Car Wars 6e and Gaslands: First Impressions

Caveat: This post is based on a couple of plays of each Gaslands and Car Wars 6th edition at Origins 2019. This article isn't a review or about which game is better... It is more of a first impression of the new games from a long time Car Wars buff. Honestly, if miniature car combat is your thing, you'll want both of these games. Gaslands Refuelled is the new, cleaned up hardback revision coming mid September and Car Wars 6e will be on Kickstarter any day now (literally 7 years in the waiting...).

UPDATE 09/2021: Kickstarter starts shipping in October 2021. Retail pre-orders now being taken! 

Game Design and Aesthetic

Gaslands is very much a Do-It-Yourself game. Author Mike Hutchinson recently wrote on his blog about the nature (and joys) of kitbashing Hot Wheels and other toys for a post-apocalyptic wasteland. He provides only the rules. It is up to the players (or community) to paint cars, create the play aids, build terrain, and customize their set up... OR to just dump their kid's toy box on the table, pick out some cars and random obstacles, and go to town! You can see some of the amazing community creations with a simple Google search.

Gaslands will take a small amount of pre-preparation by someone in the group. At minimum, you will need to print out the movement and weapon templates on card stock paper. You don't technically need special dice; a standard set of d6's will do. However, you will have to look up the results on a chart rather than quickly scan the dice for the special icons. Custom dice and movement templates are available on Etsy for reasonable prices.

Car Wars, on the other hand, is being produced by Steve Jackson Games which has a long and storied history producing quality board games and RPGs. Their design goal is to provide a slick, out-of-the-box board game experience for the retail consumer. From their standpoint, if Car Wars can make it onto the shelf next to Munchkin and Star Wars X-Wing at a Barnes & Noble or Target, that's a huge win. As such, their box will include a small selection of unpainted cars, rules that will fit in a relatively small number of pages, a maneuver stick, specialized dice, and possibly an arena board or play mat of some variety.

The exact contents are not fully known, but they want to make it as retail friendly as possible. Recognizing that the existing Car Wars community would also like to kitbash cars, they recently made the decision to move from HO scale to 1/64 (Hot Wheel) scale and they will be providing empty vehicle bases for customization. There is little doubt in my mind the growing Gaslands community has had an impact on these decision.

Lore wise, Gaslands portrays the grim, dirty Mad Max style post apocalypse. Car Wars is portraying the more slick arena racing and death sport side of the game, rather than the gritty apocalyptic highways (at least at first). The Car Wars Kickstarter will only include car rules. Trucks, motorcycles, and other vehicles will likely have to wait for expansions or potential stretch goals, but the SJ team has been somewhat tight-lipped.

What surprised me most may be how quickly the new Car Wars plays. As much as I like the simulation aspect of phased movement, the new system puts you right into the action immediately. The rules are also simple enough to be quickly taught. The learning curve was much smaller than I anticipated. Gaslands rules are also fairly light, but need a little bit of polish here and there (which I expect to see in the new revision coming this month).

Gaming 101: Bullies and Samaritans

Miniature skirmish games often have awesome terrain.

I hate to start a post-con wrap up with this topic, but I think this is singularly important to point out what I witnessed this weekend. Notice I didn't say “discuss” because there is no discussion. What happened was awful behavior and I want everyone to recognize it and put a stop to it when they see it.

While this incident happened in a miniatures game, I've seen this kind of behavior in many different kinds of games, and even once at my own table... so the lesson here is universal.

My wife and I attended a miniatures event this weekend at a well known convention, which should have been incredibly fun, but was hamstrung by events that occurred in the first turn. The set up was this: the players were all monsters and the town was the focus of our destructive behavior. It was a players vs. the environment situation. It was like “Rampage” (the video game) but with giant miniatures and a pseudo-medieval setting.

However, there was a caveat -- PvP was allowed in the game. It wasn’t against the rules to attack another player, but it was obvious (to me at least) that this kind of thing might happen later in the game when chaos was in full swing and the event was winding down.

So, here’s where things went sideways.

Origins Registration Crapfest... Again

Every year, it's "Next year will be better!"

And then it isn't.

UPDATE 7:00 PM - The single event cart bug just got fixed, but the search is awful, since you need provide the date AND category along with the event name or number. Lots of small press RPG events appear to be missing from registration even though they are listed on the event grid csv.

UPDATE 05/03:  Missing - Every event from 9th Level Games, Most (about 20) from Pelgrane Press, and several others missing events from the registration portal (Steve Jackson, Green Ronin, etc). Of the roughly 6000 events, only about 3500 are present in the registration portal... an absolute sh!t show.

I hate being the Debbie Downer, but this absolutely preventable poop-storm just pisses me off. Again, this year (and just about every year since about 2010), Origins Game Fair registration arrived with yet another server or code catastrophe (or both)... because you can't always anticipate the unexpected, right?

Origins 2017 Post-Game and Owlbear 500K

Last weekend, I spent my long overdue vacation time attending Origins Game Fair. During that period, Raging Owlbear crossed the 500,000 page view mark. Three years ago, I could have never guessed I’d get more than a couple thousand page views in any given month. It’s been pretty surprising the blog has grown the way it has. Thanks for the support!

Anyway, back to Origins… If you don’t already know, Origins is one of the largest tabletop gaming conventions aside from Gen Con. This year saw approximate 17,000 attendees in the Columbus Convention Center.

In a prior post, I ranted a bit on the issues encountered during pre-registration. Thankfully, the on-site badge pick up this year was fairly quick and painless. This year they had multiple laptops available on which one could perform a self check-in and have your event tickets printed.This was a welcome improvement over the last year where check-in took anywhere from ½ hour to 2 hours depending upon when you arrived. This year, we were in and out of the line in a matter of minutes.

For the most part, the convention appeared to run fairly smoothly, although I did hear from a Mayfair representative that all was not perfect. Mayfair, who is a major sponsor of Origins (and publisher of many popular games such as Agricola, Caverna and Patchwork), submitted over 700 events into the pre-registration system which, due to a technical snafu, were not in the registration system, nor printed in the events program. Because of this, the Mayfair hall was very lightly attended in comparison to other years. There is bound to be some damage to the relationship, as Mayfair has been a headline sponsor of Origins for as long as I can remember. I hope this doesn’t create a permanent rift.

From my perspective, the convention went quite well and some of the lost esteem due to pre-registration was regained over the course of the weekend.

Highlights:

• Played Castles & Crusades with author Davis Chenault (which I wrote about). He’s a true mensch.
• Had a chance encounter in the hallway with Chris O’Neill of 9th Level Games. Not only did he remember who I was, we had a pleasant (but quick) conversation about 9th Level and their new releases. Super nice fellow.
• Briefly watched Ken St. Andre GM’ing a game of Tunnels & Trolls. I would have liked to say hello, but I did not want to interrupt his game.
• Won a Tie F/O model playing X-Wing. 
• Played a truly enjoyable home brew Savage Worlds scenario.
• Participated in a crazy Paranoia LARP
• And a crap-ton of D&D Adventurers League (probably too much, to be honest).

Misses:

• I did not get an opportunity to chat with any WotC people.
• There were a few well-known authors/bloggers I wanted to meet, but did not.
• I really wanted to get to play a demo of Dragonfire which looks like it could be a hit.
• There just isn't enough time in the day to fit in all the extra gaming.
• I don't have tickets to GenCon this year... sigh.

Let me know about your Origins experience in the comments!

Owlbear and the Troll Lord	These come equipped with ER-PPCs, right?
Bit of a furball going on...	7 evades in a row?!?
Hey Guys... What's in here?	Meeting Chris O'Neill in 2016
Dice Tower's Tom Vasel	Acerak demands your.. erm... devotion.

Random Encounters with a Troll Lord

Best SWAG from Origins this year

First a bit of background… In 2004, Castles & Crusades by Troll Lord Games was the very first OSR** game to hit the market. It utilized the Open Gaming License released by Wizards of the Coast to re-create an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, but with updated mechanics. This was years before anyone used the terms “retro-clone”, “OSR” or had published D&D-adjacent games like Pathfinder.

This past weekend at Origins, one of the game masters in C&C game for which I had tickets did not show up. Even though it was not an official C&C event, the Troll Lords had heard about it and another GM from the community offered to run a different adventure in its place.

As a bit of a “sorry this happened” consolation, C&C author and lead game designer, Davis Chenault, showed up to the game with a handful of C&C beer stein swag and sat in on the game with us. The next day I had a very pleasant conversation with Davis about C&C and D&D 5th Edition, and he generously gave me a signed copy of A1 - Assault on Blacktooth Ridge for D&D 5th edition (I own the C&C version).

Owlbear and Troll Lord

I don’t have any connection to the Troll Lords other than being a huge fan over the last 10 years, but these folks are definitely the Good Guys of the industry and very committed to their fans. I urge everyone to support their work. Davis Chenault is a class act and his modules A0 and A1 are two of the best RPG adventures written. They are up there with Village of Hommlet and Keep on the Borderlands in style and substance and as good as the D&D 5th Edition Starter Set for starting a new campaign.

A0 - The Rising Knight
A1 - Assault on Blacktooth Ridge

Don’t forget that in addition to Wizards of the Coast, there are several other small publishers making awesome content for Dungeons & Dragons. You should check them out!

** Old School Revival or Old School Renaissance depending upon whom you ask.

My Last Origins

This will be my last Origins.

Just about every year, Origins opens its registration system to a rush of several thousand attendees. Just about every year, it’s a disaster of web site unresponsiveness, and just about every year they say, “Next year we will improve.” Every year, they don’t. Last year, they couldn’t even get badges quickly to people attending on the first day because of “computer problems” and ran out of convention programs.

This year was no different… and actually even worse than usual.

You see, this year in order to make sure I was ready for event registration day, I attempted to login to my account prior to event registration. For whatever reason, my password was not working. I was not terribly surprised, as I have a whole bunch of different passwords in order to minimize any attack on my identity. After trying several different times, I just decided to just use the “Forgot Password” option.

It didn’t work.

It was a few days before registration, so I emailed the Origins contacts so that I might get it reset before the event registration started. At first, there was no response, so I emailed again, and I called. They assured me it would be fixed before registration starts, and they would notify me as soon as it was.

Days pass. I email again the morning of registration. I asked if they could change it manually. “It will be fixed prior to registration opening,” I was told again. “We can’t change the password. We will let you know as soon as it is fixed.”

It wasn’t. They didn’t.

My wife and I were screwed. I had registered us both for the weekend pass, but could not access either account because of the password issues and thousands were about to flood the queue.

There was, however, a small breakthrough for us. We had two other family members that were going to attend, but doing events that were not the same as ours… So we asked if we could register our events under their itinerary  in order to hold the spots. Thankfully, they were totally cool with that.
So, on Wednesday, event registration opens and the site fails dramatically. No one can login without getting timeouts. No one can search events without all kinds of Java site errors or 503 Service Unavailable errors. The website was crashing so often, NHTSA said they were going to open an investigation.

Over the course of 3+ hours, my wife and I managed to get enough page loads between us to get into about 10 events… Or about 3 successful event registrations per hour.

Origins then announces on Twitter and Facebook that they will close registration until Friday at 1 PM to get the issues fixed… but then they secretly re-opened registration on Thursday without telling anyone they had told to wait until Friday. So, basically, if you listened to them, you were screwed out of events you might have wanted because other people kept trying anyway and found that registration has been re-opened earlier than announced (and the password issue was still not fixed).

The password issue was eventually fixed over the weekend, four days after event registration was initially opened (and after almost everything was completely booked). I was extremely lucky that I had family that could grab the slots my wife and I wanted to play. I’m certain many others did not have that opportunity.

They never emailed to let me know the password recovery had been fixed, despite telling me repeatedly they would. No notification. No apology.

S#!t technology… Even s#!ttier communication. For a 15,000+ attendee event, this is the worst event management I’ve ever seen. They apparently don’t even test the most basic functions of the website -- login, password recovery, and event registration -- which is basically everything you need to have a convention website.

I have been a major proponent of Origins on this blog and among my gaming friends, but there are other smaller cons that are growing each year with better customer experience -- Gamehole Con, BGG Con, Dice Tower Con, PAX East, and now PAX Unplugged. Origins may be the #2 spot in terms of size at the moment, but if it keeps offering crap customer experience, it will find itself less relevant as time goes on. It certainly will be for me as my family and I  will be seeking other alternatives and recommending others do the same. If they can't fix their management issues, they do not deserve our money.

Royals board game (Origins Preview)

It's good to make friends in high placed.

As I noted in my Origins Post Game Report, my wife and I were able to try out a few pre-release titles, including Royals from Arcane Wonders, an area control game with a card mechanic. Royals supports 2 to 5 players.

Royals is scheduled for official release in August at Gen Con 2016, but they had a few hundred pre-release copies for sale at Origins (and is available for pre-order at Amazon).

Origins 2016 Post Game Report

The Eagle has landed.

My wife and I were fortunate enough to attend Origins 2016 in Columbus, OH this past weekend. It was the first time in over 5 years having a vacation without kids (Thank you, Grandma Diane, Papa Frankie and Great Aunt Donna!). To say that the weekend was hotly anticipated would be an understatement... and our expectations were almost entirely met!

Origins did have a registration snafu on Wednesday due to some down computers (people always blame the computers), but we were lucky enough to miss all of that. By Thursday morning, the Registration and Pre-Registration (Will Call) lines were not terribly long and we got our badges and tickets in 15 minutes, tops. They did. however, have a snafu with printing the coupon books, so many of the vendor booth SWAG was not available to a great majority of attendees. That was a pretty bad screw up. I mean, when you pay $55 just to get in the door (no games included), you expect to get some SWAG... or at least a coupon to buy some SWAG at a discount.

I won't bore you with a blow-by-blow, but will hit some of the highlights.