Thunder Alley is a pretty great
NASCAR racing game by Jeff and Carla Horger, published by GMT. Read more
comprehensive reviews of Thunder Alley’s clever racing and drafting mechanics
here and here.
Neither I, nor anyone I’ve
played Thunder Alley with, have been NASCAR fans. But as an evocative
simulation of bump-and-grind team racing, Thunder Alley has succeeding in
making nearly everyone who has played it in our games say something like “Wow,
I never really cared about NASCAR, but if this is how the tactics work, I could
pay more attention.”
I admit that we haven’t followed
up on that by following NASCAR. But we’re all looking forward to playing the
game again, it’s an elegant design that’s extremely fun.
And speaking of looking forward
to playing …. What I’m really looking forward to is the Car Wars style version
of Thunder Alley, cars with weapons racing on closed circuit tracks! The
game-in-the-making is called Apocalypse Road. It’s presently at around 337 orders on GMT Games’ version of crowdfunding, the Project 500 system (aka P500)
that requires 500 pre-orders to get published.
P500 preceded Kickstarter, it’s
one of the early crowdfunding systems. P500 works extremely well for GMT but
I’m not certain it’s working as well as it could be for Apocalypse Road. GMT mainly publishes historical games. It has some
science fiction successes, but they’re considerably less wacky-looking than Apocalypse Road. I’ve got a hunch that
few GMT P500 people were ever into Car Wars. I believe that Apocalypse Road will
benefit from getting noticed by a wider fantasy/science fiction-oriented gaming
audience.
Take a look at the ApocalypseRoad development page. It’s combat racing, something like automotive roller derby:
you’ll score points for completing laps with the cars on your team and for
eliminating opposing cars. You can build cars for speed or for combat or maybe
you’ll want both.
I’m fond of the Horgers’ recent
Grand Prix. It’s a lot more predictable than the madness of Thunder Alley. But
I’m hoping for the chaos of weaponized racing, and hope the game gets noticed by people who like a good car war.
