Morning! Jeanne and I played the old Car Wars Saturday night. Took a bit to track down some of the bits and there are a few others that I haven’t found yet but I’m still hunting.
Top pic is my chit carrying case. Under are the bags of chits from the game and various expansions.
Top pic is the vehicle record sheet I created back then. I was a graphics artist so that’s an ink and paper creation. Under pic is the same record sheet but after spending about a half hour filling it out. I used one of the sample cars but still had to track down information so we had damage points, ammo, etc.
Amazingly I found my first arena, the top pic. All the post-its are holding chits down where they were. Apparently we were playing a game who knows how long ago and intended on continuing. Clearly not. The lower pic is after all the post-its have been removed leaving the original damage and car in place. I suspect the other vehicle dropped off sometime in the past and it may be in a box somewhere.
To the game itself. Jeanne and I have the same car and I didn’t want to add extra bits to the game so no dropped debris from hits. In the pic you can see the original arena, our vehicles, flaming oil chits, and the official turning key. We both have linked rocket launchers with a targeting laser (+1). To hit is 8 or higher on two dice by default and a 7 with the laser and 2d6 damage. To the rear is a Flaming Oil Dispenser, 3d6 damage. We’re coming in at 15 and 20 mph, both with a handling class of 3 and acceleration of 5mph. We also have the Control Table and Speed Table close at hand.
In the first pic, after doing some maneuvering, Jeanne cut a hard left in front of me just missing hitting each other (cars not chit dimension). In the next pic however, she learned and dropped a flaming oil patch in front of me that I can’t avoid! 11pts of damage to my undercarrage!
In the final pic, you see the ending of the game. She decided to head on crash and the damage gave her 2 pts left of front armor. I fired my rockets into her front end (and took damage too, 2″ radius explosive damage). I still had armor after the explosion but I breached her armor, removed both her rocket launchers, her engine, and her targeting laser leaving her to scramble out of the wreckage and hotfoot it over to the exit.
In comparing the two games, Jeanne liked playing in both. The issues with the game with chits is they were small and tended to adhere to the fingers so moving them around was a bit annoying at times, something 6th fixed with miniatures. We liked the original turning key better than the new turning key that slides under the base of the miniatures. Certainly set up was significantly quicker with 6th and having cards for the various weapons and accessories. If we had pre-generated vehicle record sheets, setup would have been about as quick I guess. Having to hunt through the book for stats took quite a bit of time and I had to look up the Difficulty values for some things like taking damage but once known, it was easy enough to manage (taking damage: 1-5 D1, 6-9 D2, 10+ D3). We really liked the MPH for speed vs the 1-5 increments. Made it a bit more realistic feeling.
Overall 6th is better just because of the miniatures and having cards for the weapons and accessories. 1st-4th is better though if part of your joy is building the best car. Think of it as closer to a Collectible Card Game like MtG where you’re creating the “Best” deck. And the earlier game has a ton of adventures. But we like both and Jeanne is looking forward to breaking out either game.