Game Night Light 17

Last night was the weekly game night. Last week fell through with an unexpected non-game night, shoot-the-shit visit.

Three of us gathered to take a 2-hour SAT math word problem test and then played Car Wars for a bit over 2 hours. I even got the new-dice smell by breaking the seal on the bag of dice in the pristine, never touched game components.

But first, the beer exchange submissions:

Well played, gentlemen.

And this is what the game looked like as we started out on 4 laps of death and destruction.

That's also where we finished, with some rough respect for the ending time of weekly game night.

We only played two or three turns of 5 phases each. The game rules are fairly extensive, not well written, or organized. But we decided to try anyway because we have memories of playing the game in college. And basic physics knowledge helped us figure out what some opaque rules and charts must mean.

The first obstacle was figuring out how to design the cars. With scrap paper we each toiled away with a subcompact and its weight and space limits along with a $3,500 budget to outfit the vehicle with the means to survive each other.

We all passed.

Then we played the game for a bit. As we played we figured out the rules. And many of the daunting list of maneuvers were clearly unneeded by our primitive vehicles. My capacity was almost limited to gentle turns, acceleration, and braking; and an occasional full drift, I think.

Otherwise I'd flip, roll, and burn.

We got to see how dropped spikes, machine gun fire, and armor worked.

And we recalled that our friend Pat owned this game and was the referee back in the day. Which explained our failure to remember the complexity.

We are saving the positions and cars we made to continue the game at a future game night.

Of course, this morning, I wondered why this old game wasn't partly online. I spent 5 seconds on a search and found this site.

Oh good grief.

Well next time we do this from scratch, everyone playing will be expected to design their car with chassis and money limits we all agree on before arriving to play.

But we agreed it was much fun and a great game to revive.