Tim Mossman
United States
Montgomery County
Maryland
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Sunday Drivers was the “scenario” expansion to the original Car Wars game. The setting is the normally uneventful town of Midville caught in a confluence of really bad events . . . and, by the way, it’s Sunday.
What the expansion added (Playability): While Car Wars and the Truck Stop expansion provided all the technical detail to build and operate everything from a decked-out tractor-trailer to a motorcycle/sidecar combo to an armed pedestrian, the storyline underlying the game was outlined at a relatively high-level, and scenarios for gameplay were fairly generic. Sunday Drivers ably filled the scenario void.
The expansion sets up two large scenarios, which feature heavy use of pedestrians and motorcycles, with less of an emphasis on cars. While this focus may seem contrary to the notion of “car” wars, the urban setting makes the pedestrians a formidable force, and the cycle gang, if used in a disciplined fashion, are not easily dismissed either. [Of course, there are still cars that play and nothing prohibits you from bringing oversized vehicles (from the Truck Stop expansion) into town.]
Our experience in playing with the expansion highlighted some inherent advantages of playing the pedestrians in either scenario. Although the exact numbers do not come to mind, I seem to recall certain unrealistic movement capabilities of a “man on foot” to be a likely source of the slight edge held by the pedestrians. [Note: I don’t believe the enjoyment of the scenario was affected by (my perceived?) pedestrian bias.]
As with many sessions of the Car Wars game, preparation time could take a while - particularly if you wanted to really design your vehicles (which I always enjoyed doing) rather than just copy down the specification of "stock" vehicles. And with the Sunday Drivers scenarios, there are so many moving parts (especially in the "cycle gang" scenario), actual gameplay took a non-trivial amount of time as well. [Note: We primarily played Car Wars back in high school (20+ years ago) when disposible free time was more readily available.]
What the expansion added (Technical Detail): This expansion is long on scenario detail with sufficient storyline to set a mood; however, only a handful of new rules come into play and just a couple of new pieces of hardware.
• The first scenario is a “Wheels vs. Walkers” tiff. A local disagreement over municipal security has pitted 2 or 3 armed vehicles against 20 members of the local militia. The vehicle player gets a little more than twice the cash to equip his side, which goes a long way to striking a balance against the inherent advantages that pedestrians have in an urban setting.
• The second scenario is a larger fracas between a rogue bicycle gang and the combined forces of the local autoduelists, militia and police.
Unlike other Car Wars universe events where the last one standing wins, both scenarios have a point system for meeting a variety of criteria. The side with the most points wins at the conclusion of hostilities wins. [Naturally, the side that has the most forces still remaining is more likely to be the victor.] A few variants are also provided for the above scenarios, but intuitively, the types of forces detailed in the basic scenarios were best suited to performing on city streets (i.e., oversized vehicles don’t maneuver well in tight quarters).
The new rules mainly dealt with the impact of buildings on combat and movement. Of course, the ability of buildings to take punishment was also addressed . . . and every shot that doesn’t hit its intended target has the potential to “bring down the house” or at least a lot of debris. Hand-to-hand combat is also covered. The fog-of-war provision was potentially the most dramatic rule augmentation. These rules permitted the pedestrian player to potentially move or hide forces in a fashion undetectable to the “wheeled” player (until they moved into the open or fired).
The new equipment in the Sunday Drivers expansion consisted of a couple of new weapons for pedestrians and blades for cycles (useless against everything except pedestrians). While these additions had applicability to the scenarios, they would seem to have a minimal impact on the overall Car Wars game.
The map of Midville consisted of two map sheets, which cover a little more than square meter of playing surface. Since the paper maps come folded in a tiny plastic box, having a large piece of plexiglass to place them under made for the ideal playing surface. If someone deemed “downtown Midville” insufficient for gameplay, I believe that Car Wars Expansion #3 provided the maps for “East Midville”, which must have really allowed for significant urban warfare. And, oh yeah, there are a lot of new counters in the Sunday Drivers box to handle all the pedestrians and cycles that could be in play, plus a bunch more rubble counters for buildings that “get in the way”.
For those players who “developed characters” in the Car Wars universe, there was no obvious tie from the scenarios to any bigger campaign; although creative folks like board gamers probably would have figured out how to make it happen.
Summary: Sunday Drivers was a neat addition to the Car Wars base game. A lot of mayhem ensued during play of either of these scenarios, with so many moving, armed characters on the map. Playing in the urban setting with heavy motorcycle and pedestrian participation was definitely a healthy change of scenery from the basic “road dueling with cars” battle format.
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Ethan McKinney
United States
El Segundo
California
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IronMoss wrote:
• The second scenario is a larger fracas between a rogue bicycle gang and the combined forces of the local autoduelists, militia and police.
As opposed to an establishment gang?
Anyhow, I have this vision of guys pedaling like mad while firing machine guns: "squeaky-squeaky-squeaky-BLAM!"
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Tim Mossman
United States
Montgomery County
Maryland
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"bicycle"
 . . . as I re-learn not to proof-read my own writing.
Although, if you had a bicycle gang led by the paperboy from the movie "Better Off Dead", that could be a formidable group. Your scenario is to ride into Midville and collect $2.00 from the delinquent Meyer family account. [Granted, that's a bit of a dated reference, but Car Wars is getting up there in age too.]
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