Car Wars Beginner Here! (Classic Edition)

[josephrey]

Does Car Wars have an official or unofficial series of rules based on beginner, intermediate, advanced?

Say, beginner only deals with the most basic principles of moving and shooting. Intermediate introduces targeting mods. Advanced introduces jumping and falling rules. Etc, etc.

I've got plenty of board games that do this. Actually, a few even have fan-written rules to make them even MORE complicated. (Thinking about Um Reifenbreite: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardg...m-reifenbreite)

It's a cycling race board game where the movement and drafting rules become more complicated as you get accustomed to the game. There are a few rules in there that I would love to include into a Car Wars racing scenario. Drafting most specifically.

[swordtart]

Some editions of the rules included a "Jump Start" section that had some basic rules (and in some cases abstracted more complex rules).

It could be argued that Mini Car Wars also fulfilled that role.

The 3rd edition pocket box rules were about as minimalist as you can get. The basic set basically covered cars and a subset of the weapons. Additional material was added in supplements (Sunday Drivers, Truckstop and the Uncle Al's Catalogues etc.) that expanded but rarely changed the basic rules-set. As new expansions were added, players discovered loopholes that were not anticipated in the original game. These were dealt with ad-hoc in ADQs (which themselves included new or revised rules) but it started to look decidedly wobbly (IMO). It appears that supplements were not necessarily cross-referenced (possibly being parallel developed) to one another and often two supplements would have contradictory rules or stats for the same thing.

The first compendium, CW Delux (B&W edition) compiled this incremental expansion into a theoretically holistic rule set. Inevitably things were missed, but if you treated it as a stand alone product it worked. The fact that it was on sale alongside the original product line and didn't contain all of the expansions (either because they were niche, or because they were published after the Deluxe rules came out) and isn't compatible with later expansions creates additional confusion. The fact that most of this stuff is now available again via digital means configuration mis-match that had effectively time expired has once again become an issue for new players.

Eventually the compendiums came out (2 and 2.5) but again there were editorial errors and again there wasn't necessarily a correlation to the various editions of the supplements (e.g. the rules for gas engines in Duel Track and the Uncle Al Catalogues are somewhat different to the ones in the compendiums).

Finally UACFH arrived to finally resolve all the config issues, but it didn't fix all of the inconsistencies, it re-introduced others that had been resolved in ADQ's or rules revisions and even added in some brand new issues.

Then 5th came out with a whole different ethos (but it was internally consistent).

So basically beginners game is Mini-Car or the pocket box 3rd edition or the Jumpstart rules from CW Delux (B&W edition) or perhaps the compendiums (but those big books might be intimidating).

The intermediate game is the third edition plus whatever supplements you feel are essential or Delux (B&W Edition) or CW Classic or 5th edition if you fancy a change. The top end of this is one of the compendiums, but if you do this try to ignore the rest of the material or you will get a headache.

The advanced game is as much as everything else published (or home brew) as you want to include. Coming up with a rule-set that is to your personal liking (and resolving the mis-matches) is a meta-game in itself.

Again YMMV.

[swordtart]

Originally Posted by josephrey

Say, beginner only deals with the most basic principles of moving and shooting. Intermediate introduces targeting mods. Advanced introduces jumping and falling rules. Etc, etc.

Movement in CW is fairly tedious, it needs the shooting to make it interesting, Shooting is tedious unless there is some tactical element which really requires there to be targeting modifiers (if you always need the same number to hit, why move at all?).

For beginning players the easiest was to simplify the game is to fix the design of the identical car they all use. If it has only a single direct fire weapon, you can pre-calculate most of the modifiers and just change the to hit number. You then only need to take account of range, speed and whether you are hitting the broadside or the front/back. I would expect any player that was going to go further in CW to expect these things to make a difference and put in the effort to understand them after a few turns.

You can simplify the relative vector calculation for speed mods if you want, just make it the speed of the enemy vehicle regardless of it's orientation to the firing car.

If the Arena is flat then jumping and falling are not relevant. You can still put in obstacles and walls to block LOS to make it interesting.

If you include dropped weapons (even smoke) you start to add complication exponentially.

Once you go beyond that you might as well use the whole rule set.

[josephrey]

If only showed these responses, would anyone be able to guess what the original thread was entitled?

To be honest, if I was a beginner and these were the answers I would definitely be a little dismayed. Even as a player who (sadly) at one time had every stat in the compendium memorized, I gave up after reading only a few lines of each post here.

Yes, it's a complex game, which is part of what pulls folk in. At the same time that's what pushes other folk away. Perhaps this illustrates the need for having Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced rulesets for 6e. Or at least two levels of complexity: "Amateur Night" and "Duellist" levels.

[josephrey]

(Not knowing what 6e will end up looking like, of course.)

[Chris Goodwin]

Originally Posted by swordtart

Some editions of the rules included a "Jump Start" section that had some basic rules (and in some cases abstracted more complex rules).

It could be argued that Mini Car Wars also fulfilled that role.

I never picked up Mini Car Wars, but I always assumed that it was the same rules as the Jump Start section. Can someone confirm or deny that?

[Magesmiley]

Originally Posted by Chris Goodwin

I never picked up Mini Car Wars, but I always assumed that it was the same rules as the Jump Start section. Can someone confirm or deny that?

They're different.

It's a greatly simplified version of the game. A bunch of stuff is altered from the 2nd Edtion Compendium/Classic (4th edition) sets to make the play simpler and fit on a single sheet. Portions of the rules are actually closer to other editions of the game.

[swordtart]

Originally Posted by josephrey

If only showed these responses, would anyone be able to guess what the original thread was entitled?

To be honest, if I was a beginner and these were the answers I would definitely be a little dismayed. Even as a player who (sadly) at one time had every stat in the compendium memorized, I gave up after reading only a few lines of each post here.

Yes, it's a complex game, which is part of what pulls folk in. At the same time that's what pushes other folk away. Perhaps this illustrates the need for having Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced rulesets for 6e. Or at least two levels of complexity: "Amateur Night" and "Duellist" levels.

There are plenty of auto combat games out there that are easier/quicker to play. You can't really lose the complexity but keep the spirit of the game, unless you were only interested in leveraging the brand.

[josephrey]

Well, let's see what happens with 6e. :)

I'm excited for it, and am excited to see its popularity spread. So just thinking out loud about what can help/hurt those chances. (I almost made a rolling of the dice pun, but I always miss on those.)

[The_Phantom666]

Hey fellow duelist! Been loving the advice and help! I have a question regarding Turrets: How EXACTLY do they work? How i keep reading it in the rules, they are great to have for wanting 360 degree firing, but how do they consume spaces? The rulebook makes it sound like you can put weapons in them to conserve space, but the turret takes up that space anyway so???