Steve Jackson Games Teases Car Wars 6th Edition
October 2, 2019 by avernos
Steve Jackson Games have been teasing some test prints and designs for Car Wars 6th edition. The showed off a preview at Gencon this year but now they have received the test prints from their sculptor Motion in poetry who has worked previously for Mantic on the Walking Dead and Kings of War. As you can see from this test print shot the cars are designed to fit around the Matchbox/Hotwheels scale.
If you are new to Car Wars it is set 50 years in the future, natural resources are severely depleted and the United States government nationalised oil production. This eventually led to a second American civil war, ending with the secession of the "Free Oil States", Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Following famine in various parts of the world, there are limited nuclear exchanges between the USSR and the US, but anti-missile systems limit the resulting damage.
After these wars, there are years of worldwide economic crisis, and related global unrest, during which "death sports" become a popular form of entertainment (why does death offer the best entertainment?). In this future, technology has allowed for new vehicle designs, miniaturized weapon systems, and replacements for internal combustion engines. Furthermore, human cloning (together with techniques for storing memories), has made death only a minor setback for autoduelists who can afford the procedure. Car Wars is a game designed for simulating these autoduels between competing players.
The last edition came out back in the early 2000s and it's nice to see this classic car (game) getting the restoration job it deserves. The cars seem to come with integral clear acrylic bases to help with the game mechanics, deciding on arcs of fire for outgoing and incoming damage.
Armed with only a pair of twin machine guns to the front and a rocket launcher on the rear spoiler this beauty is considered to be a "light" vehicle!
The prototypes are showing pen marks for the tooling to produce these beauties in plastic, no word yet how they will come in the set but I would expect prebuilt in a variety of glorious techicolours. (can you spot the car within a car in the bottom image?)
The fifth edition removed a lot of the bloat that had built up over two decades of new editions and expansions bringing it back to its purest beginnings of cars, weapons and death. The deliberate choice to continue to scale to Matchbox and Hotwheels cars opens up interesting possibilities, will they allow AADA expansions again as you build your own death machines, or are they merely content to make a good product that they know people will use and reuse in other games like Gaslands, rather than reinventing the wheel.
I'm looking forward to seeing Car Wars roaring back onto tables in the near future and seeing what Steve Jackson Games do with it.
What car would be the basis for your dueling death machine?
"The last edition came out back in the early 2000s and it's nice to see this classic car (game) getting the restoration job it deserves..."
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
Looks cool, you could probably also use the minis from the Devil’s Run game with this one – they have a substantial range of Post Apocalyptic vehicles at that scale.
A number of the hotwheels cars – especially the buggies fit well with the theme, but you will need to add on any guns as hotwheels cars generally don’t have them.
thankfully Northstar have just released a plastic add on sprue of guns and armour in that scale for Gaslands
Judge dredd hot wheels.
bikes! allways bikes!! dredd is sada XD
Lol not for the block gangs?
over the bikes wheels…of course! 😀 wellcome to mega city one! XDDD
Not a fan, they look like wacky racers cars from the cartoon. I have a dozen or so for Gaslands so will stick to those cars. They will be selling the templates for the cars so those of us already owning Gaslands cars can simply use those instead. They are still working on the design, we will see if these get better, but not a fan at this stage. I know they are going for a starter kit where you open the box and play, and I get that since this is supposed to be in commercial release at some… Read more »
Gaslands has done some lovely work, but at the same time they haven’t had to produce a single vehicle. It’s very easy to illustrate a car that has been fitted for dueling but producing it is another matter.
I quite like these, they remind me of the sort of things we built in the 90s to play with, but I get that they won’t be everyone’s cup of coffee
I was speaking not of the illustrations but of the game community created vehicles.
This is a blast from the past, we ran semi roll playing campaign for this set in Acme(Washington State it does exist) which only ended because players disappeared doing normal lives, used a pile of micro machines cars.
The famous evening of 4 players with 4 cars and a van full of goodies having to negotiate a checkpoint “discussion” without one wanting to leave their car behind still leaves me and Pete in fits of giggles!
wasn’t carwars renamed to gaslands?
Nope!
Wow. We hammered Car Wars in the 80s. Love to see it going on strong.
Looking forward to the ks coming soon. Played this for years in the 80’s, again when the 5th ed came out, looking forward to this one next.
this is part of a third attempt by SJG to re launch this game. I hope they can pull it off this time but I question if they have the money to front plastic production. I would expect a KS but SJG is not going that route again. They’re still trying to recover from the last KS fiasco.
I cannot wait for this. It has been WAY to long.
What would it offer that Gaslands doesn’t already deliver… nostalgia? And, as another poster points out.. the cars look silly. They don’t even look like classic “Car Wars” cars. But good for SJG if they fully support the use of ‘home made’ models.