io9
The only way to survive the fall of America is to build the most bad-ass car in the universe, and then roll out and destroy everybody else's cars. Mad Max and Death Race 2000 came to life at the roll of your six-sided dice in Car Wars, the classic 1980s strategy game. You would rack up "points" and use them to add armor, tank guns, fire-proof wheels, mini-engines inside the wheels and nitro-injectors, then you'd duel, either out on the open road or in an arena. Click through for the history of Car Wars.
In Car Wars, scarce resources lead the U.S. government to nationalize oil production, causing a second American Civil War. Three "Free Oil States" spring up with their own oil production — Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Famine and plagues also hit the world hard, and then the U.S. and the Soviet Union launch World War III. In the wasteland that remains, a bitchin car is a necessity for travel, but people also duel cars for sport. (And the game explains away that you can come back from being destroyed because of advances in cloning and memory "backups.")
The original Car Wars came in a ziploc bag full of rules and information, in 1981. You'd have a certain amount of "money" to spend on your car, and you could allocate it to armor, weapons, engine enhancements, and so on. Here's one fan's explanation of the problems with this points allocation system, which later banned tank guns.
(The game's maker, Steve Jackson Games, claims that a Swedish bus company's recent development of a bus with mini-electric engines in each wheel, fed by a central generator, may have been inspired by one of the enhancements you could add to your car, back in the early 1980s.)
Eventually Car Wars came out with a version for tanks and boats, and even allowed you to add airplanes to the mix. You roll dice to simulate combat, and each player gets to make ten moves per second, including moving, turning, and firing weapons. The more complicated your set of manoeuvres, the higher a score you'd have to roll on a six-sided die to pull off the whole shebang. You would need a rulebook (and a lot of brainpower) to figure out if someone sideswiped you or T-boned you, according to the game's FAQ. It could take hours to play out a few seconds of car-crashing action.
Depending on the size of the map you were playing on, you could use little game counters, Hot Wheels toys, or 1/25th scale miniatures to represent your super-cars.
The game spawned a lousy imitation, Batlecars, as well as a card game version and a computer game, Autoduel.
In the 2002 reissue of the game (which went nowhere), Steve Jackson reduced the amount of moves per second from ten to three, in an attempt to speed up the gameplay and make it less calculated. (And maybe a tad more realistic. Most people don't sit there and go, "Yeah, this second I'm going to honk my horn, and fire my rocket launcher, and turn 15 degrees to the left, and, uh...") The 2002 revision also tried to become quicker because you can only take four hits before your car is toast. But it was too late to bring people back to a dice-based game with mini-cars bashing the hell out of each other. Sadly.
Comments
oh how i loved that game
Oh man, I played this game a LOT back in the day. We played it like an RPG with a strong combat system. I remember making special counters for the shuttlecraft from V, how's that for 80s-liciousness.
I've got the black-cased version around somewhere, along with several supplement books, Ogre, Battletech, Renegade Legion... holy crap I'm old.
IIRC, most of the vehicles were electric - the IC versions were a later addition.
I remember when the gas-powered cars and metal armor came out in a supplement and they were fiendishly overpowered.
The best videogame adaptation of this basic idea was the Pentium era Interstate 76 which combined Car Wars with 1970s funksploitation. It ruled even harder if such a thing is possible.
I had that exact black plastic cased version you show there; my friends and I never figured it out. But it did inspire some "remodelling" and repurposing of some model cars and G.I. Joe guns.
@gfburke: YES! I still have I-76 around somewhere...
Playing this game is how I spent most of my weekends during High School. I can't believe I admitted that. It may be hard to believe that I still have the game and all the expansions. It is tucked away at my parents.
Between Car Wars and Talisman what more could you want?
Bootlegger Reverse!!!!!
PS. I have all the expansions still for Talisman too!!!
Wow did I play the crap out of this!!! Made it easy to have a 2nd game with you while lugging those damn D&D books everywhere.
@AmishJohn: Ogre rocked too and I think I remember Renegade Legion, that was Spaceship combat wasn't it? Battletech, well, that deserves it's own post!
Wow Charlie, not sure where your getting this stuff but keep digging! Sometimes it's not so bad to feel old.
@Epaminondas: Renegade Legion was spaceship combat with physics... it came with paper box spacecraft (think rasin boxes), and combat was much like that seen Babylon 5... cut engines, roll ship, and shoot under or behind you. I've got a box of minatures from the short-lived B5 Wars game too... one of these decades, I'll have to paint them up.
@Epaminondas:
Renegade Legion was starship combat and land combat.
Also, it's never too late to ressurect old wargames, there's thousands of people clammoring for another Space Hulk.
Not sure why the 2002 reissue went nowhere?
@AmishJohn:
Not really short lived, B5Wars lasted six years and there were dozens of minis and suppliments.
Then Mongoose picked up the line for a new game, and kept producing most of the minis for another six years.
Of course, it's nothing compared to the 30+ year run of Star Fleet Battles.
I still have the original!
Said the nerd.
@Seth L: LOL, I just had another nerdgasm when you mentioned Space Hulk!
@AmishJohn: Okay, I don't think I ever played it. I had a buddy who collected games and I think I read the manual for it, as I recall the ships were pretty bad-ass looking it.
...and yes, I-76 was in fact, the shit!!
Wow. I found my set last weekend while going through some old boxes in the basement. Loved that game. It was quite fun to go back and read the road atlases they released for the various US regions.
I may still have the City Blocks too. Hell, now I gotta dig through boxes.
I played this game in the original version, and tried some of the computer games it spawned (someone mention I-76, also Carmageddon - also some post-apocalyptic online beta that I can't remember)... I've never figured out why SJ Games never made a Car Wars computer game.
OMG OMG OMG OMG! I love this game! It's worth the trip to the Origins game con just to play the Rogue Judges' Hot Wheels size version with a full 3D model city block to play on. It's amazing. I have photos somewhere I'll have to post. Nothing quite so awesome as launching your car off the top of an overpass while launching missiles at the car you're about to t-bone. Or laying flaming oil all over a major intersection, forcing all 12 players to spin madly out of control to avoid it.
One weekend back in the day, my buddies and I decided to play Car Wars for the first time. After spending a solid two hours picking out cars, choosing accessories, and pimping them out, we decided to battle on a simple oval track. Two of us started planning our stratagies, and angling for position, but the other guy just stomped his accelerator. By the time he hit the first turn, he was going to fast to negotiate it, but as he slid across the track he triggered his mine-layer, putting down a string of mines across the width of the track before crashing and burning.
We were both going too fast to stop, and couldn't avoid the mines, so we died as well. After TWO HOURS of getting ready, the game was over in about three minutes.
We have never let him forget that shit.
I played this once at my cousin's house when I was about 8. It was a really old game then.
I remember both of us getting really bored after about 20 minutes trying to figure out the directions, and we ended up playing the game by taping firecrackers to Stomper trucks and running them head-on into each other.
I guess we played it more realistically, because there's very little chance of bodily harm by using a 12-sided die.
Let me take that back.
Most of the people I knew in high school who got beat up all the time were very familiar with 12-sided dice.
PAgent: I remember a similar story with a Traveller (did anyone else play that RPG? I loved it!)supplement that allowed you to build your own space armada. Of course, everyone spent all their resources making overpowered versions of the Death Star--and the guy who won? He built several million single laser starfighters that effectively swarmed everyone else's ships and ended the game in a matter of 2 or 3 turns.
Steve Jackson Games--loved the OGRE series and Illuminati, especially the play by mail version--- letters would come to saying "The Teamsters, controlled by the UFO Cults, are trying to assume control of the Phone Phreaks"
Autoduel baby!
[en.wikipedia.org]
Oh, how my friends and I loved Car Wars. I think I loved it a little too much. I subscribed to Autoduel Quarterly, and owned darn near every supplement that came out for it. I kept the little card-stock counters in a drawer tray meant for pencils. And now here's some guy on a website talking about the game in a kind of "Look what our parents were wasting their time doing back in the '80s" way, and I guess I'm a little ashamed. We should have been cultivating our mullets and "going for it," but instead we pushed little cars around a tabletop and rolled dice.
LOVED this game. But yeah, the ten phases per second really dragged it out. That box artwork was so cool though.
Another funny thing about Car Wars was that while an arena battle could take a couple hours to play out (or days in the Sunday Drivers scenario), the "time in game" was rarely more than 10 to 15 seconds.
Was the Apple ][E version of this AUTODUEL?!?!
Now that was one of the greatest games ever! And no dice rolling, needed.
Still have my set, the rarely available die-cast cars, the Dueltrack supplement for gas engines and helicopters as well as a pile of Autoduel Quarterly and Uncle Al's supplements.
I was so involved with Car Wars that I wrote a Hypercard stack that made point allocation easier
"(The game's maker, Steve Jackson Games, claims that a Swedish bus company's recent development of a bus with mini-electric engines in each wheel, fed by a central generator, may have been inspired by one of the enhancements you could add to your car, back in the early 1980s.)"
Actually, that's not quite true - you sorta misinterpreted the comment on their site.
The SJG site mentions that "This should sound familiar to Car Wars fans..." because the "big fuel cell with motors in each wheel" design was the whole basis for the car structure in the original game (a modular fuel cell was easier to compute damage for than a relatively fragile internal combustion engine). It wasn't an "enhancement," it was the basic model, and the Swedish design wasn't "inspired" by Car Wars, it's just an obvious way to build a vehicle once you have good enough small electric motors.
I'm 100% certain that's how Car Wars was designed. Guess why?
Oh Ghods, I'm the biggest nerd here! I (still) have: Car Wars, Sunday Drivers, Truck Stop, Expansion sets 1, 2, 4, 5 & 7, AutoDuel Champions, AADA Vehicle Guide, Convoy, Car Wars Deluxe Edition, DuelTrack, Car Wars Tanks, several Uncle Albert's Catalogs (2035, 2036, "Uncle Albert's Catalog From Hell"), and several years worth of AutoDuel Quarterly.
The last of my Car Wars stuff finally went to the winds of fate (by which I mean the trash) during my last move a couple years ago. And now damn you I have an urge to pay it.
Though finding several hours to kill and someone to play it with is more of a limited factor than it was in high school.
Oh man did I play the living stew out of Car Wars. I even played Boat Wars and bemoaned the existence of Tank Wars. My friends and I played Car Wars for close to 12 or 13 years. Actually I still have it all in one of my comic collection boxes including the good ol' Uncle Alberts and ADQ. Oddly enough, we were also virgins until late in life. Huh.
I wonder if there's a connection.
Nope.
Not at all.
I found this game at a yardsale before my pencil and paper career took off, I must have been 9 or 10.
I started by using 2x1 cm paper cut out cars on drafting pad "maps", spending way more time building courses and designing cars than actually playing. At some point nearly I abandoned playing and focused on building a new economy / car construction rule set, which was followed by new combat damage rules. I remember rediscovering the drafting pad of maps when I was in high school and being astounded by the detailed 40 odd page volume of content I'd made for the game.
I had no idea this classic was a Steve Jackson classic. Rock on guys.
In high school, when I had gamer friends, we played the far superior rendition:
BATTLE CATTLE
@Epaminondas:
you may be interested to note,
space hulk board game recreated as a free computer game
YES! That and Paranoia was my youth...
Loved this game played through high school and played Autoduel on the old Apple II+.
I would love to see a modern PC or console game based on this property or maybe even one of those click-based mini games?
Ooooh, oooooh, I've gotta do some surfin' for an old copy of I-76. Carmageddon, I managed to get pretty good at, but I'm more a fan of older PC games. Don't know why, they just seem more fun....
Gettin' old sucks. Where's Space Duel?! Damnit, Sonny, when I was a kid, we had vector graphic video games and we LIKED it because it was better than text-based Apple II games!
Oh, the long summertime afternoons that I spent inside playing CARMAGEDDON on my PC.
When I could have been out getting some sun, I was inside killing as many pedestrians as I could...
Technically NOT Car Wars... but close enough :D
Where's my hat tip? J/K but I did tell tips@Jalopnik.com about this a year ago. I used to play it all the time (ok, when I wasn't playing D&D, AD&D, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Top Secret, Axis and Allies, etc) when I was a kid.
I still have my entire collection including the original little plastic box set, the Deluxe set, Dueltrack expansion, Uncle alberts catalogues, etc. Anyone interested in buying it all? Or playing a tournament? I've never tried to play it whilst drinking...
Autoduel is sweet, I still play it.
i think i have almost everything Car Wars related. i still love how long it could take you to reach someone on a big map :)
omg....I remember this one...in fact somewhere I still have my plastic-cased game set...along with the original Star Fleet Battles, and even the predecessor to SFB where you had to use string and a 360 degree protractor to figure out if you could shoot at someone or not.
and the miniatures...good God did I just say that in public?
wow someone brought up I76! That game was so sick I wish I still had it!
I never played this game, but it sorta reminds me of a football game I played with my dad called Paydirt. Anybody?
Car Wars is the sole reason why I have a roof-mounted recoilless rifle on my Plymouth.
I'll be a monkey's uncle if this isn't a blast from the past.
From the time I was 8 to 15 this game was a constant. I used to design car after car. I read Uncle Albert's and would dream. I guess that all stopped when I could actually drive.
Another game that hasn't been mentioned yet -
Gorkamorka.
Along with a decent indie computer game - Mexican Motor Mafia
I, too, am that old and that geeky. I actually think of Car Wars as one of the 'later' microgames, after Metagaming went under.
I still use 'D2 hazard' (as in, pedestrians are a D2 hazard) in conversation. Of course only other old freaks know what I'm talking about, but I'm used to that.
-Kle.
Ah, good ol' pen and paper rpg. My favorite was when the rules asked you to roll a "d3". Oh man, those were the days...
Whoa, I think I stepped in some nostalgia!
*Goes in closet to delicately caress Car wars box set.*
I loved this game...only drawback was that I'd spend about an hour putting a car together, slaving over all the details and calculations, only to get it totally destroyed in about 15 minutes.
You know, all of us gaming geeks should get together for four days a year at a convention center in some central city like Indianopolis, maybe in the summertime, and play these games together without sleeping or bathing the whole time.
Who's up for it?
The Car Wars community on the Web is still surviving. Play-by-Internet sessions are very active now, especially with use of the VASSAL online board game program.
French Autoduel Association (FADA)
[car.wars.free.fr]
[tdehais.9online.fr]
Mid-South Autoduelists and Handgunners Attack