Wargaming
Car Wars
English
Rules-medium
Apocalyptic
Car Wars is a vehicular combat tabletop miniatures game of armed cars fighting in arenas and on the highways of a collapsed United States, designed by Chad Irby and Steve Jackson and published by Steve Jackson Games. It first appeared in 1980 as a small ziplock-bag game, and it won the Charles S. Roberts Award for Best Science Fiction Boardgame of 1981. Later editions followed, including the Deluxe Edition (1985), the Compendium (1989) and Car Wars 5.0 (2002). Sixth Edition, which replaced the 2002 edition, was funded on Kickstarter in early 2020 with $652,995 from 3,936 backers, and it began shipping to backers in 2021. The rulebook is written for competitive play, although earlier supplements added light roleplaying elements and a GURPS-based setting, Autoduel America.
Description
Players are drivers who build their own armed vehicles, using pre-assembled 1/64 scale plastic cars on a shared arena, and fight until one is left running. The setting is a fallen United States around 2069 to 2070, a time of banditry and regional dictators, in which armed driving grew out of demolition derbies. It is played as a head-to-head contest between the players themselves, with a starter set built for two players and an arena of around 36 inches square.
The game asks players to accept that their carefully built cars will be wrecked. A reviewer of the two-player starter set found one-on-one play limited, with the first player often at an advantage, and recommended more cars, more players and objectives.