It has always been my purpose that game reviews would play a conspicuous role in this blog, so I thought I’d comment on another game that I played over Orccon weekend before I leave that convention in the rear-view mirror. 10 years ago, GMT Games published a NASCAR-style racing game called Thunder Alley, designed by Jeff and Carla Horger. It ginned up a fair bit of enthusiasm among my gaming friends, so I got to play it a few times.
It’s a simple, but tactically subtle game in which you run a team of cars, moving them in turn based on cards that you are dealt. Each card represents a maneuver of some sort. It’s quick and relatively easy to learn because the range of maneuvers isn’t that wide. However, it requires a good deal of chess-like thinking to play it well, because a maneuver will usually force you to draft all of the cars directly behind you, or require you to move all of the cars directly in front of you (as if the lead car in the formation is drafting you in its wake).
Two years later, they applied the Thunder Alley rules system to Formula 1-style racing in Grand Prix, which GMT also published. I haven’t played it, but the opinion of my gaming circle seems to be lukewarm by comparison. I guess Thunder Alley’s mechanics, which capture some of the aggressive, “rubbin’ is racin’” spirit of NASCAR, didn't translate as smoothly into F1.
Most recently, the Horgers designed Apocalypse Road, which I like to describe as Thunder Alley meets Car Wars. As the name suggests, it assumes a post-apocalyptic future in which organized auto racing is still a thing, but each car is also a weapons platform and rules of civilized conduct have long since passed their half-life. Cars come equipped with a mounted machine gun, auto-cannon, EMP gun or missile launcher and you score victory points not only for getting your team’s cars across the finish line, but also for inflicting lethal damage on an opponent’s vehicle.
My friends got in couple of games on their own while I was hawking in the dealer room, and one of them described it to me this way: “Our first game, we were all trying to win the race. Then we figured it out.” That’s when the shooting and the demolition derby tactics really started, because it seems like it’s easier to pick up victory points by destroying other cars. In fact, there is a case to be made that you might as well start open hostility as soon as the flag goes up.
I found Apocalypse Road a modest but amusing game, which is pretty much my opinion of Thunder Alley. It falls into that agreeable middle-ground of games, in which I probably wouldn’t buy it for my own collection because I’m always playing on someone else’s copy, and I probably wouldn’t suggest playing but it I’lm glad to go along with it if someone else wants to play it. It retains the tactical subtlety of the Thunder Alley system, except that now you also have the means and the motivation to shoot at and ram the other cars.
That being said, the combat system in Apocalypse Road is abstract enough so that it misses opportunities for flair and customization such as you find in, say, Car Wars and Battletech (which gives you the option to design your own mech). Perhaps it would have compromised playability to have a combat system that is more finely-grained, and I can see that allowing customization of each car’s armor and weapons load outs would probably have negative effect on play balance. Using a team-based point-buy system to customize each vehicle could have worked, but then again how well it would work would depend on how well the load out options balance out, and that is always a trickier thing in the execution than it is in the planning.
In the end, Apocalypse Road, like its predecessors, was designed as a casual game, and it works well enough in that role. It’s a good multi-player game (probably works best with 4-6) for the end of a day at a convention, when you’re in the mood for something that plays fast and light. I don’t have any particular insight into best strategy and tactics, but I wouldn’t mind playing it again until I figure it out.