I preferred the cyberpunk background to the game itself, very Gibson-esque, but it was playable fun and they nailed it with using Matchbox scale car models so you could make your own gangs.
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There was a GURPS book that fleshed out its world for people who wanted to roleplay in it.
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Backed immediately upon seeing this. I played a lot of Car Wars back in the day, and we had a 6-month tournament at a comic book store back in the late 80s (games every 2 weeks as I recall, cars, cash, people carry over) that I actually won. In fairness I was sort of gaming the hazard rules in the final arena but I think we were all trying some variant strategies and mine ended up the best. For a while I had every edition, but could never get into GURPS or the Autoduel variant.
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I miss the original clamshell mini-game that I picked up in the early 80s for $5.00 when it was new. There’s a larger-size reprint that preserves the original artwork, but it’s just not the same.
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I had several of the clamshell originals back in the 80s. I even submitted some artwork to AQ (rejected). However I was a “weirdo” and isolated child and never got to play any RPGs with anyone.
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I’ve seen videos of them playing it and it’s much quicker. They’re aim for play time is 30 mins per player.
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Well then it’s too bad you missed their last Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sjgames/pocket-box-games-of-the-eighties/description
The $400 level for the new Kickstarter contains all of the Car Wars reproductions from the pocket box Kickstarter, so if you really wanted to be completest you could do that…
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I loved this game the first time around. I even write a C=64 program to help design the cars (track weight and budget mostly). My friends and I spent hours making cars that we would then spend an hour or so simulation the ten or so seconds it took to blow them up.
Oh, also I remember on dark day where I took a friends bragging about how he was unbeatable too seriously and designed a vehicle to take his out in a single shot…and sadly did so in the first turn. Sorry Chris! I really didn’t know you had never played before!
If it is an consolation I have become a slightly nicer person in the intervening decades…
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Ram bar, bumper trigger and 3 front mounted anti tank guns?
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I waited about 2 years for the OGRE Kickstarter to arrive… AND IT WAS TOTALLY WORTH IT!!!
Now, if only I could get people to play the game with me where I live. 
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No, it was a really really unlimited game, any vehicle (this was prior to rules for tanks and helicopters I think, or at least pre-helecopter and we specifically limited it to ground vehicles), any budget. He had told us all he was building a killer something-or-other and I took a look at the maximum vehicle weight, and made an 18-wheeler with lots and lots of rockets (and/or rocket pods?). Enough that I had a very high chance of doing enough damage in a single “all in” round to exceeded the “get weight divided by 100 points of damage in a single segment and your vehicle is shattered, no matter how much armor it had left” rule (I don’t remember the exact numbers or terms…and the rule might even have been official but optional, and in the list of optional rules we were using).
It really was a dick move. It also left me with a really big, hard to manovoure truck that had mostly disarmed itself in the first second of combat. It was a miracle that I last most of the rest of the battle with nobody else willing to see if I had a second set of missiles. I definitely didn’t win, but I think I was the last man out. I was left mostly alone, and when we were down to two they found out I was basically out of weapons. I almost managed to ram my last opponent (not with the front of the truck, I was nowhere near nimble enough for that, but I jackknifed on purpose and almost managed to hit them with the trailer and/or roll onto the car).
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Oh, and I should add that it was an armored Volkswagen beetle that I rolled that day, and within a year or two afterward I rolled an actual Beetle in real life on my way to my first job (as a cashier at Wendy’s). Coincidence, or eerie synchronicity? SJ did also publish the Illuminati game, after all…
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I believe my copy of DF is still in my mom’s attic. I love it- very fast moving, straightforward rules, and the modular car parts were great. The rolling road mechanic was such a no-brainer that I always wondered why nobody else had done it before this. But, like all Games Workshop projects that aren’t WH40k, it was doomed to fail from lack of interest and/or support.
I’d like to give a shoutout to Autoduel, the Apple ][ game that was a blatant ripoff of Car Wars. It was fantastic, though. I played the hell out of that.
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Yes, it was. Also, Origin (the developers) made an official version of Ogre. Origin (Richard Garriot’s aka Lord British) company was located in Austin, as SJG was and is, so there was contact between the two companies.
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That’s what they want you to think…
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Are you sure you guys haven’t been playing this…?
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Although that was published by Greg Costikyan’s (sadly, now defunct) West End Games, he actually did do some work for SJG as well, such as the RPG Toon. BTW, the other author, Warren Spector, became better known for his work in computer games, starting with Origin’s later Ultima gmes and most famously with Ion Storm’s Deus Ex.
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Yes, that’s the one! I didn’t realized it was licensed. Cool! #TIL
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