Classic Car Wars

I love classic Car Wars.

The new game is cool, and more miniature and card-based. Nothing beats the original for me, as I remember long summers of my brother and me playing days-long battles like a massive wargame on card tables covered with quarter-inch ruled maps.

And the game lets you design the vehicle your mind could imagine, from sports cars to buses to 18-wheelers. Motorcycles, too! Tanks, helicopters, boats, and planes joined the fight later. The game had both electric and gas engines for the cars, though, really, you could just say whatever you wanted the engines to be, and it did not really matter when we started playing. The gas engines were cool, along with the metal armor rules and the low-tech "Mad Max" style of play, where the battles were more "chassis and crossbow."

The game was slow. You were simulating a vehicle battle with real physics, one-tenth of a second at a time, though later that was increased to one-fifth of a second, and that sped up play by double. That level of accuracy was needed, since the battles were these chaotic dances of death where everything was in motion, and those "planned random moments" where a damaged side of armor appeared for a fraction of a second were often the difference between life and death.

If you don't have the patience to play a battle one second at a time without a computer, this game is not for you. And we designed these vehicles by hand, using an LCD scientific calculator. I still have this TI calculator, 50 years old at this point, and it is still working (and on its second battery).

Seriously, this country used to make stuff that lasted back in the 1970s and 80s.

Car Wars is a lot like simulating World War 2 dogfights: motion, fire angles, momentum, control rolls, lucky shots, and planning movement in slow motion were the keys to victory. Though on the ground, tire management became an issue. You are only as good as your contact with the road, and mines and spikes took their toll. Oil, paint, smoke, and other defensive weapons were highly effective.

Predicting your opponent's movement hours ahead of "real world time" and figuring out where you wanted to move, for 15-second slices of "game time," helped you gain foresight into where your opponents were likely to move. A car moving 40mph moves 4 inches per second, which gives you an idea of where it was going and could be in the next 10 seconds of play.

If you don't have the patience for this, stay far away.

But if you ever wanted to simulate a car-versus-car battle where every heartbeat of time matters, this is car nirvana. This hits the classic American "car culture" vibe perfectly, mixing it with Western and post-apoc genres in a tasty blend of nostalgia and muscle-car madness. The game slaps hard and is the meat and potatoes of simulation wargaming.

Fighting on foot is a death sentence, as cars were like ogre main battle tanks. You can mount an effective pedestrian defense against a vehicle assault, but you need urban terrain and a lot of coordinated fire and ambushes to do so. Pedestrians are slow compared to vehicles!

The game works for post-apocalyptic play, flashy autoduel arena battle play, low-tech car battles, battle cars versus superheroes, and every place in between.