was where we wanted to focus our next series of games.  We played an impossible series of twelve four-on-four team amateur night events after that: eight with Killer Karts, two with Stingers, one with Joseph Specials, and one with Hot Shots.  Only the best duelists got promoted to the better cars in the later rounds.  By factoring out vehicle design and big money, suddenly… the focus of our games highlighted the significance of a dozen oft-overlooked minor rules.  Instead of being “car design snobs”, we evolved into “arena aficionados.”  We could never convince ourselves to make the move to 3D layouts and model cars after that because we just loved laying down a new map and seeing who could figure out the key tactics for it first.

You can control how much money is being injected into a campaign by controlling the dollar value of the cars that compete in the Amateur Night events.  Any character that can survive five duels is likely to own a cheap car, be an ace, have a sponsorship, and also will probably have advanced to Gunner-1.  Something strange and cinematic is likely to have happened to him as well.  This iterative process of developing a character through arena combat yields an unexpected amount of color, in my opinion.  The fact that the other guys in the game group actually witness such things transpiring (as opposed to just rolling them up) makes it even better.  We haven’t yet made the leap from Amateur Night combat into Role Playing with any of these characters, but I look forward to doing so soon.  There are few things more fun than getting to drive around in a pimped out stock car that is loaded with weapons that you’ve physically taken off of your arena kills yourself.

For myself, I have always wanted to work up a character from nothing through the original default rags-to-riches campaign premise from the CAR WARS pocket box.  (I was very close to achieving this with one character, but totaled his $15,000 car in one game and got him blown up real good in the next.)  At the same time, you don’t want new players to have to compete with advanced characters.  In order to play in whatever event ends up on the schedule, you’ll need characters with appropriate levels of experience and that live in similar regions.  As a consequence, each player ends up developing a small troupe of characters.  As a rule of thumb, your worst characters are going to be stuck in the cheap Killer Kart events while your better characters have a chance to drive the more expensive cars.  I’m not sure how we can handle the transition to running “pro” events.  I would want $15,000 to buy a car and handle repair costs before I stuck my neck out in a series of Division 5 games.  It could take several sessions to get everyone up to that level!  Sponsorships are the key to making it possible for pro duelists to handle their expenses and stay in the game, but rules for that were never really developed in the old game.

Anyways, we’ll see how things transpire.  That’s all for now… until next time, keep on dueling!

This is the best thing to happen to the game for a long time. Thank you, STEVE JACKSON GAMES.  After combining this with the complete run of ADQ that is also available on e23, life is good for those that would like to enjoy legal copies of the best game of the eighties without giving excessive amounts money to the scalpers on ebay and Amazon….

Note that blank map sheets are available from Warehouse 23… and that it should also be fairly easy to make counters with various image files that are available here and there on the web.  If you need any assistance with such a project, please post on the CAR WARS forums or on Board Game Geek, and helpful gamers will come out the woodwork to give you any advice you might need.  Also, check out SPARK’s website for turning keys!  (And if you’re at a loss for just what kind of games to run, check out these session reports!)  To track how well sales are going for the first month after its release, look here.

Keep on duellin’, CAR WARS fans!

I’d arranged to meet a gamer passing through the area at a nearby Starbucks. This turned out to be an excellent place to game– there’s an entire room partitioned off from the main area so it is generally pretty quiet. While the drinks will run you five or six bucks if you hang around for a while, I’ve noticed that gamers that aren’t already close friends are more likely to get a game going if they don’t have to worry about imposing on each other’s hospitality. Even though my opponent was a long-time gamer, he’d never played any of Steve Jackson’s classic Ogre family of microgames. In a single afternoon and evening, we played three of these games that Steve had published in black pocket boxes in the early eighties back when he’d first started his own company.

For the first game, we broke out Ogre on the extra large miniatures edition hex map. I used counters from my ragged G.E.V. set and secretly took a substantial handicap for my defensive forces. The Ogre trudged onto the map and I sent my fast moving G.E.V.’s to meet him. I rolled poorly and the Ogre came out unscathed. (Heavy tanks seem to do a lot better in these initial engagements, in my opinion.) The Ogre struck back with his missiles and batteries and fried several of my units. In a particularly nasty turn, he trounced my forces by rolling several fives and sixes while I “whiffed” in return. He annihilated my defense force and took little damage in return.

For our second game we broke out my war-torn G.E.V. pocket box. The map is warped from an ancient drink spill. We set up the “Ceasefire Collapse” scenario and reviewed the more complex rules for spillover fire, overruns, and terrain. “Breakthrough” just doesn’t seem to go as well for new players as this one does, in my experience. Having played this one before, I concentrated my tanks in stacks as far forward on the road as possible and moved everything towards the enemy town hexes and command posts. My opponent had wisely chosen to forego howitzers, but was still spread out behind the road in a long line. I had high hopes of crushing his force in detail.

My heavy tanks aggressively entered hexes where they’d be sure to take enemy fire on his follow up turn. After taking my requisite licks, I then moved to strike back and successfully disabled many units. (G.E.V.’s and missile tanks are very vulnerable to the heavy tank’s crushing 2-to-1 attacks!) My opponent sent a group of G.E.V.’s to harass my town hexes– I should have at least left some infantry back there to guard them! (One howitzer screened by some infantry could have been very nasty….) I withdrew my own G.E.V’s from the heat of battle to respond to the attack– a critical mistake!

My missile tanks had improved movement on the road, but could not effectively engage unless I was willing to risk stacking them. My assault fell apart when an infantry unit overran one of my key armor units. To make things worse, on one turn my opponent made all of this attack rolls. I responded my making several risky attacks along his line, but missed with them all. For the first time, I’d not only met someone that was far luckier than myself… but he seemed to neutralize my own luck powers as well!

From there we discovered that his remaining forces could easily eliminate my own defenses– I was down to a lone G.E.V. and fifteen points of infantry. An exciting game: I thought I could crush my opponent but soon learned differently. His infantry units gave him a tremendous edge even though he was short on armor units in the main confrontation! Don’t underestimate them….

(While we were playing, two older ladies came in to chat while they worked on their knitting. I overheard one whispering loudly something about the two Dungeons and Dragons players in the room. It’s good to know that my hobby is still dark, mysterious, and vaguely scandalous to the right people!)

After a quick meal we broke out Battlesuit. This has a large fold-out map with “points” instead of hexes. The counters are extra-large and feature beautiful Denis Loubet silhouettes. We chose to play “Scrap Iron Hill”, which turned out to be a monster game featuring eighteen battlesuits on each side.

While showing my opponent my microgame collection before getting started, I mentioned that I didn’t ever expect to play this one face-to-face with a live opponent. I’d actually played it solitaire five times in the preceding weeks so that I could be prepared just in case I did get such a chance as this. He agreed to play mainly because it is a rather obscure and underplayed game– he enjoyed putting old games through their paces. I was really pleased to get a chance to play it– and my opponent was a hardened Advanced Squad Leader player, so he had no problem picking things up.

He positioned ten of his suits on the north hill. I moved my three rangers (each armed with heavy weapons) into hard cover and immediately began firing on any unit that lacked cover– especially his units had heavy weapons. I brought up my main force on the southwestern corner of the map. This turned out to be a bad idea as he quickly eliminated the leading assault suits that were leading the charge. I pulled my standard suits back behind the hill on subsequent turns and tried to push them forward into the trees in the central valley so that they could actually shoot something. Even though line of sight was usually blocked, I would only succeed in getting three suits into that forward position by the end of the game.

My opponent had moved several units out into the open on the northeastern ridge– they caused heavy casualties to me because they had line of sight to my standard suits huddling behind the southwestern hill. If I had thought of it, I could have used my reactive fire from my heavy weapons units to prevent them from taking their second attacks so often on their turns. After they fired a first shot, I could have responded and had a fair chance of at least putting them into shock and/or damaging them to the point where their attacks would be ineffective. So even though there is no specific rule about covering fire in the game, the concept seems to emerge nicely enough just from the way the reaction fire rules interact with the double fire opportunities that the non-moving attackers get.

I focused my heavy weapons fire on my opponent’s units with heavy weapons. I thought this was a little lame– it is a pretty luck dependent situation. My opponent assured me that the same thing happens in ASL: the heavy machine gun emplacements focus on each other first… and then the real fighting begins once the dust settles.

Drones are really neat, though. They have powerful ECM suites, but almost any sort of damage will take them out of the game: flying eggshells, as it were. They come in three types: bomb, assault, and targeting. I chose two targeting drones and managed to get one of them into a forward soft cover position where it could do some good. With that drone’s ability act as a forward observer, I could eliminate the soft cover penalties for targeting enemy units stationed on forest edges. Even indirect fire from my standard suits could have a chance of doing some damage thanks to the drone.

My opponent aggressively sent his two drones toward my forces and I immediately started targeting them with reactive fire. One of them got pretty close and I focused all of my men’s weapons on it when my turn came. It turned out to be a bomb drone, and if my opponent had thought to activate it with a reactive fire declaration, my detachment of standard battlesuits would have been decimated.

In the course of the battle, I was able to keep my heavy weapons units alive even though my opponent succeeded in putting one in shock at for a few turns. I managed to take out his command suit with a lucky shot and he suddenly had a hard time getting his units back after they went into shock. He’d played really well, though it looked like the battle was going my way after that.

I looked down at my watch and thing realized suddenly that four hours had passed since we’d started the game. I’d been so immersed, I hadn’t been aware of the time passing! I couldn’t figure out where the time went. My only explanation for that unusual level of engagement was that, unlike Ogre and G.E.V., even when it is not your turn you are still playing actively.

The unique thing about the game when compared to the other Ogre microgames is that you call out your moves on a second by second basis: “one, two, into the woods makes four, and six….” At each point, your opponent can interrupt you with reactive fire. On one turn I became terrified when my opponent started wearing down a key unit with a heavy weapon. I immediately declared all of my heavy weapons to fire in response in an attempt to stop that unit from taking his second turn of fire. It turned out that, due to the modifiers, we couldn’t hit him. I’d panicked and wasted my reaction fire on a hopeless shot– much, I imagine, the way real soldiers might.

Reflecting on these three games, Ogre appears to be much more linear and chess-like, where the Ogre player must choose hexes to “fork” his targets while minimizing potential damage to himself. G.E.V. is similar, but adds a second dimension to the game play what with each side having a variety of units operating in a more varied set of terrain elements. Infantry become a major factor thanks to the favorable overrun rules. In both games, infantry are expendable, but how they are used can turn the tide of the game.

But what happens when, in Battlesuit, infantry becomes the focus of the game? The most notable thing is the sheer nakedness of your troops. Even if you are a ranger in heavy cover, there is nowhere on the map where you can be safe from enemy fire. Your only hope is to minimize the damage you receive by keeping your head down and using as much covering fire as you can to protect your men.

My opponent’s reaction to the games was to really prefer G.E.V. over both Ogre and Battlesuit. In fact, after completing the Battlesuit scenario, he said, “that was awesome, but… I never want to play that again!” Indeed, it was a grueling and exhausting experience– almost like playing a large team event or Midville scenario with CAR WARS. You end you rolling 2d6 for each of your men, usually… sometimes twice each… and each of the opposing units gets a 2d6 reaction roll. That’s a lot of time spent adding up to-hit modifiers. Line of sight issues can complicate the first turn or so, but after a while it is pretty easy to read the map without hashing that out.

Talking it over, there was a great deal going on in the game and the outcomes of the engagement seemed to fit what little I knew of real infantry battles. We agreed that the game would be more fun if both sides had more drone units. The surprise value of keeping the exact drone type a secret until it is used is just too fun. Also, I conjecture that the best way to have gotten my weaker suits into position would have been to jump up one level at the end of one turn, and then cover them aggressively while I waited for the chance to push them forward. If they can land into soft cover on the following turn, they just might make it. This would have gotten a lot more use out of my assault suits and it seems like it might be an exception to the general rule of “jumping equals shot”.

Suffice it to say, this was a very special game session for me. I hadn’t gotten to play five-player CAR WARS since I was in high school. MattV travelled all the way to North Carolina from Maine to join us. Der GrossFahrer had bought the game back in the eighties, but never played until now. Bill isn’t even a gamer, really, but was a good sport while we hashed out crash table effects and to-hit modifiers. By all accounts, a good time was had by all. (All of you, I owe y’all each a hefty algae based alcholic beverage. You are all great!)

As far as we know, the world’s three biggest fans of the game were finally gathered together in one place. Earlburt had his map collection laid out around the room. We all gathered around the Autoduel America map sheet to review the background history of the setting. I had my nigh-complete run of ADQ on hand and MattV showed us his miniatures and his Vassal map for a Japan-based scenario. To our knowledge, ours was the only ongoing old school rags-to-riches campaign currently being run in the entire world.

MattV kindly gave me a copy of the Hobby Japan edition of the Armadillo Autoduel Arena. This thing is awesome– the cover art is fantastic. Thanks, Matt!

Without further ado, here is a complete run down of the day’s games:

*** Campaign 2029: Games 16 & 17 ***

The first Amateur night event featured four Arden Motors Barnabas compacts at the Grand Rapids Municipal Arena. This is a single map sheet sized arena with four barrier “stripes” in the middle that block line of sight for everything except turreted weapons. We played CAR WARS Compendium, Second Edition with 5th edition fire rules and a combined speed/range chart derived from GURPS 4e rules. MattV suggested we allow mid-turn speed changes and Earlburt eagerly assented.

Barnabas , designed by Jeffr0
An Arden Motors 2029 release that was discontinued when the company folded after its headquarters were looted by a mass cycle gang attack late in the year.
Compact, Standard Chassis, Medium Power Plant, Heavy Suspension, Puncture-Resistant Front & Rear Tires, Driver (Targeting Computer), front: RR, right: HR, back: SD, Armor F37, R25, L25, B30, T10, U10, Accel. 5, HC 3, 3697 lbs, $ 7932

A full view of the Grand Rapids Municipal Arena.

I started across from MattV and turned away from him and put the spike dropper on automatic while I drove through a “tunnel”. This took me out of the action temporarily. Earlburt came from the other side of the arena to tangle with MattV. They got in close as Earlburt pounded Matt with his recoilless from behind– but MattV’s spikes were on automatic and deft maneuvering on his part put Earlburts’s tires in trouble. Earlburt managed to complete the kill by taking out the driver with a shot through the side armor in spite of Bill and Jeffr0 driving by and toying with “vulturing” it from him.

After that, I went to deal with Bill. I hit his front armor and rammed him, taking out his front weapons. I couldn’t pursue him without risking spike damage and I didn’t think I had enough ammo left to work though another facing. When Earlburt started taking MattV’s body out of his car, I drove over to point the RR at the wall behind him and threatened to take him out with the burst effect if he didn’t leave the car alone. Bill ran up the clock at that point and left the arena when the gates went up.

Earlburt (Grey) was imobilized by MattV's spikes, so he'd gotten out of his car to try to get into MattV's still driveable wreck. Jeffr0 (Blue) has just taken out Bill's forward weapons, so he rolled over to the two cars, covered them with his recoilless rifle, and threatened to take out Earlburt's continuing character if he didn't leave that car alone.

We play that you keep your car if you can drive it out– and also, you keep your kills as salvage. Here are the stats for each character:

MattV — Deceased

Bill — 1 Driver skill point, 1 Gunner Skill point, 1 Prestige point. One Barnabas (no front armor, RR destroyed, one hit to power plant, HR expended, SD has six shots left).

Earlburt playing Luc Gumberry — +1 Driver skill point, +2 Gunner skill points, +2 Prestige points. One Barnabas (2 hits to front, no right armor, HR expended, SD empty, RR has nine shots left, tires each took two points of damage). [Luc had previously scored one kill at a Killer Kart event at the Amex Proving Grounds. Before this event he was Prestige 1, Driver Skill 2, and Gunner Skill 2.]

Jeffr0 playing Elroy McKnightridge — +1 Driver skill point, +1 Gunner Skill point, +2 Prestige points, +1 Event won. One Barnabas (no front armor, RR has six shots left, SD has six shots left, HR is expended). [This was Elroy's second outing after a lackluster event at the Amex Proving Grounds. He had three prestige points from that event along with one Gunner Skill point.]

Der GrossFahrer showed up with the pizzas and we took a break to look around at the various map sheets Earlburt had brought for show and tell. The Autoduel America road map continues to be a favorite– so much history and detail to discuss looking at that one…!

Our second event featured five Arden Motors Lothario sedans at the Kettering Arena. Earlburt had gotten an artist to shade the gravel for us, so the map looked fantastic. The smaller size and the lack of barriers made it much harder for the amateurs to flee and run up the clock.

Lothario , designed by Jeffr0
A popular vehicle commonly seen in the Free Oil States in the late 2020’s.
Sedan, Heavy Chassis, Large Power Plant, Heavy Suspension, Puncture-Resistant Front & Rear Tires, Driver, front: ATG, right: 2 HR, back: RR, Weapon Link, Armor F41, R30, L30, B35, T10, U10, Accel. 5, HC 3, 5604 lbs, $ 12508

Our randomly assigned start positions turned out to match our existing seating arrangement exactly. Der GrossFahrer started in the middle at any facing he desired, tires squealing. (We decided it would be cool to let the guy in the middle get a smoke cloud behind him to disuade folk from ganging him.)

Der GrossFahrer cruised across my arc of fire. I shot at him with my ATG and missed. Earlburt cruised toward him next and (as usual) he set up a perfect shot and connected. If I remember right, Der GrossFahrer smacked him back with a pair of heavy rockets. The table then had to endure a constant stream of remarks about the efficiency of German engineering. Earlburt’s smack talk then goaded me into firing (and missing with) my second round of ammo at him.

On the other side of the Arena, Bill hugged the wall and stayed away from the gravel while ducking behind the TV bunker for cover. Bill was taunted mercilessly for his no-so-brave slinking around. MattV headed toward the bunker for a face off with him. An ugly mess of rockets and ATG fire was exchanged, but Bill managed to disengage and cut across the arena away from the mess that was developing.

Bill (Green) speeds away after trading shots with MattV (Red). Earlburt (Grey) bears down upon MattV after successfully hitting both Der GrossFahrer (Black) and Bill with precision ATG fire.

Meanwhile, Earlburt closed in for a set of opportunistic shots against both Bill and MattV. Due to his superiour timing, he connected with each shot. Arthur dove into the “cubby” behind the TV bunker. I then caught up with MattV and dealt him a ram followed by an ATG shot. Things didn’t work out as I had planned– MattV’s rockets destroyed my front armor! Earlburt was then in position to steal the kill from MattV with a lucky shot. MattV had almost no armor left on both of his sides and I was on fire because of the power plant damage I’d taken.

The Meltdown: This photo was taken just seconds before Jeffr0's car exploded. Jeffr0 (Blue) had tried to ram MattV (Red), but ended up on the side of the car with the heavy rockets. With heavy damage to his front armor, it was trivial for Earlburt (Grey) to damage Jeffr0's power plant and set it on fire. Earlburt is recovering from a spinout and Bill (Green) has just killed MattV, though Der GrossFahrer is about to set him on fire with heavy weapons fire. Bill will only narrowly escape death.

In fear of taking explosion damage, Earlburt jerked the wheel to get away. He failed a control roll and began spinning out, but as his speed was pretty low, he wasn’t in danger of wrecking too badly. MattV accelerated away from Earlburt to try to get away from him. Der GrossFahrer showed up and everyone told him that Earlburt was an easy target because he couldn’t shoot back. Der GrossFahrer ignored our advice and let him be so he could swing away from the action for a few seconds. Bill took a sharp turn to come after MattV. He lost control and spun out as well. Bill and Earlburt both regained control, though… and somehow had their guns pointed in the right direction. They’d both achieved inadvertant bootlegger reverses!

Bill gunned MattV repeatedly and was threatening to take him down completely. The smell of blood sent Earlburt into a frenzy and instead of targeting the bigger threat, he focused his fire on MattV as well. Earlburt succeeded in stealing the kill while Der GrossFahrer managed to take down Bill. (Bill had to crawl from his own flaming wreck to survive.) The heavily damaged Earlburt fled from the fierce German competitor that never seemed to miss to-hit rolls and that always rolling high for damage rolls. A few well placed shots to Earlburt’s rear armor was enough to take him out of the game.

Final stats for the game:

Bill– 1 kill, +2 Driver skill pont, +2 Gunner skill points, +1 Prestige point. One Lothario (No front or rear armor, 21 points left on front, RR gone, power plant has five dp, eight rounds left in ATG, HR’s expended).

Der GrossFahrer– 2 kills, 3 Driver skill points, 3 Gunner skill points, 4 Prestige points, 1 Event won. One Lothario (power plant has eight DP, ATG has one round, R 8, L 15, F 34, T 10, U 10, four damaged tires 8/7/7/2 dps left), one Lothario (tires damaged with one hit each, front has 18 hits, left has 13 hits, right has 18 hits).

Jeffr0 playing Bobby Drake — Deceased. [This was Drake's second duel. In his previous event, he scored no kills in a Killer Kart event at the Rubberway.]

MattV — 1 Driver skill point, 1 Gunner skill point. Hospitalized for one week.

Earlburt playing Joseph Apronfields — deceased. [This was Apronfields' second duel. In his previous event, he's wrecked himself in a Killer Kart event at the Southtown Arena.]

Note that, with two vehicles each in their possession, both Bill and Der GrossFahrer can salvage one of their cars to repair the other. They may risk those cars in a role-playing adventure, or bank them in order amass funds for a professional dueling event.

Before the next game we want to review the crash table results and especially the durations of the various targeting penalties as these are key. We will also introduced a new “save versus death” rule– roll higher than the damage roll that killed you on 3d6 to survive.

Game Over: Der GrossFahrer puts Earlburt out of his misery. We wondered why Earlburt was running away, but checking later we noticed he was down to a single shot of ATG ammo.

Afterword

Once again, it appears that symmetry is the enemy of exciting autoduel action. Grand Rapids Municipal arena would probably be more fun with cars that have turret weapons, but that first game was hampered somewhat by having the four players break off into paired combats. I thought the armor was a little bit heavy for the event, but Bill said he enjoyed having to really work for a kill by making three or four successive hits. (Of course, he was still alive after losing his weaponry, so it’s no surprise that he felt that way!)

Kettering was a much more successful event, in my opinion. The pairs of heavy rockets added a lot flavor and inspired a lot of smack talk. The more confined space kept everyone together. The fifth combatant threw everything off balance and shredded the last chance for any boring symetrical activity.

I think the preference for compacts and subcompacts hurts the tempo of typical Amateur Night games. That extra -1 modifier for a small target really changes the game in a bad way. The perfect amateur duelling vehicle will be a mid-sized car and have linked weapons. (Linked weapons increase the likelyhood of killing a vehicle that has lost an armor facing.) To spice things up, there should be room for heavy rockets, dropped weapons, or a rear mounted flame thrower as well. Armor should not be maxed out– the chassis should probably be light or standard sized. Side armor should be intentionally kept light so that the people that make kills have a higher chance of picking up a driveable car. An acceleration of 10 would be a big plus, as well.

Finally, sponsors might outfit cars with equipment that the duellists won’t get a chance to keep– this can allow for interesting designs while still keeping costs down for the arena managers. Also… sponsors will probably hand out special favors to duellists that use their equipment in a creative way. For instance, rocket manufacturers might hand out $500 for dealing to killing blow to a car using a pair of heavy rockets. Also, if the duellist rolls double his prestige or less, the manufacturer offers to sponsor the duellist permanently by paying for his heavy rocket reloads at any major truck stop.  The sponsors will be more likely to reward duellists that get their hardware on the evening news!

There is a lively Star Fleet Battles group starting up in a nearby city. I bit the bullet, made the drive and dove in. (I’ve owned this game since I was in high school and have always wanted to play it more– and if I turn 40 without filling a map full of fighters and drones in a nasty eight hour fleet battle, then I’ll not have done my gaming duty.)

I showed up at the game store and was glad to see tons of gamers. There were a couple of Warhammer tables, some Magic people, and some Euro-gamers. I just can’t get over the Warhammer people. They have these beautiful miniatures of futuristic hover-speeder things… and they just sit there on the crowded tabletop… hardly moving. Don’t these people have a desire to turn, dive, and whoosh… risking death with insanely violent high-G turns? It looks like they just line up their units and start rolling dice…. Argh! Their miniatures look really really good, though… as do their nifty matched six sided die sets marking various units for damage and so forth. Sigh.

We had a good crowd of SFB people. The grizzled veteran was extremely well prepared with his giant maps, rules binders, and whole cases of counters and ship displays. Two young ladies had arranged for a tutorial in advance. Another grizzled veteran showed up to help out with them. I ended up playing a fellow IT professional who had brought his teenaged son along.

We let the teenager pick any ship he wanted: he chose the really cool Federation BCG which is rated as being worth 180 BPV points and is armed with four photons, a pair of extra drone racks, and a killer phaser suite. My ally agreed to go with drone and disrupter armed Kzinti ships. I picked out a 110 BPV medium cruiser for him while I took a 70 BPV heavy frigate.

The game was fairly straight-forward. We agreed in advance to not use electronic warfare rules or mid-turn speed changes. This was partly because we were collectively new and/or rusty, but mainly to keep the game moving.

The Federation ship stayed at speed six for the entire game. He launched scatter packs every turn and recovered the shuttles as he went. He had heavy shield reinforcement and (as I expected) held overloaded photon torpedoes.

I went speed 19 in my frigate so I could have a good turn mode. My ally in the medium cruiser went speed 21. Because the fed was moving so slow, this meant we could easily stay in range 9-15. I took pot shots at the fed’s #1 shield each turn and then turned away so that I could stay alive. My ally danced in much more closely.

The game mainly turned out to be a training lesson on how to defend against drones. The fed would be swamped with anywhere from six to ten drones each turn. His G-racks were loaded with enough anti-drones that he could easily shrug them off, though. In spite of that, one of my drones just barely squeaked past his defensive phaser fire on the first turn to damage the shield that I’d already scored disrupter fire against.

The Kzinti medium cruiser was armed with two anti-drone racks. Due to his ability to turn away at about the same speed as the fed’s drones, my ally was effectively immune to the Federation scatter packs. After the ADD-rack demonstration– and after getting stung on that first turn– the Federation captain decided to use his turn 2 and turn 3 scatter pack launches to neutralize the Kzinti medium cruiser scatter packs. (This father-son pair really liked scatterpack shuttles. I imagine the shuttle contractors of the Star Fleet Universe appreciated this fact a lot– especially given how stressed the economy is…!)

There were a few times where I had to be what I called “the SFB nerd.” It was a friendly game and all– and we were training up the next generation of wargamer– but I had to point out that we have to declare all of our fire before resolving it. If you can check for the success of your anti-drone fire before declaring your phaser fire, then you’re effectively operating under the Module J Aeigis fire control rules!

During the third turn it became critical for us to know how much ADD ammo the Federation had left… and just how exactly reloads work for those complicated type-G drone racks of his. I tried looking up the rules on the that, but was couldn’t figure it out with confidence under time pressure– most other rules I could look up faster than the other players could ask a veteran, though. Another point of confusion was how many drone reloads the medium cruiser had. I wasn’t explicit about the ship’s refit status and the drone rack display can be confusing if that’s up in the air. After launching three scatter packs, he very well could have been out of drones.

During turn three, my ally lowered his rear shield and transported a crew over to his empty scatter pack shuttle. This took him dangerously close to overload range. Other SFB fans were coming over to the table to comment on the tactical situation. I proudly pointed out how we could stay at range 9-15 all night as long as the Federation continued to stay at speed 6. I also gloated over the fact that the Federation was just about out of anti-drone ammunition! Ha ha!

I’m not quite sure what happened in the final impulses of the turn. Maybe we were tired and distracted. Maybe I called impulse #32 twice by accident. Or maybe it was due to the fact that the Federation battle cruiser moved after the Kzinti medium criuser instead of the way that the sequence of play dictates. Anyhow… the medium criuser was suddenly at range seven from the Federation vessel. The teenager fired… and all four overloaded photons blew the Kzinti ship to scrap! Argh!

The teenager was thrilled. During our scatter pack exchanges, he’d already been saying that this was the most fun they’d ever had playing Star Fleet Battles… but now he was talking about promoting his tactical officer and putting the medium cruiser into his kill file…. He joked that he was afraid his dad was going to make him walk home, but they seemed to leave the game store in good spirits….

Here are my observations about the game:

1) The caller needs to be a sequence of play Nazi. He needs to have a solid procedure that prevents goof-ups from occurring. An air-tight procedure is essential for the point of the game where you’re getting drowsy. The old cadet training manual had a pretty good impulse procedure chart that you’d step through marking each sub-impulse step with a counter as you moved through the list. I will make sure to have something like that for the next game.

2) In my opinion, maneuver is what starship combat is all about. How close do you come in? When do you fire? We didn’t really get to that sort of thing in this game, so we really weren’t doing much better than the Warhammer guys at the next table. I think every cadet training program should emphasize what’s going to happen if the enemy can control the tempo. The fact that we had a major goof-up on the “saber dancing” side doesn’t change the reality of this.

3) The obsession with scatter packs turned the game into a war between competing accountants. If we’d agreed not to use scatter packs, the tracking of ammo would have been basically irrelevant to the game and we’d probably have done a little more shooting and maneuvering. In my opinion, if you’re going to outlaw mid-turn speed changes and electronic warfare in order to “speed up the game”, then you probably want to outlaw scatter packs as well. (I really think that the “Commander’s Level Rules” should be taken all together or not used at all.) That said, people really enjoy launching scatter pack shuttles!

4) One thing that did not happen is that we Kzinti’s did not follow our scatter packs into overload range. We also did not launch drones at point blank range. Anti-drones made large drone waves effectively impotent in this game… and I’d really like to see drones do something in a game besides eat up a few points of phaser energy. Maybe some day….

5) We really need to be clear about refit status, reload rules, and drone rack capabilities before we start another Kzinti game!

Ah well. A good time was had by all, though. If we can set up a rematch, we should be in position to have a pretty good game now. The teenager was already fluent in movement, energy allocation, overloads, weapon status, and so forth. With just a little tiny more attention to detail… we can be playing “real” SFB!

Now about that G rack…. The Fed player has several choices. He can start the game with eight anti-drones loaded in the rack. In that case, he’ll have sixteen anti-drones available for reloads. Alternately, he could start with four regular drones in the rack– in that case, he’d have four drones for reloads and also eight anti-drones. He could also start with four anti-drones and two regular drones already loaded into the rack. In that case he’d have twelve antidrones and two more regular drones available for reloads. (In every case, one set reloads matches what is in the rack at the start of the game and one set of reloads is entirely made up of anti-drones.) If it is Y175, then the rack gets one more set of reloads that are identical to what the rack was loaded with at the start of the game– so don’t let your Fed opponents play in Y175!! Also… to reload a rack during a game, it must not be fired for an entire turn. (You declare it out of use in advance.) This can reload two spaces of “stuff”– ie, either two regular drones or four anti-drones.

SO… what this means is… that it is unlikely that the Federation BCH could have launched three fully loaded scatter packs and at the same time fired his ADD’s as much as he did. If he had so many drones available, then I’m pretty sure those racks would have at least been taken down for reloading at least once during those three turns…. (The BCG’s only got two drone racks, right…?)

Ah well…. We’ll get this…!

Ever since I was in the third grade– back when I bought the original Car Wars black plastic “pocket box”– I’ve always wanted to have a legitimate ongoing Car Wars character that worked his way up from nothing, through a series of Amateur Night events, and into a career as a professional duelist. I can now finally say that I have achieved this life long dream. Almost.

After playing 11 “team amateur night” events consisting of two teams of 4 cars each duking it out at the Armadillo Autoduel Arena, the Amex Proving Grounds, Southtown Autoduel Arena, the Rubberway, and the Waco Double Drum, we were ready for the season finale of our special American Idol style campaign. We’d each started 32 Car Wars characters in each of 8 Killer Kart events. We then played our best 8 characters in a Stinger round. The best four of those graduated to a Joseph Special event. Finally, we played a couple of side games to give some border lined characters a chance to squeak ahead– in each of a 3 player Stinger game, a 3 player division 15 game, and a special 2029 “Rush Hour” Firehawk scenario. Our continuing characters in the Division 15 event drove vehicles pieced together from their salvage– they took their heavily damaged Joseph Specials, removed the destroyed ATG and RL, and retrofitted 5 Killer Kart and Stinger MG’s into their place. Both of our characters damaged their hard earned vehicles and had little to show for it, but our best characters were now aces, just on the edge of getting new skill levels in Driver and Gunner, and ready to pick up their first corporate sponsorships for the pro duel circuit. All they had to do was survive the next event and they’d be tooling around the freeways in a nice easily modified luxury sized death machine!

So finally, eight Hot Shot’s rolled into the Double Drum and began firing at each other. I made an incredibly stupid tactical error. I focused my fire on my opponent’s tough front armor where he fired mainly against my weak side armor. I also fired MG’s more often than FT’s. In three seconds, Buck Lescinsky was knocked unconscious with a clean shot through his right side armor. In four seconds, Tanaka found himself with no right side armor and wide open to easy attacks. He jerked the wheel in order to get fresh armor facing his opponent, but lost control and rolled into the wall. After five seconds, Fernando’s power plant caught fire and all his vehicular weapons burned up along with what was left of his power plant. Finally… after six seconds, my best character took a double blast of flame thrower damage through the right side… and using an off-the cuff application of the fifth edition fire rules, we declared that she’d taken four or five fire markers as a result. We checked for explosion… and in the final second of our campaign, Yahoo McScandle’s care exploded in the most cinematic moment of our 15 games.

I was stunned. Not only had I been completely shut out of the final event (I’d hoped to pick up at least one Hot Shot as a salvaged kill) but my best character in all my years of gaming had literally just gone up in smoke.

I tried to be gracious, pointing out that my opponent had clearly outplayed me… and also… that for the characters to matter, death had to be a factor… and also… that so many of the characters had survived other near death experiences up until now. The exceedingly dramatic nature of the death was epic enough to make it worth it. (Wasn’t it?)

So long, Yahoo. We had a good run.

Yahoo McScandles
Pres 16 (Career high of 21)
Dr 10
Gn 9
HG 3
Kills 5

Background:
———–
4/24/09 Team Amateur Night Game 12: Hot Shots at the Double Drum: Took a double blast of FT damage with at least four fire markers and then died in a massive fireball explosion.
2/14/09 Division 15 (3 Car Event): Custom Cars at the Double Drum: Drove a MG armed Joseph Special built from salvage. Narrowly survived driving over an Iron Horse’s mines, but was killed by a lucky shot while out of control.
1/17/08 Team Amateur Night Game 11: Stock Joseph Specials at the Double Drum: Yahoo crossed the Drum with Cornelius on his tail. Put paint sprayer on automatic. Ducked into the hideaway and stopped to take out a pedestrian shooting his SMG. Fired all RL ammo into Cornelius. Got out of reverse and slowly accelerated… finally killing Cornelius with an ATG shot. Cornelius’s car still got the head-on collision to take Yahoo down to exactly zero DP.
1/16/08 Team Amateur Night Game 10: Stock Stingers at the Rubberway: After a pass, her first opponent turned to go up a ramp, but because we came at each other from the left side of the map, we were both set up for such a turn. Because he rolled really poorly for his reflex roll, he went second… and Yahoo was able to turn with him—but on the outside! Yahoo turned in a little more to close the distance—at first just to try to get his target in arc for hits without the risk return fire. But then Yahoo rammed his opponent, knocking him off the ramp for a 12.5 foot drop with a 40 mph ram against the central platform to boot! It took him forever to cross the arena. Pastor Halfix had lost his power plant in an early pass and had coasted back into the action by cutting underneath the overpasses. Yahoo sped in, slowed down, and took him down with a final coup de gras.
12/29/08 Team Amateur Night Game 8: Stock Killer Karts at the Rubberway: Tailed an opponent early on… shot through the back to make a clean kill on the driver. Went up top as the last cars exchanged their weapons/vehicles. Slowed down to get back in control and was tailed by a weaponless opponent… rear ended and pushed across the board at 90 mph. Across the arena killed that the tailgating idiot, causing him to ram the wall at high speed in a spectacular crash.

Salvage:
——–
Killer Kart salvage: 4 points armor damage (2 back, 2 left), 10 MG shots left. [Salvage Value = $3848 - 50 * 4 - 25 * 10 = $3848 - 200 - 250 = $3398. Cash value = $1699.]
Stinger salvage #1: No front armor, one MG destroyed, 3 power plant hits, and 11 shots left in his MG. [Salvage Vale = $5268 - 460 - 1500 - 250 - 9 * 25 = $2833. Cash Value = $1416.]
Stinger salvage #2: 6 hits front, 10 hits left, one hit to power plant, tire damage: (5, 3, 2), and 36 shots left. [Salvage Vale = $5268 - 460 - 50 - 4 * 25 - 3 * 100 = $4358. Cash value = $2179.]
Stinger salvage #3: One MG destroyed, 1 DP damage to remaining MG with 13 shots left, power plant destroyed, front armor destroyed, 1 hit to right armor. [Salvage Vale = $5268 - 460 - 1500 - 100 - 7 * 25 - 500 = $2533. Cash Value = $1266.]
Joseph Special salvage: No weapons or armor left. (A good power plant, though!) Tire damage: 3, 4, 5, 5. [Salvage Value: $10340 - 2024 - 2500 - 1350 - 650 - 400 = $3416. Cash Value = $1708.]
(Total Salvage Value = $3398 + $2833 + $4358 + $2533 + 3416 = $16538.)
(Total Cash Value = $8269)

Yahoo McScandal’s Customized Joe
(This car was built from the above salvage and somewhat damaged in the Division 15 event.)
Mid-Sized, Standard Chassis, Large Power Plant, Improved Suspension, Puncture-resistant Front & Rear Tires, Driver (Targeting Computer), front: 3 linked MGs, back: 2 linked MGs, right: PS, Armor F35, R20, L20, B20, T4, U10, Accel. 5, HC 2, 4797 lbs, $ 14994

This was the big one.

We started this one innocently enough: our usual random starting positions (improved now with a handy 1d8 roll…), our usual move of the top and underbody armor to protect the sides better, and our usual opening maneuver of facing off into four independent passes. This would be our longest game, yet… with an unbelievable amount of action.

The opening pass in the upper right went horribly for me. I was starting out in the “tube” so I think I had to turn a little more than my opponent. He came right down my throat and took me out with a few ATG shots followed by a head-on collision. I’d done little damage in return… and I didn’t think I could possibly recover from this setback.

In the upper left corner, we made our pass at each other and I managed to make the 20 or 30 mph D6 turns to turn back on my opponent. In the lower right corner, I did the opposite: I gunned it as I went past and headed for the madness in the opposite drum. I inserted a little role playing into the mix by putting my paint sprayer on automatic after that car got hit on the right side for a massive 15 points of damage. The paint sprayer did not actually cause a penalty to the car that was tailing me: at first it just messed up my continuous fire bonus against the car I was targeting in the opposite drum.

The fourth mini-duel in the lower right corner also went poorly for me. This one ended up being a low speed pivot and counter pivot battle as we both went in forwards and reverse trying to second guess each other. I seemed to take a lot more damage here and even got blurped with a single paint cloud, though I did manage to work off the three second -2 penalty that resulted from that….

With the opening complete, all seven remaining cars converged into the upper right portion of the left drum. I appeared to be losing badly, but my luck finally changed. One of my cars hit the guy that had killed my first car: the damage went through the ATG and damaged the power plant. I rolled 3d6 for the 5th edition fire rules and rolled less than the damage: this resulted in a fire marker. Yee-haw! At the end of the turn I rolled to see how that fire marker would do. I rolled a six: add an extra fire marker! Woo-wee! The pedestrian bailed out and started pestering everyone with his useless SMG. (Note: my opponent reminded me of the chance for fire even though we’d started the first phases of the following turn. We reapplied this rule retroactively only because of his honesty.)

On the following turn, I made a similar shot against my opponent’s second car. I rolled high damage, scored a fire marker after the plant took hits, and rolled another 6 to get a bonus fire marker at the end of the turn. This was insanely fun, though I still felt miserably behind my opponent: he had one car that was completely undamaged…. Mine were all falling apart! (Note: my opponent had allowed me to change the move of the car that fired this lucky shot. I was originally going to stay still and continue to fire at the damaged car I was targeting. Because of his honesty and graciousness, he let be pivot to make this game-changing second shot.)

My car with the paint sprayer turned into the left drum and cut up towards the pedestrian that was shooting from cover from behind his flaming car. (Note: we forgot to check for explosion in this game—that could have really changed things in my favor if we had…!) I rolled to a stop and covered my teammate from the SMG fire with my paint for a few turns. I then fired my SMG at the pedestrian taking cover and completely nailed him. Totally put him into the hospital. (His DP went negative and I allowed him to make a “saving throw” against death considering the arena’s state of the art medical equipment. He rolled an 8 or a 9 on 3d6, so he did survive. But the subsequent hospitalization would prevent him from competing in the final Hotshot round….) The tactic of rolling to a stop and using an SMG seemed to be a pretty good tactic. If I had remembered to apply the burst effect rules, I probably could have done as good or even better!

So I had three cars to his two. My car that had scored the awesome fire marker kills met his end fair and square—the undamaged car that had been chasing my paint streaming car rolled up and cut him down. I just couldn’t pivot away in time. Perhaps I was too greedy to attempt to fire that one last ATG shot….

My car that had gotten blurped by a paint cloud slowly rolled up toward the mess. He’d lost his side armor and was firing furiously at the car that had dueled with him since the opening of the game. I pivoted to protect my missing right-side armor and set myself up to ram that annoying pedestrian with his stupid SMG on the following turn. But that crazy ped used his 4 squares of movement for the rest of the turn to get into position for a final shot at my car! After the turn break, I could only get up to 10 mph. That ped was going 12.5, so he went first! He shot my car and killed my driver! ARGH! There’s no reason that this insane ped couldn’t have drug my driver out of that car and then start driving around again. Instead he just fired the rest of his SMG clip at my last car…. Grrrr….

That left my paint cloud trailing car against two enemies. I slammed it into reverse and went right at the car that had faced him in the opening. I went straight back, slowly picking up speed for several turns, and then curved around the left drum obstacle. My opponent finally accelerated faster than I could, but I still managed to get off every single RL round my car carried. My opponent did a few well executed maneuvers to keep his nearly destroyed side armor out of my arc. The other enemy car was not in the action for some reason, though my paint cloud trail probably protected me from him and the evil pedestrian both…!

I then stopped and put my last car back into first gear and accelerated for the final clash. My opponent’s two cars were just about out of ammo or had their weapons destroyed. Even the pedestrian fired his last shot. The car that I had been targeting swung back around toward me. I think he was going faster than me. I stayed going towards him so I could get two shots off at him. My massive luck on die rolls was not enough to stop him completely. Though I did kill him, in the following phase, his car plowed right into me with a game ending head-on collision. If I had just avoided him for a few more seconds, I could have left the arena in my fully drivable car and kept it…. Ah well, I was completely exhausted at this point and not thinking straight anymore….

I think I could have won this one if I had remembered the explosion and the burst effect rules. I also (for the tenth time) needed to remember that getting in close against my opponent is suicide: he seems to have a knack for putting himself in exactly the most inconvenient spot! I’m not sure I could ever learn to be as evil as him, but I can minimize the number of chances he has to pull off his wickedness. (If I had just turned away one phase sooner….) Still, I wouldn’t have had a chance in this game at all if he hadn’t reminded me of the fire rules, so I don’t have anything to complain about. (Besides, I’d gotten really lucky in the last game….)

All and all, it was an incredible game. Everything seems to work as it should… and the game affects feel realistic for what they are. We still learn new tactics and new rules nuances with almost every game. (I don’t think this game could have lasted near as long as it did if we had left the top and underbody armor in place. That one change would have yielded a lot more salvage value for the winners….)

Yahoo
Driver: +2
Gunner +2
Handgunner: +2 (Extra +1 for ped kill.)
Prestige: +1
Kills: +1
1/17/08 Team Amateur Night Game 11: Stock Joseph Specials at the Double Drum—Crossed the Drum with Cornelius on his tail. Put paint sprayer on automatic. Ducked into the hideaway and stopped to take out a pedestrian shooting his SMG. Fired all RL ammo into Cornelius. Got out of reverse and slowly accelerated… finally killing Cornelius with an ATG shot. Cornelius car still got the head-on collision to take Yahoo down to zero DP.

Joseph Special salvage: No weapons or armor left. (A good power plant, though!) Tire damage: 3, 4, 5, 5.

Tanaka
Driver: +3
Gunner: +3
Kills: +2
Prestige: +3
Hospitalized
1/17/08 Team Amateur Night Game 11: Stock Joseph Specials at the Double Drum— Dueled with Hyena at a speed 5 dogfight. Killed by a pedestrian (Corky Mcswain?) that managed to run into a defenseless side’s arc and fire his SMG through the breach: knocking Tanaka unconscious!

Marla
Driver: +3
Gunner: +3
Kills: +2
Prestige: +3
Hospitalized
1/17/08 Team Amateur Night Game 11: Stock Joseph Specials at the Double Drum— Took out two cars with ATG fire to their power plants—setting them both on fire with the 5th edition fire rules. Killed by Cornelius because she could not pivot her car around in time—she was just a little too greedy for kills….

Fernando
Gunner: +1
Prestige: -1
1/17/08 Team Amateur Night Game 11: Stock Joseph Specials at the Double Drum— Knocked out in an early one-on-one duel with Nesbitt. (Massive ATG fire through the front armor and a ram….) Knocked unconscious.

This game ran from about 8PM to 2AM with a break in the middle for pizza. It showed the Stinger to be a fun car for Amateur Night duels—its weapon to armor ratio is just right. The unusual topology of the Rubberway turns out to be just right for a good match: even on a small map board, you have large obstacles, but lots of space to fight as well. The ramps make for interesting terrain, the overpass makes for a fun shortcut, and the possibility for shots through the top armor are pretty neat as well.

After so many cars being killed because they allowed themselves to be tailed, my opponent and I play a little differently now. We always turn towards our opponents and dogfight now—there’s just nowhere to run in these arenas! My opponent demonstrated the danger of doing a D6 immediately after making a pass: I was on the outside, so I was able to turn onto him from just slightly behind. Because he was going up the ramp, I had the opportunity to kill him and T-bone him into a 12.5 foot drop and a 40 mph ram into the central platform!

A similar pass went well for me on the opposite side of the board. I took out an enemy’s power plant in the opening pass. He opted to coast under the central overpasses—this effectively removed him from the game for several seconds, though he was able to make an appearance at the final show down at just the worst time for me!

One of the opening passes went horribly for me, though…. I traded shots and went past… and kept my speed up to 30 mph, I think. I attempted a pair of D6’s, maybe on separate seconds… but I had to make a control roll to make it work. I needed either 3 or 4 or better on D6 to pull it off and failed it. The awful +3 penalty on the Crash Table turned what could have been a skid into a dangerous spinout. My car rammed the wall and took the driver down to zero DP. That put my opponent back in the game! If he could just get a little more luck, he could eliminate my early lead!

In our previous Stinger match back at Armadillo, we learned that it was in fact not optimal to have your cars in a tight formation. They just seem to get in each others’ way and you don’t maximize your fire the way you’d think you could. My opponent theorized that perhaps a slightly more naval tactic of keeping your ships in a line could be more effective.

In this game, I did have my cars following each other about 6 inches apart. My lead car still seemed to get in the way, though…. As the lead car hurtled toward the ramp and an oncoming opponent, I lost another critical control roll and was killed by my opponent’s ram. He just always seems to pick the most aggravating possible place to move to whenever he gets in close…. My killed car coasted to a stop right in front of the ramp—very inconvenient!!!

My opponent took two of his remaining cars and paired them up at pivot speeds. One of them had the power plant gone, so he was stuck. I took my last two cars in for the final pass—slowed down as I came in and took out both drivers within a couple of seconds. I think the odds were in my favor for this, but you know how this game can be….

That left my opponent with his last car. I think it was the one that had rammed one of my guys. My opponent wanted to keep that driver, but I wanted his salvage. So we played out the final seconds of the end game. Much of it was without phased movement and it appeared that my opponent was going to have the better of the cat and mouse game. Somehow, I got a car up on the top level and managed to come down a ramp right on his tail. He was going much faster than me, but I still got enough shots through his rear armor to end the game. There was only four seconds left on the clock….

Yahoo
Kills: +2
Driver: +3
Gunner: +2 (+3?)
Pestige: +8 – bonus for t-boning Benjamin Kohen off the ramp.
Background: 1/16/08 Stingers @ Rubberway—After a pass, his first opponent turned to go up a ramp, but because we came at each other from the left side of the map, we were both set up for such a turn. Because he rolled really poorly for his reflex roll, he went second… and was Yahoo able to turn with him—but on the outside! He turned slightly to close the distance—at first just to try to get his target in arc for hits without return fire. But then Yahoo rammed his opponent—knocking him off the ramp for a 12.5 foot drop and a 40 mph ram against the central platform! It took him forever to cross the arena. Pastor Halfix had lost his power plant in an early pass and had coasted back into the action by cutting underneath the overpasses. Yahoo sped in, slowed down, and took him down with a final coup de gras.

Stnger salvage #1: No front armor, one MG destroyed, 3 power plant hits, and 11 shots left in his MG.

Stinger salvage #2: 6 hits front, 10 hits left, one hit to power plant, tire damage: (5, 3, 2), and 36 shots left.

Stinger salvage #3: One MG destroyed, 1 DP damage to remaining MG with 13 shots left, power plant destroyed, front armor destroyed, 1 hit to right armor.

Anita
Gunner: +1
Prestige: +2
Background: 1/16/08 Stingers @ Rubberway—Attempted to make 2 consecutive D6 maneuvers, but failed the second one. Spun out and hit the wall and took exactly 3 hits to the driver. Hospitalized.

Stinger salvage: No front armor, no right armor, 2 hits to plant, and tire hits: (3, 2, 4, 4).

Wayne
Driver: +1
Gunner: +1
Prestige: +1
Background: 1/16/08 Stingers @ Rubberway—Forced to maneuver between ramp and oncoming enemy. Executed a major Skid into the worst possible position. Killed by Ho Ho Gingwain.

Tanaka
Kills: +2
Driver: +3
Gunner: +3
Prestige: +7
Background: 1/16/08 Stingers @ Rubberway—Rolled into the final showdown of speed zero Pastor Halifax and the pivoting Chantreuse Smitton. Killed Chantreuse, then maneuvered to tail Ho Ho while he was attempting to run up the clock. Blew through his rear armor with 4 seconds left before the gate would open.

This tournament was run with the classic Traveller Book 5 High Guard and Adventure 5 Trillion Credit Squadron.  Six players entered “squadrons” costing no more than one billion credits.  Three entries consisted of a single frigate.  One entry consisted of a pair of frigates.  One entry consisted of four smaller ships.  One entry consisted of an armed carrier with four fighters.

Analysis of the top 3 Designs

Each of the three winning ships won all of their games except one. The Dagger lost to the Sloepigg, the Sloepigg lost to the Aristinas, and the Aristinas lost to the Dagger. So, the tournament yielded an unexpected paper-rock-scissors scenario with a three-way tie for first place! Let’s look at the designs to see if it was just luck or if there’s more to it than that.

The Dagger has fair agility, a solid missile battery punch, weak armor, and pretty good defenses. The Sloepigg has poor agility, a solid missile battery punch, incredibly strong armor, and no defenses. The pair of Aristinas have excellent agility, a pair of light batteries, okay armor, and light defenses. All of these ships prefer long range, so we don’t have to worry as much about initiative, range, and so forth. These are all straight up slugging matches that have little need for tactical decisions.

The Dagger hits the Sloepigg on 5+ [Base 2+, DM +0 for computer, DM -2 for agility, DM -1 for size]. However, the Sloepigg’s armor means that the Surface Explosion hits have a DM of +12 on the Damage table– just Fuel-1 and Weapon-1 results there and rolls of 10 or more result in No Effect. The Sloepigg’s Radiation Damage rolls get a DM shift of +17… which is a Weapon-1 hit only if the roll is a 4 or less! The Dagger requires 9 consecutive hits in order to wear down the Sloepigg’s combat capability.

The Dagger and the Sloeppigg both hit the Aristinas on 8+ [Base 2+, DM +0 for computer, DM -5 for agility, DM -1 for size]. The Aristina’s sandcasters are useless against this unless they can wear down those Missile-9’s. The missile-9 is sure to cause a critical hit as well. In the actual game, the Sloepigg hit on the first turn and only managed to disable the Jump drive and score a Weapon-1 and a Fuel-1 hit. It could have gone much worse!

The Sloepigg hits the Dagger on 6+ [Base 2+, DM +0 for computer, DM -3 for agility, DM -1 for size]. When he does hit, he has many opportunities to score Computer and Maneuver hits… making the Dagger even easier to hit on future turns. Once the Sloepigg starts hitting, he will tend to keep hitting.

The Aristinas hit the Sloepigg on 8+ [Base 5+, DM +0 for computer, DM -2 for agility, DM -1 for size]. These are pretty good rolls– and they get four of these chances every turn if they can hang on. The Sloepigg lacks any secondary armament, so all weapon hits will be applied directly to the missile-9 battery.

The Aristinas hit the Dagger on 9+ [Base 5+, DM +0 for computer, DM -3 for agility, DM -1 for size]. Even before being damaged, the Aristinas will be doing good to get one or two hits each turn, but they still have to get through the defenses. The first hit will have to roll 6+ to get past the sandcaster… and all hits have to roll 8+ to get past the nuclear dampers. These aren’t good odds– especially if the Aristinas score only one hit on a turn– so the Dagger has plenty of time to degrade the Aristina’s fighting capabilities without taking any serious damage.

The Dagger’s sandcaster and nuclear damper are going to be pretty useless against the Sloepigg’s ferocious Missile-9. However, they turn out to be fairly effective against the hits caused by the Aristina’s Missile-3’s. The Dagger’s lack of armor makes it extremely vulnerable to Computer and M-Drive hits from the Sloepigg. But the Sloepigg’s lack of defenses make it vulnerable to being slowly worn down by Weapon-1 hits from the Aristinas!

So yes, the results do make sense. No amount of “fog of war”, limited tactical intelligence, or role-playing would affect High Guard games played between these three sets of designs. The players won at the engineering stage and the dice rolling was little more than a formality. That may be a bit dull for a role-playing scenario, but it does make it easy to run a game quickly and fairly in an extended campaign or play-by-email environment. Games will, however, have an exponentially greater number of tactical decisions if they feature multiple ships on each side, ships that have more than one active defense that get hit by a variety of weapon types in a single turn, and ships that have a mix of short and long range weapons.

***

Ship: Dagger V3
Class: Dagger V3
Type: Frigate
Architect: Ron Gianti
Tech Level: 12

USP
FE-A333562-140100-00009-0 MCr 993.611 1.1 KTons
Bat Bear    1         1   Crew: 27
Bat         1         1   TL: 12

Cargo: 0.000 Fuel: 385.000 EP: 55.000 Agility: 3 Shipboard Security Detail: 1
Craft: 1 x 20T TL12 Lifeboat 30 person
Fuel Treatment: Fuel Scoops and On Board Fuel Purification
Architects Fee: MCr 9.841   Cost in Quantity: MCr 796.798

***

Ship: Sloepigg
Class: Sloepigg
Type: Armored Frigate
Architect: OIT
Tech Level: 12

USP
FA-A433362-B00000-00009-0 MCr 974.113 1000Tons
Bat Bear              1 Crew: 23
Bat                   1 TL: 12

Cargo: 5.000 Fuel: 330.000 EP: 30.000 Agility: 2 Marines: 10
Craft: 1 x 30T Ship's Boat
Fuel Treatment: Fuel Scoops and On Board Fuel Purification
Architects Fee: MCr 9.541 Cost in Quantity: MCr 783.291

***

2 x Aristina Frigate Class Frigates
Ship: Aristina
Class: Aristina Frigate
Type: Frigate
Architect: Skyth

USP
FF-5435662-640000-00003-0 MCr 548.782 500 Tons
Bat Bear    1         2   Crew: 12
Bat         1         2   TL: 12

Cargo: 8.000 Fuel: 180.000 EP: 30.000 Agility: 5
Fuel Treatment: Fuel Scoops and On Board Fuel Purification
Architects Fee: MCr 5.488   Cost in Quantity: MCr 439.026

***

Notes on Running the Games

The following tricks will help the High Guard referee maintain his sanity:

1) Make your own reference cards/sheets for each game showing the basic to-hit and penetration for each main combination of ships.

2) Make your own referee reference screen with the charts and tables from pages 45 to 49.

3) Send out sit-rep emails (bcc’d of course) with the exact same text to both players– with blanks where ever a player is required to specify something. The subject line of the email should be in the format of “Event Name, Game #, Turn #”. Gmail threads things such that it is easy to tell at a glance when you’ve received responses from both players.

4) Optionally, keep a template for each game. Get a list of die rolls and just go through and fill in the blanks of your template. Resolve defense rolls all at once… and then damage rolls all together. Alternately, write a program to do this.

5) Players need to have standard operating procedures that specify range (long or short), missile types (nukes or high explosive), and weapon-hit prioritization. If those things are clear, the only thing that’s tricky is weird combinations of hits and defenses… though weird orders of “target such and such if such and such otherwise such and such” can get very difficult to keep track of.

5 Rules to Remember

1) There does not appear to be clear rules on tactical intelligence in High Guard. In TCS tournaments, stats are public once combat is engaged. In role playing scenarios, Leroy Gautney (in a JTAS article) suggested players discover things in the process of battle, but admitted that players would know most of a ship’s specifications in a couple of turns.

2) Weapon damage: the rules for this are actually laid out in the entry on screens on page 49. “Damage must be divided as evenly as possible: no screen may receive two hits until all other screens have a t least one, or three hits until all others have at least two.”

3) Don’t forget the DM’s for relative computer size on the penetration rolls!

4) Don’t forget the automatic criticals when a large weapon hits a small ship.

5) The hardest rule to apply in a PBEM game is the sequence of play of alternating ships for targeting starting with the player that has initiative. Basically, there’s a slight advantage in getting shot at first: you know exactly what’s hitting you before you fire so you can specify your defenses without worrying about wasting laser shots when you go on the offensive. These benefits tend to wash out in larger fleets, I suppose, but it can be a significant nuance in one-on-one battles.

“If you try to kill all birds with one stone, you end up with lots of half cooked things.” — Reiner Knizia

My friend Earlburt and I had never really been to a con, much less run games at one, so neither of us knew what to expect. As the con date had moved from the MLK weekend in January to Valentine’s weekend, our expectations were pretty low as far as turnout was concerned. Our plan was to simply play our schedule just the two of us if things happened to tank. That turned out not to be possible. Valentine’s Day went as expected: for all intents and purposes, no one besides the folks that registered to demo games showed up. Critical failure! This was so bad, we could not quietly return to our corners for isolated two-player games of CAR WARS. We felt we had no choice but to try to play games with the other demo people so that we all could salvage some semblance of a good time. This turned out to work rather well in the end as we were all serious “alpha-gamer” types with compatible tastes.

The first game of the con was Steve Jackson’s Super Munchkin. This was a little annoying because most of us were familiar only with the original game or else had never played any sort of Munchkin. The rules for powers and origins took us a while to get the hang of and were frustrating enough at first that we were about to drop the game and dig up the “real” Munchkin. We persevered, though, and ended the game with three people at level nine. The game felt like an impossible-to-read version of UNO, with people saving up the “whoop cards” in order to prevent the other players from “going out”.

While I didn’t particularly like the game, it did serve its purpose in breaking the ice. We had two CAR WARS guys, one SFB guy, and one train themed Euro-game guy…. What would be the best game for this mix of gamers? The SFB guy suggested Titan and the Euro-game guy got fairly enthusiastic and went to his car for the game. Being good sports, we went along with this.

Nine hours later, the game board was filled with my stacks of creatures. Exhausted, my two remaining opponents conceded to me after I declared that I had lost my capacity to care about the game anymore. I don’t think I’d lost a single battle… and my king-like “Titan” unit had enough experience points to be able to destroy entire stacks of units by itself.

Titan, in a nutshell, is a brilliantly devised game that combines a strategic level board game with tactical “battle board” engagements in a profoundly beautiful way. The topology of the main board is unique– and fairly hard to maneuver your stacks on. Some “squares” have three choices of movement, and others funnel you along specified trajectories around the board. This makes coordinating your stacks somewhat difficult. (The Euro-guy said this made the game really good for just three-players: a pretty rare thing in games!) Stacks are nearly anonymous, but experienced players tend to know what has been recruited and where– though uncovering the location of the “Titan” stack is a big part of the fun.

The game has a very unusual “tech tree” system that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Most “civilization” type games have a single tech tree for each player that determines what the players can buy or build. Titan has an elegant system for having each stack of counters define it’s place in one of several interconnected tech trees. Each counter stack can recruit specific monsters in specific terrain based on the composition of its stack. Powerful units require you to have multiple instances of less powerful units in order to recruit them. The stacking limit is seven, so your large stacks will often spawn smaller stacks that try to survive long enough to grow into larger stacks. A big part of the strategy of the game is knowing when and how to split up your large stacks.

The monsters that make up your counter stacks are each defined with two numbers. One is your strength number, which determines the number of hit points the unit has and also how many dice the unit rolls when attacking. The skill number (when compared to the target’s skill number) will tell you your target number for your attack rolls. The target will be anywhere from 2+ to 6+ depending on how the skill value of the units compare– with equal skill levels resulting in a target of 4+. The experience value of the unit is the product of its strength and skill numbers. This is the most comprehensive definition of a combat unit that I’ve ever seen done with a mere two numbers. Monsters also have different capabilities depending on their terrain.

The battle board is a small hex map that the attacking and defending units deploy on. Starting positions are determined by the direction that the attacking forces entered the “square”, so the battle maps are really a highly magnified view of the game board. Defenders can recruit a reinforcing unit on turn four if the still have living units relevant to that “square’s” terrain type. Attacking stacks can call in an “angel” unit after they kill a defender as long as they have a hex open for him to deploy into. There is an unbelievably large number of tactics you can deploy in these mini-battles and it was quite bewildering to see the expert Titan players argue about the best moves. We did get the hang of it by the end of the day, though I tended to flabbergast the old timers when I failed to see the “obvious”.

Titan is one of the great games of the eighties. Almost everything about it is bold, cunning, and unusually interesting. The designers achieve their aims (and, yes, the aims of many a geek gamer) with almost no regard for the insane playing time. But it is a thing of beauty, however, and every serious gamer should play it at least once. The new edition is very well done when compared to the original, so this should be a game that’s possible to track down. (I just saw several at Boardwalk and Parkplace in Greenville, SC, so this isn’t just a cult game…!)

The next morning, there were still no folks arriving that weren’t signed up to demo games. Nevertheless, a pretty good game of Federation Commander got fired up over in the corner. The Euro-game guy returned early as well and headed to our corner. He’d said the day before that he’d played CAR WARS in the eighties, but didn’t know that anyone still played it. (He had every issue of ADQ and was very disappointed when subscribers were switched over to Pyramid at the end….) Within five minutes we had three stock Singers blazing away at each other in the Muskogee Octagon.

We really didn’t have to explain much to get the guy up and running– just the bits about handling status and control rolls, really. Earburt and I were essentially human computers executing the game and the Euro-guy accepted all of our rulings. If something wasn’t clearly articulated before a key decision was made, we often let things slide in favor of the “new guy”. We had random starting positions and the Euro-gamer managed to completely blow away Earlburt within 2 seconds of game time. (They had entered side by side and Earlburt made the mistake of turning away from him instead of decelerating.) My car and Euro-gamer’s car ended up circling the arena in opposite directions for a couple of “jousting” passes. On the second pass, I slowed to 5 mph for the pivot and finished him off. The pivot maneuver was a game-breaking surprise and I felt bad for not going over it before the game.

The Euro-gamer didn’t miss a beat, though, and asked to play a second game after that– though he noted that he might have to walk away when his friend showed up at noon. We played a Division 15 game in the Octagon. He took a solid-tire version of the Iron Horse, while Earlburt and I took MG-armed versions of the Joseph Special. We all circled the arena clockwise at the beginning and maneuvered a bit before I took off toward the Horse for a confrontation. Earlburt cut across the arena to get into the action.

I’d exchanged heavy fire with the Horse, and cut past him to try to take cover. Earlburt pursued me to try to finish me off. I cut over the trail of mines to try to get away, skidded across an extra mine counter, and miraculously didn’t set off the mines! Unfortunately, Earlburt got off one last lucky shot that was exactly enough to take my driver down to 0 DP. He stopped to avoid the mines, turned, and began accelerating for the final confrontation. The Iron Horse came back his way at a slightly higher speed and rammed Earlburt into the mines. The tire damage was enough to take out two of his skid-damaged tires, so the Horse simply parked next to him and demanded surrender. Yet another beautiful moment of CAR WARS cinematic action!

There was no question in our minds that we should try to reciprocate. We headed for the “train games” table immediately following the game. We played a 6 player game of Union Pacific with the two Euro-guys, two SFB guys, and (of course) us two CAR WARS referees.

Union Pacific is a building game with a heavy bidding component. Yes, you can build up a train empire… but someone else may get the shares to take it over from you. You can’t just specialize in one or two lines, but you have to play a pretty diversified set of shares that cuts you in on dividends while putting a maximum amount of pressure on your opponents. This was really a unique opportunity: we got to learn this game from two of its National Champions! Earlburt nearly won the game, but I cut him out of the victory by taking just a couple of points from him by playing a share at an inopportune moment….

Union Pacific is a great game. The bidding factor makes for a big contrast with Cataan and Carcassonne. Playing time is less than a couple of hours… and the randomness of the timing of the 4 dividend payouts of the game make for some fun suspense. Just as with Titan, serious gamers should give this game a try at least once. My only gripes about the game are that the various train track types are hard to distinguish… plus the game (I think) is permanently out of print because of the fussy designer that doesn’t care about it…. Oh well.

While we were playing the train game, a table of Munchkin players came in for a gigantic game with all of the expansion sets. They even had miniatures and props. (Nothing like geek chicks wearing viking helmets….) At this point, there was about one paying con participant for every demo person. Things were beginning to get crazy! Relatively, anyway.

Earlburt and I were now a little burnt out from trying to accommodate the other gamers. We came to the con for CAR WARS games, after all. We retired to our corner and began to set up a game of “Rush Hour”. This is a pretty complicated CAR WARS scenario from ADQ 2/3 depicting a duel between two cars in heavy traffic. Each NPC vehicle has a disposition ranging from “rattled” to “irate” and we had no idea how things were going to play out.

After playing out a few seconds of game time, we noticed a game of Cataan starting up and I insisted that Earlburt give it a try. I normally only get to play with just two players, so it was a treat to be able to do the six-player version for the first time. Our brains were starting to get fried anyway, so we went with it.

The six player version of Settlers of Cataan adds a mini-building phase between each player’s turn. This is so the thief-thing doesn’t wipe your hand of cards out so often while you wait for your turn. You can’t trade on that mini-turn, though– so the fact that my production didn’t cover anything that could actually build stuff meant I was often sitting on a large number of cards. The folks that could build roads between turns really had a huge advantage. With six players crowding the board, it quickly became critical that each player claim enough territory so that they could have even a chance of winning. The victory point cards, the most soldiers’ bonus, and longest road bonus were critical to finalizing a win– much more so than in the 2 player games that I was used to.

This game was played by three demo people and three non-demo people– two of which were female. (Party!!) Seriously, though… the fact that female gamers will actually play Cataan is a big plus for it. It gets a little dull competing with hard-core geeks all the time and it was nice to just relax a little and play a genuinely friendly game. The jokes were pretty good. We had an informal competition to come up with songs that referenced the actions of the varying moves. I sang “Everybody Must Get Stoned” when several people harvested their Ore cards. The lady across from me sang “We Built This City from Rock and WHEAT” after coverting a settlement. All an all, it was a very pleasant game.

Afterwards, the girl-gamer next to me busted out the Monty Python themed Flux game. This is a simple card game that allows the rules to be changed and extended as it is played. I happened to win both games. We had many a laugh quoting Monty Python and being silly. It wasn’t until the end that we realized that we should hold back the “change winning condition” card until you could finally take the game– that card just gets changed to often for anyone to win any other way….

It was a good day of gaming. We came back the next morning and there were only two demo tables left. We finished out our big “Rush Hour” scenario. We played in two Kane Firehawks. Kane provided our characters with the cars in order to make real action footage for their promotional materials. Starting the game, I was in the rear. I was sure Earlburt was going to lose. I had 20 shots in my front MG and he had only 10 for his rear FT. He would take pot shots to his rear armor from Annoyed vehicles and would run into the Irate cars before I would. There was no way I could lose!

We populated the freeway with cars that could be expected to be around in 2029. (Earlburt has put a lot of effort into his percentil-dice based encounter charts….) We had counters of the “actual” vehicles… and extra copies of them on our super-sized movement chart. (Thanks for spending all that time with Photoshop, Earl!) This was awesome. It has never been so easy to run so big of a game. I would call out “Hotshot– 2, Chameleon– 1, Rockwell– 1″ and Earburt would move the cars. The main trick was to watch him move the vehicle before calling the next one in order to save confusion. It was a thing of beauty, though.

We careened through the traffic at 90 mph. A Pisces hit my right side with a heavy rocket. We played that the smoke screen blocked line of sight long enough to break the continuous fire bonuses unless the vehicles could still “see” each other after the cloud was laid down. We missed each other for the first five shots or so because of this. Finally Earburt hit me a couple of times and rolled a 6 for damage. We were playing the new 5th edition fire rules, so he then had to roll 12 or less on 3d6. He set me on fire– but I was going 80, so I had a good chance of putting out the fire.

He emptied the rest of his FT ammo into me while the fire he’d started simply would not go out– I needed a one or a two on a d6 at the end of each turn and just couldn’t get it. In desperation, I tried to maneuver through the traffic so that I could do a D3 to help put out the flames, but I failed the control roll. I went into a spinout, but recovered enough to turn it into a T-stop. I failed the control roll for the T-stop (thereby saving the last treads on my tires) and skidded– going crossways in front of the traffic. I struggled to straighten out and skidded into the median. I bailed out into the grass as my car careened into the other lanes. Earlburt swung across the fast lane while taking shots from an Irate driver, completed a 180, and made for the exit we’d just passed a couple of road sections earlier. The Irate driver let him go because he just wanted to see the dangerous road duel come to an end.

We packed up our stuff, but took a second to spend an hour on a demo of Federation Commander. The game eliminated a lot of the fiddly annoying rules of SFB and made several surprising changes, but still seemed to retain the crunchy goodness of the original. We were exhausted, but enjoyed firing off a few overloaded disrupters on a Klingon D7 anyway….

And that was our gigantic high-intensity maximum geek experience of the year. It will be some time before we can top this. It was crazy to drive so far and get a hotel for something like this, but it was almost worth it in order to get to hang out with “championship” level board gamers. The whole date-change to Valentines Day practically killed the thing… and Monday being a work day didn’t help it, either, I guess. One guy said that there was more people at the local game club meeting than at the con. (!!) You’d wonder why folks at the club wouldn’t come out and support the con, but… if you have players for your favorite game already, why would you pay even a measly five bucks to get into a con…?

Oh well….

The experience gave me several insights into the strengths of CAR WARS and how it fits into the overall gaming scene:

* CAR WARS is technically a board game, though it is clearly deep into the “Ameritrash” wing. This is problematic given how gamer tastes have evolved since the eighties, though many serious gamers are still relatively unrepentant.

* Euro-games require people to understand the core rules and strategies– but CAR WARS is a simulation that maps more-or-less to reality. This means you can get casual gamers into a “real” game much more quickly than most other con games. CAR WARS also has a lot less in it that you have to explain when compared to something more fiddly like Federation Commander.

* The most important quality of CAR WARS in a convention setting is its capacity to yield a good gaming experience to 4 to 6 players in less than an hour. A good referee can also run entire games without referencing the rulebook as long as he has appropriate play aids. Most CAR WARS players tend not to develop campaigns and or scenarios to take advantage of these key qualities.

* The CAR WARS setting details add a lot to the game and really help to set it apart from the other convention type games. People just love to come up with snappy remarks about the nationalization of the oil reserves, the secession of the Free Oil States, the egregiously shameless sponsorships of pro autoduelists, and the efficiency of the SDI Star Wars program. The fold-out map of Autoduel America is a particularly good conversation starter.

* CAR WARS is a jack-of-all-trades game. It is a set of miniatures rules, but probably way too silly for most serious miniatures folks. It is a light role playing game, but it is not fleshed out enough to hold the attention of serious role-players. It is a board game, but the rules are complex enough that the average person is not likely to master it well enough to run “serious” events. For a goofy game marketed to casual teenage gamers of the eighties, it was a hit…. But when it is presented to modern gamers alongside the best games of today and yesterday, it doesn’t quite gain the necessary traction to pull in a steady audience. In my opinion, the game provides a wonderful combination of war gaming, role-playing, and board gaming– but it has trouble because most gamers have a decided interest in only one of those three things at any given time. Best-of-breed systems have continued to be developed in the years since the demise of CARS WARS and this leaves the game at quite a disadvantage in spite of the many hours spent refining it in previous decades….

Comparing ourselves to the other tables, we felt pretty good about the quality experience we could offer people. In my not-so-humble-opinion, our custom game aids, mastery of the rules, and incorporation of various setting nuances provide a solid value in terms what can generally be expected in a convention environment.

While I probably have more realistic expectations for what can be done in the “real world” with impromptu CAR WARS mini-campaigns, I’m still not ready to give up on the possibility of a large marathon convention type binge of autodueling action. If we can somehow coordinate with at least two other dedicated fans and also find a well-run convention with a level of participation that suits what we’re trying to do, I think we could really do something cool.

Please contact me if you’re interested in making this happen. Maybe next year sometime, though. I’m completely burnt out on gaming right now!