State of Play: Apocalypse Road (not a wargame, but…)

 

I wouldn’t normally report on a non-wargame here, but it’s always good to see a new game get to the table, even if it’s somebody else’s. Wednesday just gone saw Apocalypse Road (GMT Games, 2020) get its first test drive (after sitting on B’s shelf for over a year; but I’m in no position to judge or criticise). No, it’s not a wargame, but it was so much fun, I thought it deserved a little blog-loving.

Apocalypse Road is the direct descendant of Thunder Alley (GMT, 2014), Jeff and Carla Horger’s stock car racing game. In fact, the seed of Apocalypse Road was there from the beginning; in a recent interview with Dan Pancaldi, Jeff Horger mentioned that when playtesting Thunder Alley at gaming conventions, the most common questions were variations of, “Can we shoot at the other cars?”

Each player picks a team, and choses four cars from their selection of eight to begin the game. There were five of us playing, so twenty cars were spread across the four-lane starting section, but the game can accommodate up to ten “teams.” Going around the table, each team leader plays a movement card out of their hand of six cards. The movement is dynamic in that, depending on what type of movement action you play on a vehicle, it may push or pull other adjacent cars along, and after a car has moved, it’s flipped over to the other side (same illustration and markings, but a slightly darker background) to indicate that that vehicle has been driven. When each player’s four cars have moved, the round ends, unwanted remaining cards are discarded, and everyone’s hands are replenished back to six cards for the next round. 

Depending on what your vehicle is packing, you might be able to fire at another car, either at the beginning or the end of your movement, and some cards let you ram opponents. Each car can take six points of damage, and some have a higher threshold for that pain (each car has an armour rating of one to three), but sometimes a single hit will take a car out. When this happens, you pick one of your remaining cars, and start over. Rinse and repeat until there’s a winner or until you run out of cars.

There was plenty of action with twenty cars on the track, and it wasn’t long before we saw the first casualty. By the time the winner made the required 20 victory points, a total of twelve cars had been, well, totalled.

Even with five teams, the race didn’t take much over two hours to reach a victor. Because of the dynamic nature of the movement, everyone is engaged in the action all the time. I cannot overstate how much fun this game is to play, and the fact that it can be played in an evening on a school night is a big selling point.