Car Wars is one of those games where it is hard to do a design retrospective, the issues involved are like being handled a report to write an overview of Microsoft - there are many pieces, and a long road to consider before you can even begin to tear apart the design goals and successes of an individual area. I will focus on the road to where this book eventually came to, the rules compendium pictured above.
Retrospective
Car Wars was one of those pre-Internet games during the age of the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and its heyday ended around the time of the original IBM PC and Nintendo NES. This game was one of the first big tabletop PvP games ever made; it had quick setup, could handle multiple players easily, and had a complete vehicle design system. Players could design a car within a pre-agreed budget, select a scenario or arena map, and have at it. Setup was as easy as having a vehicle record sheet and placing your car counter at the start point. Car Wars was one of those addictive games that derailed many a D&D session, and its eventual spiritual successor was the original Battletech game.
More Is Not Always Better
The original Car Wars game was printed in a tiny pocket box, with a complete rule book no larger and longer than a game manual for a typical XBox game. The game have about a dozen cars and motorcycles, and about as many weapon options. For the most part, the fights happened between lightly armored vehicles with machineguns, rocket launchers, lasers, and the like - with a couple 'dropped weapons' that the cars could drop on the map, such as mines, smoke, caltrops, and other map-changing weapons. Future pocket box games added more rules for pedestrians, and also buses and big rigs. For a while, the base game was good enough for a ton of fun, or 2,400 lbs with an XHv chassis.
The game was supported by the Autoduel Quarterly magazine, and also periodic rules supplements. Boats, trailers, blimps, tanks, trikes, helicopters, hovercraft, race cars, dragsters, planes, jets, and a whole Speed Racer credits reel of other vehicles were added to the game eventually. All the best rules for which were gathered in the Car Wars Compendium (above), and the final version of the rules was released. Note that the tanks and some of the other vehicle types are missing from this book, as they pulled back some of the creations to make the rules clear and presentable.
More was not always better, and the CWC seems unfocused and all over the place if you haven't played the original game. If you don't know the original charm of two cars fighting it out on a desolate road, you may think a hovercraft fighting an off-road motorcycle pulling a travel trailer (chased by a mini helicopter and a gas-powered speedboat) is what the game is all about. There is still too much in this game, and the original charm is buried deep in a mess of vehicle types, weapons, and options.
The Turn Structure
Another sore point with Car Wars was the turn structure. In the original game, you were moving in turn increments of 0.10 seconds, with one action allowed every second. This improved by the time CWC rolled around to 0.20 seconds, which sped the game up by a factor of two. The gameplay was still very slow, with many 4-8 car combats taking 4+ hours to resolve a 30 second span of time (150-300 phases of movement). As kids, George and I ran 200+ car combats over a week during the summer, and it was a detailed, if not interesting wargame to run in that much detail with that many vehicles.
Part of the problem is Car Wars was simulating physics on the tabletop. They needed a microsecond phase to handle car chases correctly, so thing like a slower car rear ending a faster car would not happen. This obsession with accurate physics extended into the crash, ramping, and turn systems. Nowhere else can you gain an appreciation for seat-belts, or the devastating consequences of a head-on collision better than Car Wars. Games with simpler turn structures and a lessening for the understanding of momentum eventually replaced Car Wars as the PvP game of choice, such as Battletech, Wahammer 40K, and several others. Remember, we are still pre-Magic the Gathering, so tabletop wargaming and roleplaying has not totally been decimated by the MtG tsunami of the 1990's.
The Rules
Car Wars used a straight 2d6, N+ system. Weapons were rated on their to-hit number on 2d6, and you needed to roll that or higher on 2d6. There were modifiers, a few at first, and too-many at the end. Damage was marked off in little boxes on the printed record sheets, an average weapon doing 2d6 damage to around 30 points of armor. The armor ablated, so if you rolled 8 points of damage, you lost 8 points of armor. Once the armor was gone, damage continued through to the interior of the car, knocking out weapons, engines, and possibly the crew.
At any time the crew could surrender, and the car would be considered off-limits to further weapon fire. Of course, the car could still burn, explode, or crash after surrender; and also there was the potential for a devastating lucky shot during the fight, so the vehicle's crew wasn't 100% safe. Crew members could get XPs, and get better skills, such as driving, gunnery, and even skills to use with hand weapons.
The rules worked well, and handling things was straightforward. Once the CWC rolled around, the rules absorbed years worth of errata, questions, and clarifications - so things were considerably more complicated. The addition of special weapons and devices also further complicated things, such as rules for wire-guided missiles, jump jets, boat wakes, cars entering water, and a whole phonebook full of special rules appeared. If you grew up with the original game, you could deal with the complexity. If you were new to the game, you had a lot of trouble understanding how everything worked together (hint: if you are new to this, start with Mini Car Wars for a buck).
Compared to other systems, Car Wars was more complicated than Battletech, but less complicated than Squad Leader. It compared well with something like Warhammer 40K, since the number of units was less, and there was less fiddly movement and rules interpretations to worry about and fight over. The turn length and time to play a game killed the game for many, since most every game since has cut the time to play down considerably. The newer two-car Car Wars books seek to address the time requirement, and do so quite well. Of course, when computer games rolled around, and could simulate all this weapons fire and physics in silicon, the days of Car Wars came to an end.
The Scenarios
The scenarios you could create with Car Wars were limitless, and ranged from road battles with convoys, to motorcycle gang attacks on a town, to professional sports arenas with cars battling for big money. It was a true 'gladiator' style game set on wheels to the roar of engines and weapon fire, and it was cool. Most every scenario could be played with multiple players, so the game scaled well for large groups. Everyone got one car and a crew, and you were off and playing.
By the end, most scenarios took place in large tabletop arenas, as this style of play was the easiest to play with a pick-up group. It was a very fun PvP style game, and you could join a game without having to know the other players. If you knew the basic rules and how to move and shoot, you were in most games. It was always cool to have another car on the board, and you never had trouble finding a group to join. This pick-up play was a very nice design element, and you see this carried through to games even today, on tabletops and on computers.
Vehicle Design
Vehicle design was fun, but required a lot of fine tuning and math at the end. It was mostly all addition, and making sure you covered all the special cases, like linking weapons, turret requirements, and other design rules. You could design limitless vehicles for fighting, passengers, cargo, scouting, or any other use. The lighter your car, the less the armor, but the faster you accelerated. A lightly armored small car could achieve victory in a goal-oriented checkpoint scenario, where a heavier armored car could not. Deciding hat you would give up for that speed was a fun part of designing a car.
Weapons and Escalation
The original game shined with a small weapon list - there was a difference between using two linked machineguns versus a single rocket launcher. The weapon choice was small, but it led to a scissor-paper-rock style of attack, design, and defense. The ways someone could attack were limited, and you could get away with a design focusing on one-shot rockets and dropped weapons. Car designs didn't have too much armor, so every weapon was deadly.
By the time CWC rolled around, an entire armor of weapons and defenses were added to the game. You needed HEAT shells for your rocket launcher, along with infrared laser guidance. The tweaks and special equipment got more detailed, and the armor and defenses kept getting better. The designs of the cars became better too, with first-generation classic cars being out-gunned and out-armored by the later designs. What was simple became complicated, and the game suffered on a basic level. It was fun for people that loved design and min-maxing, but it became inaccessible for many others who wanted to try out a design and have fun. Again, if you knew the original game, you knew what to stay away from, and how the original game felt in comparison with CWC.
Overall
Car Wars was a big part of our life when we were growing up, and I will always see the game as something fun. Today, I see a lot of its problems, especially the bookkeeping, math, and time requirements. Computers do all this better, but as a designer, it is important to see how a game like this runs on the 'metal' of the tabletop. How do you simulate physics without a college textbook? Where could a real-time simulation system be streamlined and made better? Car Wars is a fascinating problem to solve with game design, and it still remains so.
CWC represents an inevitable and complicated end to a game that was once simple and fun, and it reminds me of how D&D4 ended up with its endless options and expansions, and how other games of today will end up. I appreciate the work that went into CWC, it is a great collection of rules, and a great little game is hidden in there. But do we have to expand games into oblivion? Sometimes, saying no and keeping the game simple is harder than saying yes all the fun new ideas a game creates. One of the most important qualities of a designer is saying 'no.'
Three stars as we drive off into the sunset. One for the memories. One for having a PDF. And one for the incredible concept hidden away in this game.
No comments:
Post a Comment