Cart Wars

I've been going through my collection of old games lately. It's actually much larger than I had originally thought. I offhand estimated it at "fifty or sixty" games, but at last count, it's up to 239 games, and that's without counting about twenty role-playing games (D&D, T&T, DQ, and other cryptic things). The website I use to keep track of my games doesn't consider D&D and other games of its ilk a game, while other RPG websites don't consider my other games games... Can't we all just get along? Apparently not. You got D&D on my PGG!

So I've been going through my collection, partially to inventory it, partially to undertake some simple preservation measures (some of my games, like Atlantic Wall, are worth some fairly serious money) and partially to skim off the groovy games that I'd like to play in the near future. My primary preservation technique consists of shoving things into plastic Ziploc bags and storing the bags in plastic totes. Had I done this five or six years ago, my game collection would be worth a good deal more than it currently is.

But enough sniveling. I didn't get tipsy so I could snivel!

As I was going through my collection, I found things that frankly astonished me, like the game charts and CRT for Prochorovka, printed on a half-sheet of blood red paper and half-eaten by cats (I'm pretty sure it was cats). I've been trying to play Prochorovka again for years and couldn't because I didn't have the CRT, but ask and the flying spaghetti mass (or whatever) will deliver. I thought I'd lost the magic rules for Dragonquest, a rival to D&D, but I found them too! With the critical hit table from the first book tucked into it! A double-score.

One game I've always regretted giving away was Car Wars. It has a strong Mad Max kind of flavor where you haul ass in various kinds of cars and motorcycles and get involved in all sorts of mayhem. Normally most of the mayhem is supposed to come from car-mounted machine guns and the like, but I always liked leaving the shooting irons at home and doing it demolition derby style, bumper-to-bumper and may the best-protected radiator win. But the point is that I really missed that game, but as I was going through the Richthofen's War box, I found my copies of Car Wars, Sunday Drivers, Truck Stop and at least one expansion. Crikey. What's going wrong with my brain? I have such strong memories of having given that game away, but there it is, and I know it's mine because it's got my handwriting in the rules...

So now I have strange delusions of hosting a Horrendous Car Wars Tournament someday. It's one of those games that actually gets more fun with more players, and if you assign an arbitrary limit to complexity, it plays reasonably quickly.

Car Wars suffers notoriously from "Second-System Effect", where the original clean and tidy system was stretched and expanded to the point it was about as comfortable as chain mail underpants. The original Car Wars was great fun. Sunday Drivers was a good expansion, since it was more about the town and pedestrians than the cars. Truck Stop was good because how could one possibly not like crashing through a flimsy roadblock at the wheel of a Mack RD-688? Even without a gravel trailer full of concrete blocks for momentum?? But later expansions got a little goofy when they started to add things as distant from the car motif as hovercraft, helicopters, tanks and the like, and it got so complicated it was less fun than filling out the 1040 long form. By then it was all turrets and heavy weapons and was dangerously close to turning back into Ogre, a game that I half-suspect it was distantly derived from in the first place.

You're welcome, by the way, to insert a mental image of Toki and Skwisgaar trying to pronounce the word "hovercraft" at this point. God knows I did.)

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. I hope to someday get a proper D&D session going, but if that fails, I hope to get a decidedly improper Car Wars session going. If that fails, well, I suspect I'll have another beer and evaluate my options.