Car Wars (Sixth Edition)

Car Wars was one of those teenage longings: the game I read about in magazines and newsgroups, rather like Battletech except the giant robots had been replaced by cars fitted with far too much hardware. When SJG chose to bring it back with the sort of care it had given Ogre, I did the adult thing and hurled money at a screen. Sixth Edition is not the old Car Wars in fresh packaging, though. It is very nearly a different game.

The rules have been pared back until the noise can start quickly. Details such as relative speed coefficients in defence have gone, while vehicle building uses a tidy points system and cards with a little of X-Wing and Armada about them. A short game runs at roughly twenty minutes per car; a full, maximum-armour bloodbath reaches forty to forty-five.

You can teach it in ten minutes and, not long after, be lining up the player opposite with a machine gun. Nobody is trapped doing accounts: you kit out a car, enter the arena, and try to deal pain before the others deal it to you. It is Fast and Furious as a board game, with precisely enough smoke and metal for a Tuesday after work when a little excess feels entirely sensible.

As a pressure valve, then, it is very good; I simply cannot see this new system carrying a serious campaign or demanding scenarios with much ease. Happily, the miniatures are excellent: satisfyingly weighty little pieces of plastic that ask for paint and make the table look like a garage moments before disaster. They could readily have a second life in Gaslands: Refuelled, and they got me picking up brushes again. Car Wars (Sixth Edition) is not the old obsession I imagined, but it is a quietly excellent excuse to blow something up.