[Coopdevil]

Do you like Subbuteo?

Do you like Scalextric?

Are you really good at Snooker because you never went to school?

Good. Then you need Pitchcar.

It's exactly as it looks. Build up a track from wooden track sections (available in lots of expansions to build up colossal circuits) and slot-in rubber barriers, then flick your car along the track in a first-past-the-post wins.

 

[Coopdevil]

I pruned the games collection (board, role play, card, wargame etc.) quite severely last time I moved and got rid of a few games. The only motor-racing ones I kept are the following two

Speed Circuit - Avalon Hill

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1194/speed-circuit

I've never actually played this, but I believe it's quite similar to the Waddingtons game. Originally published by 3M, the Avalon Hill version has a few rules changes. Used to be the enthusiasts racing game choice in the days before Formula De came out.

Two tracks, Watkins Glen and Monza. Money saved on production by printing them both on the same side of the board...

(The car geek in me feels strangely pleased that the Glen is printed in the same colour as it's famous - or infamous if you are named Cevert - blue armco).

Racing clogs

Character Sheet

Coop

 

[Coopdevil]

Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix - Mayfair Games

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/101/detroit-cleveland-grand-prix

A bit of a gamer's game this one, well rated by people who play games as a hobby. I picked it up in the sale before Mayfair closed down having heard lots of good things about but, in common it seems with a lot of ostensibly motor racing boardgames, it's really about something else wrapped up in motor racing dress. In this instance it's really a horse-racing game. You buy cars at auction and the racing seems to be about playing cards from your hand to advance your car but keeping the powerful (I.e. move further) cards until just the right moment for the end rather than squandering them all at the start of the race and flagging in the latter stages. Yep, just like conserving stamina in a horse-race...

Double-sided board with two track, Detroit and Cleveland (HELLO CLEVELAND!) surprisingly enough...

In this game you have a hand of cards that you play from to move your car but most of the cards have compulsory moves for the other cars as well - for example the rightmost card here means that the white car must be moved 5 spaces,then the black one 2. So if you are the black car then you end up having to grant a big push to white just to move your car a little bit along the track. That said you often need to move a car out of your way first to get your full movement in so sometimes it's advantageous to be giving generously to your rivals.

 

[Coopdevil]

No, tell a lie, I did keep a third

Turbo - Milton Bradley

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3835/turbo

This is actually a children's game, one of a series of licensed games that M-B did in the 80s based on Sega arcade games (there was also a Zaxxon and something else I forget about now). In this you spin two spinners but as they are marked up 1 to 6 we always rolled two dice instead. You move your car the score on one spinner, and the other one is used for a competitor's car or the ambulance (which basically overtakes all the cars like it did in the original coin-op machine. I suspect we may be simulating Formula E here where the track support vehicles are faster than the racing cars...). The ambulance is removed when it crosses the line so towards the end of the race you have to get tactical in the way you move the other cars.

Actually a really neat idea but slightly ruined by having to include the novelties of the original arcade machine (ambulance), the icy road in which any car can be moved in all 8 directions so the end game becomes a mess of reversing and side-stepping cars until somebody manages to roll a 6 and escape the ice field.

(The grey cars in this one just stand still as blockers to be driven around).

It's actually a very clever simulation of a slightly odd computer game.

 

[Coopdevil]

This Indycar-themed one went in the purge as we'd played it to death.

Formula Motor Racing - GMT Games

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/635/formula-motor-racing

A card game with no board, you lay out 12 little rubber cartoon racing cars (6 of each colour) and proceed to play cards to adjust the order of the cars trying to work your own up to the front. The trick here is that each card that advances a car also advances the one behind it in the slipstream - again like Turbo and Detroit-Cleveland you are forced to help others as you help yourself.

This seems like a neat simulation of "draft racing" but after a bit I started to realise that, again, this was a game that had clearly started development life as something else and in this instance I'm fairly certain it began life as a game based around cycle racing's peloton - the way that a rider surges ahead, takes others with him but needs to be disciplined not to do it to early.

You play several rounds and score for both cars in your team. Ultimately it takes too long for what it is as the early stages of the race play no role in determining the final result - so very Indy 500 then.

Usually priced below £15 BTW so a cheap purchase.

 

[Coopdevil]

Right then, in the 1990s this was the absolute Daddy of motorsport boardgames

Formula De

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/173/formula-de

But it's a sad tale of decline...

Gameplay is run via a series of 6 custom dice each of which equates to a gear. You go up and down a gear at a time and roll the relevant die for your move. Obviously 1st gives low results, 6th gives the largest results with quite a high minimum move. You need to ensure that in each corner you stop (I.e. end of a single move) in the corner the number of times in the yellow flag by the corner. This prevents you from bombing around Lowes Hairpin at 210 mph. If you fail you start taking damage to your brakes/tyres based upon how many spaces your overshot by although you can crash down multiple gears and take damage to your transmission that way which is just as bad but removes the risk of crashing. Victory is based upon getting the correct gear and the getting the "managed declined" of your car right such that you can get away with being in a gear too high, but not falling apart until after the line Lotus-style.

All through the 1990s and 2000s this game was expanded with lots of two sided boards with a real racing circuit on each side. A complete collection of Formula De was a object of lust for the much younger Coop in this period. Many full race seasons were run by gaming groups, competitions all sorts of things, it was the standard of racing games. People produced alternative cars in white metal so you could buy period F1 cars, and prototypes and the like.

So went wrong?

A second edition came out, and the publishers jumped on the the ridiculous Fast and the Furious nonsense band-wagon and insisted on bundling this nonsense along with the real tracks. Instead of getting real circuits on both sides you now get city streets and police chases, and tattooed hoodlums and toss like that alongside a real circuit so basically each expansion becomes only half useful.

Correspondingly you don't hear anything about Formula De in gaming circles any more.

 

[Coopdevil]

I offer the caveat that yes, it's Wikipedia we are talking about here, but Wikipedia states that the Waddington's game dates from 1962 and that the US title was "Grand Prix". Al's 50s vintage game must be something else then.

Coop

 

[Coopdevil]

Yep, Dark Future was a wonderful concept but let down by not actually being any fun to play. I have an immaculate set in the games cupboard, it used to reach a very high price on the second hand market until enough people realised it was rubbish!

The actual conversion of die-cast cars was the best aspect which I enjoyed a lot more than the game so ultimately I wrote my own car combat car "Axles and Alloys" in the early '00s (the jokey name suggested by a wargaming friend) based upon the spacecraft wargame Full Thrust.

Another couple of car combat games are Car Wars, and the recent Gaslands from the Osprey books series of wargames rules in slim softback books.

I have pipedreams of scaling up Thunder Road to use Matchbox-scale cars but the track is going to need to be over seven feet long which perhaps makes it a bit impractical even for my local wargames club where tables are six feet long making it marginal to even fit on diagonally.

 

[Coopdevil]

I have your Axles and Alloys PDF , it's entitled: AXLES AND ALLOYS II Playtest 11Feb .pdf

Yes, that sounds like the last version that's floating around on the internet from about a decade ago. I have actually returned to it recently to create a version 3 which changes the movement system entirely and adds on a campaign system where your band of wasteland warriors and automotive gladiators grow between games - inspired by the systems in Games Workshop's Necromunda and Mordheim if you know those games.

And for a seamless segue back to *motor racing* boardgames, I'm hoping this version will be more suitable for actual racing scenarios which the original A&A wasn't. Play-testing it on Sunday as it happens with some ideas for US style figure-eight racing!

Couple of pictures from the last playtest session in which I, the author and mastermind behind it all, got spanked by a mate who'd never played it before.

EDIT - Well you would have pictures but bloody Slotforum is up to it's usual ****, refusing to allow JPGs from Imgur and I can no longer be arsed to try and work out what it's whinging about.

Also going back to *motor racing* boardgames, my wargames group compiles a calendar of three months worth of planned games at a time, and I've put forwards an evening of Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix (and maybe Turbo if there is time after that) so we'll see how they play.

Coop

 

[Coopdevil]

Anyway, start a new thread and post about your Axels and Alloys tests go. Send me your Imagur link I'd like to see it.

It's a bit OT for Slotforum to be honest, so here is the original imgur link -

http://imgur.com/tR6NNBB