Race, crash and shoot your way to the finish with Thunder Road: Vendetta

How many racing games is too many? I'll let you know when I find out, but so far I don't seem to have reached my limit.

Restoration Games has carved a sub-niche within the hobby gaming world by refreshing classic board games with updated game mechanics, components, and graphic design. They worked wonders transforming Star Wars: Epic Duels into Unmatched, and now they've given their restoration treatment to Thunder Road, a fairly obscure post-apocalyptic racing game that was originally published in 1986.

I never played the original Thunder Road, so I can't tell you what has changed with the new Thunder Road: Vendetta, but the game play in the restored version is very smooth and simple. Each player gets three cars, one helicopter, and four dice. The board is made up of three randomly chosen tiles laid out in a row, with spaces laid out in a hexagonal pattern. Cars can move straight ahead or forward to the right or left -- never backward, this is a race after all. The road is littered with hidden hazard tiles as well as visible obstacles such as mud puddles and rock formations that can slow your car down or destroy it all together.

Each turn, players roll their four dice and take turns assigning them to their cars. The number on the die determines how far the car moves -- it must move the full amount, this is a race after all. The fourth die can be assigned to one of a few extra options, such as nitro boost to make the car go faster, repair to remove damage, drift to allow it to glide past other cars without crashing, or the dreaded helicopter.

Helicopters are able to appear anywhere on the board and shoot at your opponents' vehicles, or even your own if they are in the way -- this is a race, after all. What's more, if a car ends a move in the same space as a helicopter, it is immediately destroyed and removed from play.

After moving, if there is another car in front of yours, you can try shooting at it. Each player has 3 different sizes of cars, with the smallest being the hardest to hit but the easiest to push out of the way by crashing into them. Damage is dealt via a stack of tiles that will generally have a one-time effect and then linger as damage counters. If a car takes two damage it is immobilized until repaired.

Crashes are probably the most fun part of the game. When a car enters another car's space, it is placed on top of the other car and then two dice are rolled: one determines which of the two cars (top or bottom) is moved, and the other indicates what direction. In this way, cars can get knocked into other cars, causing a chain reaction of crashes. They can also get knocked into rock walls or off the board entirely, either of which results in elimination.

The aforementioned hazard tiles add even more chaos to the game. They're hidden until a car moves into one, and they can be anything from clear patches of road to land mines. Often a player will be faced with a choice of either moving into a hazard that could be harmless or even helpful, or taking a safer, more predictable path around. Just as often, there's no choice at all, leading to all manner of hilarity with mud puddles that slow your car down, oil slicks that send it careening off in a random direction, or wreckage that triggers more crashes.

As soon as a car reaches the edge of the third tile, a new tile is drawn and added to the track. Then, any cars that are still on the first tile are eliminated from the race, and that tile is removed from play. This continues until one player has had all of their cars eliminated. At that point, the edge of the third tile is the finish line, and the first player whose car crosses it is the winner. It's a great way to take the sting out of player elimination as a game-ender, since the eliminated player will normally only have to wait one round (often less) for the game to be over.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Thunder Road: Vendetta is a little on the egregious and random side, but nonetheless it is a lot of fun, and makes for an excellent, low-entry-point alternative to more complicated games like Car Wars or Gaslands.

Note: I highly recommend the Carnage at Devil's Run expansion if you can find it, it adds new hazards and road tiles that push this game from good to great.

• Thunder Road: Vendetta official website
• Thunder Road: Vendetta on BoardGameGeek

Radlands: the perfectly balanced apocalypse

When it comes down to it, there are three elements that will determine whether or not I enjoy a game. Generally speaking, as long as a game does a good job with any two of the three and doesn't blow it too badly on the third, I'm likely to have a good time with it. Those elements are:

• Game play: the systems and mechanisms the game uses.
• Theme: the genre or story the game is trying to tell, whether it's a pre-existing intellectual property or something created just for the game.
• Component quality: the artwork, writing, and the physical quality of the game pieces.

For example, Leading Edge's Aliens game from 1989 has appallingly bad component quality, but it gets a pass from me because it's a solid game design and it's based on one of my all time favorite movies. Tapestry, on the other hand, has extremely high production value and the game play is terrific, but I couldn't honestly tell you what the theme is even about, and I most likely won't be rushing out to see Tapestry: the movie (although I might if it helps explain the game's setting). Starship Captains is a good example of a game that nails all three elements: great game play, excellent artwork and components (except for those weirdly low-quality cardboard space ships), and a theme that is more Star Trek than Star Trek often is.

All of which brings us to Radlands, from Roxley Games. Roxley is well known for their extremely high production values -- they are one of the very few publishers that uses Kickstarter the way it was meant to be used, as a way to provide funding for a high quality product that they then make available to the general, non-Kickstarter backer public either via traditional retail outlets, or via direct sales on their website.

Radlands is a two player card game set in an 80s-style post-apocalypse, all neon pink and impossibly straight mohawks. Players use their cards to construct a tableau consisting of rows and columns, with the cards in front protecting those behind them, and the final row representing the player's "camps," cards which must be protected at all costs. Destroy all three of your opponent's camps, and you're the winner.

A lot of the game mechanisms will be familiar to anyone who has played a lot of this type of mid-weight adventure card game. Players get a budget of resources (in this case, water) that they can spend to play cards on the table, or use the special abilities of cards that are already in play, all with the goal of destroying your opponent's cards while protecting your own. One feature I particularly like is that cards can also be discarded for a one-time effect, so there are rarely useless cards in your hand. The game effects are limited to a few straightforward options like destroying enemy cards or gaining extra card draws or resources for yourself. It's not terribly complex, but that means it's not terribly complicated, and it still makes for an engaging game.

The theming on the cards is great, and fits with the game play very well. The characters on the cards will be familiar to anyone who is a fan of post-apocalypse action movies, especially the Mad Max series, and the structure of the game really does feel like a desperate final battle such as the one we see at the end of The Road Warrior. The production value is also top-notch. The cards and water tokens are nice and sturdy, the printing is sharp, and the artwork by Dice Throne artist Manny Trembley is done in his signature slick, animation-like style, but roughed up just a little to make it fit the harsher setting.

It's a deceptively simple game that scores high on all three criteria: the theme is entertaining and fits the well-designed game mechanisms, and the components look and feel great. The game comes in a super-deluxe edition with fancy packaging and a bunch of optional extras, but honestly the $25 retail edition is a pretty nice package, especially for the price.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) a great little game that feels like a high-octane post-apocalyptic battle.

• Radlands official website
• Radlands on BoardGameGeek

Toy soldiers, part 2: Gaslands

Gaslands is another in Osprey Publishing's line of miniatures rule books that exist on their own, without a particular line of miniatures or accessories to go with them. In this case, the game is about post-apocalyptic vehicle combat, so naturally it is designed to be played with Matchbox cars.

The game uses a template-based system for movement (similar to X-Wing) and a rather ingenious way to simulate speed, with cars in higher gear getting to move more often in a turn. The rules are simple and straightforward, aided by an over-arching "rule of carnage" that states that if any rule is unclear or open to multiple interpretations, always go with the option that does the most damage.

The simple rules make it a fast-paced game, which is what you want from a game about speeding cars. Each round is split up into "gear phases" in which cars moving at that gear or higher get to move and then attack (either by ramming or shooting). Going faster gets your vehicle more chances to act, but it also reduces your choice of movement template, which could see your car unexpectedly careening into a bit of terrain, or even off the board all together.

Players are presented with a number of options for creating their cars, including different types of vehicles such as buggies, motorcycles, performance cars, pickup trucks, and even the dreaded War Rig. Cars are then festooned with armaments ranging from basic machine guns to land mines and oil slick sprayers. There is even one faction armed with mad science lighning projectors and EMP pulses, and another that uses jury-rigged catapults to lob bits of junk at their enemies.

While the game is undoubtedly a lot of fun to play, the real joy for most players is in customizing their toy cars, adding machine guns and rams along with dents, scratches, rust and weathering. An entire community has popped up on places like Etsy, providing accessories for players to stick to their toy cars, and in most Gaslands forums there is a lot more discussion about modeling the cars than there is about actually playing the game.

One of my criticisms of Ronin was the lack of accessories such as stat cards, but that's less of an issue with Gaslands, mainly because the game is a lot more popular and there are numerous online resources providing everything from plastic movement templates and custom engraved dice to reusable blank vehicle cards.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) A terrific high-octane vehicle combat game. It may take a bit of prep time if you want to create custom cars to play with, but that really is half the fun (at least).

• Gaslands official website
• Gaslands on BoardGameGeek
• Gaslands Facebook group (very active)

Wasteland Express Delivery Service: delivery drivers of the wasteland

Wasteland Express Delivery Service has a little bit of everything. At its heart it is a pick up and deliver game where each player attempts to be the first one to complete three "priority first class contracts," usually a multi-step process involving several pick ups and deliveries across the board. At the same time, players need to play the cargo market, a supply and demand system that requires them to purchase resources and then sell them on for a profit. This money is then used to buy upgrades for their trucks, in order to be able to play more efficiently.

On top of all that, what would a lawless wasteland be without raiders? The game includes three raider trucks that move around the board and attack the players, or at the very least get in their way, forcing them to take longer routes to get to their destinations. Players move the raider trucks depending on where their own trucks end up after moving, which introduces some additional tactical decisions ("if I move there, I can move that raider out of the way, and/or have it land on my opponent") and also a bit of "take that" player interaction.

Depending on how you decide to use your truck's limited upgrade space, you can even make a viable income out of chasing and attacking the raiders. Each raider truck carries resources which are won when they're defeated, and those resources can then be sold on for cash to use for further upgrades.

The game uses a ton of tokens and cards which make it seem more complicated than it actually is. There is a lot to take in, but the game play flows well, and we have found that once we get going we rarely need to refer to the rule book. And the amazing component trays that come with the game (a rarity these days) do a great job of keeping things organized.

It's a lot like Firefly: the Game, with the pick up and deliver mechanic and the non-player raiders wandering the board, but in some ways I like Wasteland Express better. While Firefly does an excellent job of immersing its players in the world of the TV show, and provides solid game mechanics, it can also fall victim to a "supercrew" situation where a player with the right combination of crew cards is pretty much unbeatable, and that removes a lot of dramatic tension from the game.

Wasteland Express doesn't take place in quite such a well-developed world (although it does a lot with the flavor text on the cards), but it does a better job of retaining the tension: combat with the raiders is always at least a little uncertain, and the cargo market can drop out from under you, suddenly devaluing all that water you were planning on selling for a massive profit.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) A great game that's easy to play but with a good amount of depth, with a fun theme and very well-made components.

• Wasteland Express Delivery Service official website
• Wasteland Express Delivery Service on BoardGameGeek

Grimslingers: weirder western tales

I love westerns, and as such I have a huge weakness for games in that genre, of which there are surprisingly few. While I prefer a straight-up historical western, I'm willing to settle for weird westerns with fantastical elements added, and that more-or-less describes the theme of Grimslingers.

Grimslingers is really two games in one: a fairly simple combat game about dueling sorcerers, and a much more engaging cooperative adventure game in which players work through a storyline that introduces them to the world of the game, fighting weird monsters and gaining spells and items along the way.

The dueling game is really just a combat system and not particularly interesting on its own -- the cooperative game is where Grimslingers really shines. Players start out with a hand full of basic spells and a few items, moving around on a small map to gather more powerful spells and better pieces of equipment, gain experience that allows them to play more effectively, and unfold the events of the (admittedly very linear) story.

It's still essentially a combat deck-building card game, and a somewhat clunky one at that, but it does have a few interesting innovations. Principle among them is that players don't have a randomized deck. Instead, they have a maximum hand size (which increases as they gain experience) and a "stash" that they can freely look through and take cards from at certain points during the game. Once used cards are put into either a discard pile or a deactivated pile, and can only be recovered by spending energy points, the game's main currency for playing cards.

Additional cards are earned by defeating monsters and also at certain points in the storyline, which makes it a little different from the usual "play cards to buy more cards" mechanics that most deck-building games employ.

Despite these innovations, the game play is a bit clunky. Having two different discard piles with slightly different rules governing them is needlessly fiddly, and too much of the game rides on random dice rolls or draws from a separate deck of numbered cards. In a recent game we played, we made it three quarters of the way through the game, only to be defeated by a random event card and some bad number card draws.

But all that aside, the real point of the game is as a framework to hang the setting on, and a wonderful setting it is. The world of Grimslingers is a perfectly balanced mix of western, post-apocalypse, science fiction, and fantasy, with a surprising amount of humor thrown in, and supported by some truly spectacular artwork. The game is clunky, but not so clunky that it distracts from the world it takes place in.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Game play alone would probably be a 2, but the setting is so vibrant and original that it more than makes up for it.

• Grimslingers official website
• Grimslingers on BoardGameGeek

Arctic Scavengers: Scrounging in the snow

I get information about new (and new to me) games from lots of different sources. I spend a lot of time lurking on BoardGameGeek, I subscribe to the Facebook feeds of most of my favorite game publishers, I watch Wil Wheaton's Table Top, and I'm a recent convert to Beasts of War's Weekender show, just to name a few.

I also spend a lot of time browsing the shelves at my local game store (Guardian Games, a huge and well-stocked shop). Occasionally, a game I've never heard of will jump off the shelf at me, and this is how I discovered Arctic Scavengers.

Recent films Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Snowpiercer, and especially Mad Max: Fury Road had rekindled my interest in the post-apocalypse genre, and the artwork on the box for Arctic Scavengers intrigued me. Combine that with my deep love of deck-building games and you have an easy buy.

In the game, players represent groups of survivors scavenging the frozen ruins of a near future earth for food, equipment, medicine, and useful people to add to their pool of resources. As with most deck-building games, each player starts with a deck of cards representing basic resources, and slowly builds them up throughout the game.

There are a lot of interesting strategic choices to be made on an average turn, chief among them being what to have your survivors spend their time doing. You can mind your own business and dig through the junkyard for cards representing run-of-the-mill resources (and sometimes useless junk), but you may want to hold some of your people in reserve to fight over the much better cards in the contested resources pile. You also need to play some of your cards to generate food and medicine, which is used to buy face up cards from the center of the table representing more effective personnel such as thugs, saboteurs and snipers.

The pacing and tone of the game are a little on the somber side, which definitely enhances the theme of post-apocalyptic survivors wandering a frozen wasteland, but player turns go quickly, and the limited number of contested resource cards act as a game timer, so games don't take too long to play.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) It's not the most high-octane deck-building game out there, but it's simple and self-contained, which makes for a nice change of pace from more complicated games like Legendary.

• Arctic Scavengers official website
• Arctic Scavengers on BoardGameGeek