V(d)6

Restoration Games’ ethos is an admirable one: find a great old out of print game, give it a modern development and art cycle, then make it available again. In practice I’ve found their track record scattershot. I’d say there are 3 categories: fully successful (Unmatched, Omega Virus: Prologue), total miss (Conspiracy: The Solomon Gambit, Fireball Island), and mixed result (Downforce, Key to the Kingdom). Thunder Road: Vendetta is their newest release and it throws a wrench into the above. I cannot in good conscience call it anything but “mixed”, and it certainly isn’t for all audiences, but I also enjoy it more than all of the above. Let me explain.

The original 1986 Thunder Road was very openly inspired by Mad Max and TR:V carries that forward with a bit more Fury Road for the modern era. Players are in charge of a racing crew trying to have one of their three cars cross the finish line first by any means necessary. Those means typically involve high speed impacts, hot lead, and hotter explosions. Make no mistake, this is a death race and death is the first word for a reason. I have yet to see a TR:V session where at least one player was not eliminated.

Yeah that’s right, we’re eliminating players! You’d think RG would have shied away from such a thing but no, the game’s lethality is fully embraced and it’s better off for it. It means that every slam of metal on metal feels consequential, carrying a very real sense of danger, but also a strong sense of humor. Have you ever rammed a car only to have it go awry, slide into an oil slick, pinball off another car, and directly into a stone wall killing you instantly? You’re gonna!

TR:V is not for the dice-averse. You start each round by rolling your own dice and rolling the road die. To take an action you allocate one of your dice to a vehicle. Shooting is a roll, slamming is a roll, the direction of the slam is a roll, crazy effects from the face down hazards on the board are often a roll, keep rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ rollin’. This isn’t going to have you referencing roll tables or anything either – every roll is with a unique die or combo of dice that tells you the exact result. You don’t need to remember what direction a particular number sends a skidding car or anything like that, and this keeps the game moving quickly, reliably wrapping in 30ish minutes.

That said the main contributor to its short playtime is the lethality. Cars die quickly in TR:V, and in several ways. You’d reasonably think that 2 HP on 3 cars would last a while when any given weapon attack does 1 damage but there are a wide variety of ways to instantly un-alive a driver: helicopter fire, walls, and skidding off course even an inch because there are no guardrails in the post-apocalypse. Once a player is eliminated the finish line becomes the end of the current last road tile to ensure that they’re not out of the game for too long, and this is likely a net good, but it has the unfortunate side effect of making the game feel like less like a fast paced death race and more of a demo derby where someone kinda just wins at the end. I’ve had players complain to this effect more than once.

You know what I’ve never heard anyone say, though? That they had a bad time. TR:V is random, capricious, aggressive, and unfair, but it is never ever boring. If it didn’t respect players’ time as much as it did it would likely feel considerably worse, but its sheer speed makes everything feel less like a personal attack and more like high octane banter. You accept the game’s terms from the moment the dice are first rolled to the finish, even if the result of that finish is largely out of your control. It’s rare that we see an unapologetically Ameritrashy release in the current board game landscape, much less one that plays so smoothly, but this is not a typical game. That’s worthy of a recommendation in my book.

7/10