Android Netrunner - Blog plug goodness

Android Netrunner

I am aware of the popularity of Android Netrunner but not being the biggest fan of the game, or for LCGs in general I feel ill equipped to tackle a review as I believe I wouldn't do it the justice it deserves.

That is not the case with JD's blog. If you are looking for a well written review/opinion/overview/update taking place throughout a players journey from day one - game one this is the blog you need to look at.

 jd-ontblog.blogspot.co.uk

The Witches - Trying not to get yer cackle on!

The Witches: A Discworld Game

Designed by Martin Wallace and published by Mayfair Games The Witches is a semi co-operative dice rolling/set collection (it’s not as confusing as it sounds) game in which the players take on the roles of a cadre of Lancre witches as they roam around the region dealing with the usual trials and tribulations of their kind such as sick pigs, deaths and the occasional outbreak of supernatural nastiness!

With the artwork being handled by the Discworld Emporium, home of the official merchandise for Mr. Pratchett’s workings, the look of the game is fantastic. The box art features a group of the Discs wise Lancre ladies and a few of the Nac Mac Feegle hidden thereabouts (small, blue, Scottish pixies who think they are already dead and in heaven for those of you who are not readers of the series)

The board is drawn beautifully and shows a birds eye view of the region of Lancre and all of the locations made famous (or infamous in some cases) in the books, from Lancre Castle and Granny Weatherwax’s Cottage to The Place Wher The Sun Does Not Shine and The Long Man (a rock formation in a VERY suggestive shape.... cue close up!)

 The board itself is great quality and suffers from no warping, ours has had quite a few games and is still box fresh!

The player boards each feature a portrait of one of the four Witches you play as and a description of their special ability...

Tiffany Aching can become invisible, passing through otherwise impassable spaces.

Petulia Gristle has the ability to cure one sick pig event free.

Annagramma Hawkins has a free use of magic but starts with a cackle token.

And Dimity Hubbub always goes first.

Each has a coloured border and matches the player pieces which are four coloured wooden witches hats which look really good on the board, I would have preferred some miniatures of the witches themselves to play with but there are companies who make them anyway so they can easily be bought later.

The dice are nice even though they are wooden, I’m not a fan of wooden dice, and have 2-6 as usual but the one spot shows the face of a cackling witch. You do not want to roll this in the game too often.

The problem tiles, in two colours green and purple, are really well printed, have great little images on them and have a great finish to them as do the cackle tokens, showing a laughing hag and the Crisis Counters with worried villagers. The tokens you never want are the Black Aliss tiles as they decrease your end game score if you have any, and you cannot rid yourself of them.

Lastly the cards. They are the best cards in a game that isn’t all card focused I have. They are standard poker sized and finished with a quality coating meaning no sticking and easy shuffling. The pictures on them are of equal quality to the box art and feature many denizens of the region featured in the books as well as one or two specials, like invisibility or Tiffany’s frying pan (useful for dealing with faries apparently)

The components are really good, as I said I would have preferred some mini’s for the player pieces but I’m very happy with the rest of the parts.

Gameplay

During your turn you start with placing a problem tile. You draw the top card from the deck and place the next tile from the holding area (bottom right of the board) in the location shown on the bottom of the card. If there is already a problem there it gains a crisis token, which increases its difficulty by 2, and you draw a new card to try and place it. Continue until it is placed.

Next you move your Witch for the first time. You may move your witch up to two spaces along the paths on the board, or to any space if you use a card with the broomstick image at the top. If you encounter another witch or a problem tile you must stop and take action. If you are on a space with a witch you can stop and ‘Have Tea’ which enables you to discard up to three cackle counters, and your fellow witch(s) up to two. If you are on a problem you have to decide whether to try and deal with it.

To deal with a problem first check the difficulty of the problem shown in the bottom right of the tile, then you roll the first two of the four dice. If you roll a witch icon at any time you gain a cackle token unless you can play a reroll card to negate it. If there are no cackle tokens in the pool to take you take one from the player with the most, and if that’s you you have to take a Black Aliss tile which are worth a permanent -1. If after this first roll you are confident that you can take the problem out you now have the chance to play any modifier cards, either for the effect in the text box or the icon on the top (see picture) and roll the second set of dice. If you succeed you claim the tile and add it to your player board where every two of each colour provide a bonus (+1 hand size for two green and +1 to rolls for two purple) if you fail you have to retreat to the next space on the path and taking a cackle counter, if the space is not empty you take another cackle counter and continue in this fashion until you are alone on a space.

The purple tiles, which remain face down until encountered, are the hardest problems and feature some of the supernatural elements the witches face and some have extra effects if you fail them such as forcing you to take Black Aliss tiles or even for the game to automatically end and the witches to lose if you have three or more elves face up.

You then refill your hand to the maximum, starting at three cards and then adding one for each green pair you have up to a maximum of seven.

Once all of the problem tiles are out of the holding area the game ends and the scores are counted, shown in the lower left of the tiles you have collected, and the witch with the highest score wins. But there are two ways that the board can win. As mentioned before, if there are three or more elves face up on the board, you lose also if you have to place a crisis counter and there are none to place you lose, meaning taking care of the problems made harder by crisis tiles is important as is not revealing too many hard problems unless you are confident you can defeat them.

The game has a semi co-op play style to it as you need to work together in a sense to stop the board from winning, but you are all competing to be the best witch so you find yourself swooping in and nabbing a couple of the easy tiles your opponents are headed for just to bolster your hand for later.

The game is a brilliant, simple to learn and teach game for most ages, the guideline says 13+ but the only thing I can see that would be unsuitable for younger people is the ‘Long Man’ on the board being a tad suggestive. I will give The Witches 8/10, if there were mini’s I would give it a nine, it is SO close to being my perfect idea of a quick, fun game and I would ask any player to give it some consideration.

Giants - get them heads movin'!

Giants

Published by Asmodee in 2008 and designed by Fabrice Beesson, Giants is a pick up and deliver/auction game where you play the role of tribes on Easter Island building the famous head statues known as Moais and transporting them to the coast and erecting them on their platforms, Ahus.

This is a 3-5 player game but I wouls always play with 4-5 as it doesn't play as well with 3.

The components are brilliant in Giants and for them alone it is worth the price.

Starting with the box itself, which is a sturdy beast, the art design, by Miguel Coimbra, is beautiful and very thematic. The board is equally gorgeous depicting a top down view if Easter Island and is pretty accurate in depicting the shape (which I would hope it would) and the placement of the Ahus along the coastline for the most part although the scale means they are not 100% accurate, but totally forgiven.

The cutouts for the auction block (Quarry) and headdress spot (clay pit) are a nice touch but could easily have been put in as a space in the board, the hex tiles for the forest, where you harvest logs for transportation, are double sided showing verdant greenery on one side and a stump filled empty space on the other which is a nice way to show which spaces remain for harvesting, and a self constructed storage bin for the tribe markers to be held in before you claim them. The smaller card components comprise of tiles to show which spots on the board you have reserved for your Moais to stop your opponents from claiming the high spots, and Rongo tablets (!) which are bought in halves and a full one can be used to special effect during the game.

 

On to the plastic! Starting with the dice, which for those of you who have read previous blithering rambles will know are the first thins I look at, they are really nice! Really good quality production and each face shows either a Moais of a different size (1-3) or a broken Moais and when rolled at the beginning of the turn show how many are available to buy, a broken one obviously showing that some cack handed mason has duffed one this time so someone may be going without!

Each tribe comes with three different members, one Chief, one Sorcerer and six workers molded in five colours and each different class is easily distinguishable from the other by sculpt alone but each has a unique base shape too, just to help. The tribes also have six tribe markers each, used for currency, and a score marker.

The Moais statues are brilliant and chunky little buggers which look fantastic once they start hitting the board. The three different sizes are cast in a different shade stone effect plastic so the small difference in size from 1-2 or 2-3 doesn’t cause any difficulty for the player and the starting player marker is an extra Moais with the headdress permanently attached. The headdresses themselves are a terracotta colour and attach (with great sodding difficulty in 50% of the cases) to the heads of the Moais by sitting them on top and ‘twisting them!’ so the indentation in them squeezes the head beneath. I HATE this one thing about the components as I know that with time they will just wear down and fail eventually.

The final components are the wooden logs you harvest from the forest which are literally tiny wooden logs! Tiddy lengths of dark brown dyed dowel which unless you have some little bowl to store them in will make a break for the edge of the table at the first opportunity and then take refuge in the carpet or the dog!

All in all, components alone I love what you get in the box before you start playing and it looks great on the table. The individual pieces all pop and stand out distinctly from one another

Gameplay

The game, as I said before, is a ‘pick up and deliver’ game with an auction mechanic to get your goods.

Phase one and two:

The players start a turn by rolling the quarry die to see how many Moais are produced for auction this turn and then the players secretly decide how much influence they are going to commit to get a Moais and what size they want to buy. The highest amount of Tribe Markers played goes first and the amount of workers they bid show the size of Moais they can take, three workers for instance can take any size of Moais but two caa only take a size 1 or 2. This is where the superiority of a Chief comes into effect for the first time as they count as three workers on their own, saving workers for later if you need them.

Phase three:

Now the players place their tribesmen on the board.

Workers: Any not used in the auction can be placed on the board in order to transport Moais or headdresses later in the turn so they go on the hexes you wish to traverse along with up to two wooden logs to aid in transportation.

Sorcerers: are placed on special hexes to gain special actions...

The Village – Gain one worker fron the resource bin.

The Sorcerers Hut – take a tribe marker from the resource bin.

The Forest – take as many logs as are indicated on the tile you are on.

An Ahu – Reserve the spot with a base from your tribe.

Headdress Quarry – Sculpt a headdress.

Workers, logs and tribe markers are held behing your player screen, hidden from your opponents. Headdresses are kept in front of your screen.

Chief: If you have two half Rongo tablets you can spend then and use the Chief in the same way as a Sorcerer or just place him on a hex to count as three workers for transport if you didn’t use him in the auction.

You can also place an unused tribe marker in fron of your screen to buy a half Rongo Tablet for later use, or pass until each player is done with this phase.

Phase four:

Transportation.

To move a Moai the space needs to contain at least as many workers or logs as the size of the Moai itself , headdresses take only one worker, but logs are removed at the end of the turn so if you are a ruthless sausage you can plot your course where your opponents have used their logs, bearing in mind the limited number there are, and use them while saving your own for later use, you also get bonus points for using other players workers for moving your Moais so planning your route is important.

Once a Moai is at an Ahu spot and you have at least one worker in an adjacent hex you can erect the Moai, with one of your tribe bases beneath it. The further away from the Quarry you place a Moai the more points it is worth at the end of the game and conversely the further the headdresses are moved from the clay pit the more they are worth. In practice though we found that if a player makes a rush for most of the mid range plots they can easily score more than enough to win over someone who goes for high scores, making a battle for the mid range Ahus a regular event.

Headdresses are erected in the same way on top of your Moai.

If you haven’t managed to move a Moai or a headdress to an Ahu by the end of the turn you can use a tribe marker to mark them as yours, if not any other player can do the same and steal them from you.

Phase five:

End of turn/game.

All used workers, Chiefs, sorcerers and tribe markers in front of the player screens are taken back behind them and a new auction begins again.

If at the end of phase four any player has placed a Moai on every one of their tribe bases the game ends and the scores are tallied for the erected Moais and headdresses. A better variant is present in the rulebook however in which the scores are applied as and when Moai are erected, this plays much better in this game for me than the hidden score option.

Final Thoughts

Although my interpretation of the rules/phases may seem a tad complicated (to me it seemed that I made it seem harder than it is) Giants is a great game, and as my first foray into pick up and deliver style games I gather I could have done much worse! The game is simple yet tactical at the same time and looks great when you are playing.

If you don’t want to get bogged down in a heavy game Giants plays in 60 mins once you have a game or two under your belt and is really fun for the price it can be picked up for!

I’ll give Giants a 7/10. While I haven’t said much by way of criticism, save for the headdress issue, there isn’t anything truly amazing in it. A really solid game and worth the time to try for anyone interested.

Star Wars Pocketmodel TCG... These aren't the cards you're looking for! (Sorry!!!)

Star Wars Pocket Model TCG by Wizkids.

Recently there has been much talk about Fantasy Flights X-Wing game and in the run up to picking that up myself I thought I would have a quick reminisce about a prior use of the license. Released by Wizkids in 2007 Star Wars Pocketmodel TCG placed the much loved and often argued about franchise into the constructable strategy game system introduced in 2004 with their Pirates line.

Components

This is essentially a pretty regular trading card game but with the novel twist that your main forces, those used for attack and defense, are plastic slot together miniatures, each with a base showing the regular guff found on a character/unit card you would expect to find in such a game.

The models themselves are pretty faithful to their subject matter for the most part even if the scale is a little wonky sometimes. (a Taunton and rider are shoulder high to an AT-AT!) and the information on the bases is clearly printed and spaced out, I have a lot of these models and one of the positives I can hold up for this is the print quality has always been perfect.

Assembling these models is usually a pretty simple affair, punching them from the plastic frames and slotting them together. Then you get the awkward ones. Some of the really small pieces can be a taxing effort, being a sausage fingered clummox as I am I sometimes had a number of attempts before getting them together but that being said I am a seasoned model maker and I can deal with tiny pieces. The main horror comes when the instructions inform me that in order to get two pieces together they need BENDING! This may be plastic (of sorts) but it does not easily lend itself to bending, especially when the piece to be bent has slots or voids. It is prone to snapping with very little stress needing to be applied and snapping a leg/gun/wing/insert-part is easily done and I have a small fleet of injured ships to attest to this.

Along with those fragile sods there are the cards, used as resources and modifiers for attack and defense along with some special effects. These feature stills from the movies (with an unfortunate majority from the prequel travesties) and the information is plain and easily read, not weighed down by unnecessary fluff and forty-two icons only two of which are actually needed.

The cards are a tad bland. The dark red colour scheme and the usually dark images in the pictures contrast massively with the stark white text boxes and as a result they are not the most appealing cards.
Also, each booster pack, along with the randomly inserted ships, comes with a pair of the worlds smallest and most useless dice and some slot on damage tokens which resemble smoke trails.
Including dice with each booster was a nice touch, meaning that potential players only needed a pack each for a small game, they are useless! Far too small to be used properly and they really shouldn't have bothered.

The components of this game are pretty standard card-wise but the models make up for this fact if by novelty alone.

Gameplay

For a full game each player needs to build a deck of no less than thirty cards and a force of no more than thirty build points of units, the build points are shown with stars on the models base with one star equaling one point.

The game takes place in three zones. Each player has a 'Home Zone' in before them where their forces start and where their objectives are placed. The third zone is the 'Contested Zone' and lay between the home zones and this is where the majority of the combat will take place as both forces have to cross this zone in order to reach the opposing home zone.

The players place the first three cards from the top of their deck into their home zone face down as objectives, the destruction of which is the main aim of your opponent, and also chooses up to twenty build points of units in the home zone, the rest are placed to one side in reserve.
Then each turn consists of two phases in the following order...

1) Play one objective.
    Players may take one objective card from their hand and play it face up, replacing a face down objective, discarding the replaced one, and applying any effects or bonuses the card confers.

2) Take ONE of the following actions.
   a) Move...
       Choose up to five build points of units and move the one zone forwards or backwards.

   b) Combat...
       Choose up to five build points of units and declare an attack on opposing units in the same zone.
Each player may play one card from their hand to boost attack/defense and the attacker then rolls 2D6 and adds the result to the attack score of the unit plus any modifiers, if this score equals or beats the defense score of the target damage is dealt equal to the damage score of the unit and if that reaches or exceeds the shields of the target it is destroyed.

   c) Strike...
       Choose up to five build points of units in your opponents home zone and make an attack against an objective using the figure in the lower right as a defense value. If the attack strength matches or beats the defense, including any modifiers, the objective s destroyed and you are one step closer to victory!

Once either player has no more objectives or no more units in any zones they are out of the game (which is usually me because, as per usual, my fiancee has a knack for aggressive play and destroys me)

Star Wars Pocketmodels TCG made a refreshing change to the usual card games at the time if only for the novelty of the 3D model cards, unfortunately the fragility of the models means that unless you have a stable, permanent storage space and intend to never transport them, unless swathed in foam, they WILL break and sadly some of the better models are the more at risk, I have a poor three legged AT-AT as proof!

The gameplay is a little on the standard side as TCGs go and the fragility issues mean I would usually give this game 6/10 but for one serious point...

...there is a 'shiny Jar Jar Binks' card! -1 for life

5/10

Damn you Binks. Damn you to Heck.

Army of Frogs..... mad as a bag of..... wait...!

Army of Frogs by John Yianni

First of all I will start with an apology of sorts for my lengthy hiatus, suffering with a lack of creative juice I retreated into my beard and sought solace in the buttony arms of my classic video game collection! But NO MORE!!! Regular cardboardy service shall be resumed forthwith.

So... Army of Frogs... What's all that about eh?

Designed by John Yianni, creator of multi award winning and nominee Hive (I don't have it yet, look it up, looks great!) Army of Frogs is a two to four player strategy game in which players place and move their coloured 'Frog Stones' into a winning position by leaping over others while simultaneously placing others to block the other players potential moves.

Components.

The box, and the art thereon, is a pretty plain affair and I wasn't really taken with it at first glance, but at the insistance of the gaffer (otherwise known as my Fiancee) I picked it up, for the reasonable price of £5 from the Works, and carted it home, noticing at once the weight as for a reasonable small package it weighs in at just under 1Kg.

Upon opening the box my opinion changed substantially. Held withing the box are the playing pieces, the 'Frog Stones'. Made from a Bakelite-esque material they are hex shaped tiles with a raised frog design on them whose back forms a handle of sorts for ease of handling mid game. They have a brilliant tactile quality to them and the sound they make, clacking together when you are rummaging in the bag for a new piece, is really good. The player colour tokens are made from the same material and are simple discs a little smaller than the frogs.

The bag i mentioned is a hefty black drawstring sack emblazoned with the game logo, and while the bag feels sturdy and of good quality, with a plastic base insert to give a flat bottom, the logo isn't that great. It looks a little washed out colour wise and seems like it will wear thin with repeated handling.
Other than the box art and logo on the bag I am quite impressed with the quality of the contents so far.

Gameplay.

First impression? Easy to grasp.

setting up each player takes a coloured player token and places it before them then draws two random frog stones from the bag and, likewise, placed these before them too to form a 'hand', then the first player places one of their frog stones on the table, draws a new one from the bag and play takes turns, moving clockwise around the table as follows...

During a players turn you take actions in the following order...

1) Move one of your coloured Frog Stones if possible.
    This is done by leaping over other frogs, or rows of frogs, and landing in any empty space other than the one you started from. Players may make multiple jumps in sequence during this phase to reach their desired spot before moving on. If you have no frogs of your colour at this point simply move on to the next phase.

2) Place a Frog Stone.
    Players take one of the Frog Stones from their hand and place it on the playing field, the only main rule to obey here is that you may not place one of you own coloured stones into contact with another, this must be done by leaping. You can put anyone else's anywhere you wish.

3) Draw another Frog Stone.
    To end the turn rummage in the bag and draw a new stone to replace the one you just played, put it by you player marker and pass on to the next player.

Play continues until one player manages to move all of their frogs currently in the play area into one group of seven or more, all in contact with each other. This is where putting other players coloured pieces down instead of your own becomes useful. If you see someone is within spitting distance of a win, putting one of their pieces down in an awkward place forces them to take more time to get it into contact with the rest and can buy you enough turns to play for a win yourself.

During the first half of our first game my group were playing quite cavalier, not getting too serious, laughing and joking. This didn't last!!! This game can quickly evolve into a strategic battle of wits between players with bluffs and power plays a plenty and watching the other players eyes frantically darting to and fro as they plan their next few moves is surprisingly amusing.

A word of caution also, Keep an eye on the quiet players. We took our attention away from one of our group, Ryan (he asked for a name drop!) and out of nowhere he stole the game. We never saw it coming!

I'll give Army of Frogs 7/10. The pieces are brilliant, the rules concise and the gameplay is wonderfully fun and strategic, but is let down slightly by the box art and the poor logo print on the bag. Minor quibbles only for a great game and if you like strategy games this is certainly worth a punt.

The Walking Dead Card Game... Not that cheap and certainly not cheerful!

Walking Dead the Card Game by Cryptozoic Entertainment

Bland....

As I’m not the greatest fan of the T.V show The Walking Dead I was unaware of this game but on my recent jaunt to town for Free Comic Book Day I spotted this on a shelf, and wanting to buy at least something on my visit, thought I’d give it a whirl.

The box art is what you would expect from a media tie in game, a generic shot of the hero looking, in this case, moody and determined with his revolver while standing in an apparently grey world devoid colour. I know the show isn’t a riotous colour-fest but this game could be easily overlooked with the drab box.

The blurb on the reverse reveals that the game is based on a game called ‘6 nimmt!’ by Wolfgang Kramer, winner of a fistful of awards including the Spiel des jahres (Game of the year), one of the most prestigious accolades in board/card gaming.

The rules are presented simply and are easily understood, the book itself is a simple four page affair explaining the two game modes, Survivor and Hero.

The cards are where this game falls flat on its brain munching face!

They feel good, that’s at least one good point, they shuffle well and feel as though they will stand up to a decent amount of play but that is where the praise ends.

The card art just looks like basic DVD rear cover screen grabs of various zombies. Of the 104 zombie cards, numbered from 1 – 104, there are only five different images. This being a 6 nimmt clone that is understandable as it is one of the game mechanics but the pictures chosen are awful! The one you see the most of (76 of them to be exact) is of a rotting woman’s face and it’s far from the most appealing card considering it is the most common. The other four are of larger groups of shufflers and are equally drab, but not as bad.

Blander....

You'll see a lot of that face on the number 42 card!

The 6 hero cards are, again, effortless screen captures from the show with the exception of Rick, the main protagonist of the show for those not in the know. Ricks card is the laziest piece of crap I have seen in a game for a long while. It features the self same image that is on the box cover, the rule book and the card backs! Yes, the card backs. This means that the card has the same bloody image on both sides! LAZY!

Considering the quality of Cryptozoics other efforts, games the likes of the DC Deck Building game, Food Fight, the World of Warcraft trading card game and Penny Arcade: Rumble in R’lyeh, this game seems like a poorly put together, phoned in effort. It may be a slightly modified version of an existing game system but they could have put a little more thought into the look of the damn thing! It plays well but the lazy copy and paste approach to the appearance damages it.

Blandest....

Gameplay

In stark contrast to the previously stated ‘Google Image Search’ approach to the art the gameplay is really good! Especially the more players you have!

Hero Mode

Each player has a hand of 15 ‘Walker’ cards and one hero card and the aim of the game is to have the highest value of walker cards when the players are all out of cards.

In the centre of the table four walkers are placed in a vertical row to serve as your starting cards and each turn players play either one or two walker cards onto one of these four rows. The cards played must have a higher numerical value than the card before it in the row unless you do not have a card higher than any on the table, in which case you must play a lower value one onto the current highest value card.

The hero cards are used to allow you to place a card at the beginning of a row once per game instead of the end

Once a row would have the sixth card played onto it, the player takes the five existing cards and puts them to one side (these will be used for scoring at the end of the game) and the sixth card becomes the first in a new, replacement line, so on and so on until all players have no cards left, at which point the players count the bullets on their captured/killed cards and the highest wins! Simple yes?....No! The game has a remarkably simple concept but has a tactical element that will have some thinking multiple moves ahead!

That bland its like a holiday in a retirement home laundry room!

Survival mode

This is the closest the game comes to the original 6 nimmt. Each player has a 10 card hand and the cards are played in the same manner as before but his time the aim is to take as few of the cards as possible, or at least the lowest scoring cards possible ad the hero cards are not used.

Once all 10 cards have been played by each player the bullets are counted and the fewest wins.

I am aware I may not have explained how well the game plays as it is a very simple game but it is quite enjoyable, just let down brutally by the appallingly lazy aesthetic choices made, hence I’m giving this game 4/10. I would happily give it 6 or even 7 but the appearance is so lame that I can’t even justify a 5. A good example of a lazy tie in, if you see it for a couple of pounds (or currency of your choice!) pick it up but don’t pay full retail value, it just isn’t worth it, buy 6 Nimmt instead, at least that won an award!

ThunderRoad... Mad Maxing it all over the tabletop!

Thunder Road

Published by Milton Bradley games in 1986, Thunder Road is a car combat game with a unique twist, a never ending board (in a sense!)

The box art, the European release in this case, the U.S. version has a much more colourful cover, is reminiscent of Mad Max (the game thankfully features no Mel Gibson!) showing a dusty brown landscape picture of automotive carnage occurring behind a steel jawed, goggle wearing, stubbly racer, staring coldly into the foreground as people are quite possibly dying in horrendous ways in his rear view mirrors, probably caused by his aggressive driving!

Under the lid we find the two part board that forms the never ending racetrack. Two boards with interlocking ends with a desert road down the centre and bare wasteland on either side. The staring positions are clearly marked with the colour coded spaces for the vehicles and spots marked out for the wrecks which form obstacles for the racers.

The cars come in four classes. Class 4’s are dune buggies, Class 5’s are racers (clearly modeled on Mad Max’s Ford XB Falcon hardtop) and the class 6’s are large six wheeled tank like vehicles and are the  go to vehicle for taking out your opponents. Each team also has a helicopter to use as extra attackers. They are two or three part plastic miniatures/playing pieces and they are quite light but sturdy enough to withstand repeated play. They aren’t amazingly detailed but this game was aimed primarily at kids when first released so this is to be expected.

The wrecks, oddly my favourite part, are black plastic burnouts on their roofs and are used to block movement on the road.

The dice are the usual old MB wooden dice found in all of their games at the time, they feel okay but have almost no perceptible weight to them at all! There are three yellow D6 used for movement, you roll all three and choose which vehicle you apply each result to. A black die with scores of 1 – 4 which is rolled if you have any vehicles on the tarmac which adds bonus movement, and then two red D6 used for combat. The dice are possibly the only thing I dislike about the game but for the time they were produced they were some of the better dice included in a game of this kind.

Gameplay

Each turn the players roll the three yellow movement dice, plus the black dice if they have cars on the tarmac, and apply the values rolled to their cars in any order they wish and move ever forward (literally too, reverse movement is against the rules. It is a race after all!)

You cannot move through active vehicles at all, and to move through a wreck you must roll 4.5 or 6 on a battle die or become wrecked yourself.

You can attack your opponents three ways. Moving into the same square allows you to make a Ram attack, you each roll one red battle die and add the cars class to the result, if the attackers score matches or is greater than the defenders the attack is successful and the defenders car is wrecked, any other result is a miss.

Moving to a space directly behind an enemy a shooting attack can be made by rolling a single red die. If the result matches or beats the class of the attacked vehicle then the shot is good and the car is wrecked.

Finally, once per turn, you may call in your attack chopper to make a single shooting attack against an enemy. The bonus of the chopper attacks is that they do not cause obstruction so if you fail a shot with a car you can always try again with a chopper!

Once a cars movement takes it beyond the edge of the second board the track moves on, leaving behind any wrecks and slow racers! The first board is removed, losing any vehicles still on it, and placed at the front to form a new stretch of road. The only thing to stay are the black wrecks which are placed on their marks to make new obstacles.

The race is won when one player is the only one with active cars on the board.

For a children’s game, and a relatively simple one at that, this game is a immense amount of fun! My group can never have just one race as there are almost always scores to be settled from the last one and vendettas seem to carry over from game to game regardless of the days between!

For those wanting more than a simple game there are a few homebrew advanced rules to be found online. My favourite so far is ‘ThunderRace’. which can be found on boardgamegeek.com, and it adds rules for armour, chopper to chopper combat, dropped weapons such as firebombs and other hazards. It adds a lot to an already enjoyable game.

For the price a good condition copy of ThunderRoad goes for online I would say that anyone whose interest is peaked by this, or any other review, should give it a go. It is a good game and would make a nice, different, addition to many a collection. I give it 7.9/10. It would score higher were it not for the old components, but it’s damn close!