[Dolph]

I can say that I loved it. I played the demo game with the basic cars and two games where we designed our cars. The design process was easy and we got to playing quickly. There are still lots of choices and some people may take longer to pick out the cards for their car.

The gameplay was awesome. It was quick and got even quicker as you got more familiar with the rules. The dice mechanics were simple and easy to follow with all the symbols.

At the beginning of the turn you were given a number of control tokens and as you moved and performed maneuvers you would roll dice and then lose control tokens (you also needed the control tokens to do things like putting out fires). Lose all your control tokens and you are the fish in the barrel that everyone else shoots at. Each time you performed a maneuver you would earn a different token that you could then use later to reroll a defensive dice. So in other words the faster you moved and the more you maneuvered the harder you were to hit. The moving template worked seamlessly with the bases which made moving the cars simple and easy.

Shooting was also straight forward. Each weapon card told you the number and type of dice you roll. Compare your successes to the defender’s successes and that lets you know how much damage you did. The dice also had special symbols for doing tire damage or causing fires (some weapons had these special abilities). When weapons breached the armor there was a small deck of cards that you drew from to determine how that damage would get distributed. We really liked this mechanism and always liked making someone draw a card to see how the internals of their car would get damaged.

All of that said the real joy of a game like this is having the “story” feel of what happened during the game. So to give that idea I figured I would share one of the highlights.

In my last battle I was lining up on one opponent from behind, while another opponent lined up on my left flank. I managed to do some real damage (and start two fires), but it cost me most of the armor on my left side. I then spent a lot of time trying to maneuver to line up shots while trying to protect my left side. While I did that I kept taking maneuver damage to my tires and was starting to worry that I would lose them. I am pretty sure I would have lost that one if we had been able to finish.

One of the more exciting parts of the game is all the growth potential. It is designed in such a way that it is easy to add new cards and new dice. This factored with the sheer number of expansions mentioned means that this game won’t get stale. I am really looking forward to it.