A quasi-board game created by
Steve Jackson Games in the nineteen-eighties, in which players recreated battles between heavily armed and armored
cars,
trucks,
buses and
motorcycles. The game was set in a post-apocalyptic America not unlike the Australia of
Mad Max or
Roger Zelazny's novel
Damnation Alley, where roving car warriors would fight marauding motorcycle gangs, and the finest autoduellists would entertain the public by engaging in heavy-firepower
demolition derbies to the death.
The game was played on paper maps which represented sections of highway, towns, or arenas, and used either illustrated cardboard chits or lead
miniatures to represent players' vehicles. The game turn was divided up into
fractions of a second, and the
rules of the game defined probabilities that a vehicle could complete a certain maneuver in a given amount of time, taking into account such factors as the vehicle's weight,
velocity, components, and, of course, the
effects of being hit by various weapons. In addition to moving the cardboard or lead representations around the board, players kept track of their vehicles' statistics on sheets of paper, where they also recorded damage inflicted (by
gunfire,
explosions, and of course,
collisions). The vehicles themselves were usually designed by the players (according to the rules), with
design limits coming in the form of a pre-agreed upon cost ceiling.
The original game came in a small
ziplock baggie, but it was soon followed by many more sophisticated and complete versions, and spawned numerous follow-ups and additions (including the
tongue-in-cheek magazine AutoDuel Quarterly, which always included a few new nifty weapons and components). It even gave birth to a
roleplaying game set in the CarWars universe (which, I believe, was later incorporated into
GURPS).