Wargaming

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.

Warhammer 40,000 is a British miniature wargame produced by Games Workshop. It is the most popular miniature wargame in the world, and is particularly popular in the United Kingdom. The first edition of the rulebook was published in September 1987, and the tenth and current edition was released in June 2023. Description Warhammer 40,000 is set in the distant future, where a stagnant human civilisation is beset by hostile aliens and supernatural creatures. The models in the game are a mixture of humans, aliens, and supernatural monsters wielding futuristic weaponry and supernatural powers. The fictional setting of the game has been developed through a large body of novels published by Black Library (Games Workshop's publishing division). Warhammer 40,000 was initially conceived as a scifi counterpart to Warhammer Fantasy Battle, a medieval fantasy wargame also produced by Games Workshop.  Warhammer Fantasy shares some themes and characters with Warhammer 40,000 but the two settings are independent of each other. The game has received widespread praise for the tone and depth of its setting, and is considered the foundational work of the grimdark genre of speculative fiction, the word grimdark itself derived from the series' tagline: "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war". Additional Links warhammer40000.com - Official website