Battlecars gives you control over armoured cars and bikes in a dystopian future. Similar in spirit to Steve Jackson's Car Wars, although not as commercially successful in the 1980s, Battlecars sees you equipping your car with various weapons before trying to drive out there through the streets of the mean city to destroy your opponents.
What's to like
I'd always wanted to play this game. I remember when it was on the shelves of games stores in the UK when I was still at school, and not having the pocket money to afford it. Then it went out of print and never came back.
Each vehicle has its own display which makes it very easy to track ammo and damage on your car. Red counters and box displays are the way forward here, along with tons of counters to track bullets, shells, missiles, flamethrowers, etc. It makes what could represent quite a lot of book keeping very easy indeed.
The same goes for keeping track of speed, acceleration, deceleration, etc. Car battle games can quickly become laden with book keeping if you are not careful, but Battlecars manages this very intuitively. I never got confused about the situation my car was in, and now feel pretty confident I could manage a pair of them, or a couple of bikes.
The game plays inside three hours for two players, and that's with us unfamiliar with the rules. I think a four player game could probably be completed in around four hours. Funky.
I also liked the way the game manages range: cars are big targets, so it becomes less a case of whether you hit one, and more how far away you are from the target WHEN you hit it. In this respect it feels more like tank combat. Hitting one is not the issue. More powerful weapons obviously have more chance to do severe damage than, say, machine guns. Pedestrians - i.e. the poor sods not inside a car - are much harder to hit. This makes sense.
Finally, I love the so-called 'passive' weapons - basically weapons you can drop from your car like oil slicks and mines. These have the effect of quickly cluttering the town with additional obstacles for drivers to contend with, making life more interesting.
What's not to like
My biggest beef is the initiative system, which is shot to hell and fundamental to the game system. A single roll off at the start of the game determines turn order, and this confers a huge advantage on whoever has the initiative, particularly for ramming. If you have the initiative you are far, far more likely to be able to set up for a ram, which can inflict considerable damage and immediately stops your opponent in his tracks. That's not to say there aren't ramming opportunities if you don't have the initiative, but it just gives the other side a much bigger advantage all the way through the game in this respect.
The board of Battlecars is a nightmare. It is too small, and buildings are card counters which are distributed onto the surface ahead of the cars. Keeping these in place would be next to impossible. Luckily my opponent had the good sense to hand draw his own map, which was excellent. It pays to play with an artist.
Other observations
I can see some interesting scenarios involving pedestrians in the game. Provision is made for drivers to exit their cars and run for it, and there are plenty of rules covering what people on foot can achieve. But they are very vulnerable once out of a car and not in a building. All the drivers have a machine gun and three clips of MG ammo when they exit their car, which in this game is pretty useless. Getting out of your car and running for it, you are really playing for a draw. Try to reach a building and hole up before someone runs you down.
I can see pedestrians playing a more interesting role if they have more of a variety of weapons - e.g. the ability to lay mines, or use anti-tank weapons, which would make drivers sit up and take notice.
In the end, we blew seven shades out of each others' cars. In the final couple of turns both cars were reduced to little better than smoking piles of junk as their engines were shot out within yards of each other. My opponent decided to take his chances in the streets on foot, although by that stage my own car was immobile and I only had two clips of MG ammo left. I managed to shoot him down with my turret MG demonstrating just how vulnerable a man on foot is in the mean world of Battlecars.
A very entertaining game. If we can fix the initiative system, I'd give it another go, possible with a car and a couple of bikes...bring it on!
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