Car Wars

                                                        RANKINGS 

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1. Battle Road - Score = 7.3    Tier = Good

Attempts to beat: 7

Gentlemen....start your engines! Another new series begins, and now I get to experience the world of Car Wars by Steve Jackson (the US one). These gamebooks are based off the boardgame which was first released in 1980, and which involves players competing in vehicular combat set in a slightly more advanced near future. I am completely unfamiliar with the boardgame and its universe, so this gamebook will be my introduction to it. The character we play in this adventure (who we can name ourselves), is some sort of gun-and-tires-for-hire type, and we are summoned by a prior acquaintance of ours to see if we are interested in a mission they have for us, and which they are willing to pay handsomely for should we be successful (to the tune of $100,000). It appears as though the President of Louisiana's daughter, Angela, has been kidnapped by an Oklahoma oil baron known as John Twoeagles, and Twoeagles intends to force Angela to marry him, thus making him the "heir to the throne" of Louisiana. Ok, a couple of things to unpack here. So apparently in this near future, the states of America are now functioning as their own nations if I'm following what I'm reading? At least this appears to be the case for Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas in any case, but I'm not totally sure, as there is no background information given as to how the former United States are now constructed politically. Also, it sounds as though once a president of a state dies, their next of kin inherits the presidency? Interesting. In any event, our mission is to travel north in our battle car from Austin, Texas (coincidentally, the headquarters of Steve Jackson Games) to Twoeagles' ranch in Oklahoma, and rescue Angela before the wedding can take place. We are informed that the ceremony is scheduled to happen at 1pm the following day, which gives us exactly 24 hours to complete the mission. 

I liked how the character creation here isn't random, with you having 10 points to distribute among your stats of Driving, Gunnery, Mechanic, Prestige, and Wealth, thus allowing you to customize your character depending upon the approach you wish to take. The Driving and Gunnery stats I found to be the most important, but the Wealth stat is interesting, as it determines how much cash you start the adventure with, and you are required to spend money on certain weapons and car upgrades as you go. Just before you set off, you are provided a map of your route through Texas and Oklahoma, and can also gather information about weather conditions and possible bandit activity. You then proceed north along the highway, possibly having to deal with such things as the aforementioned bandits, overturned vehicles, border crossings, poor roads, and foul weather. 

The vehicle combat system here I really found quite enjoyable, with one exception that I will save for later. Each vehicle comes with its own stats, the most important being its Defense Class, as this determines how difficult it is for enemies to hit you. The vehicle Handling stat also plays a role as well, as combined with your own personal Driving stat, this determines how well you can avoid spin-outs, dodge obstacles, and generally keep your vehicle on the road. Your car can be equipped with several weapons such as machine guns, lasers, rockets, and smokescreens, and these can be located on either the front or back of your car to act as front-firing or rear-firing weapons, and this becomes a key distinction. Each type of weapon comes with its own combat bonus and damage modifier, with rockets for example being harder to hit an enemy with (-1 to Combat) but inflicting higher damage (3xD6 roll!). Combat works by having you and your enemy taking turns, with you rolling two dice, and if the result added to your Combat bonus exceeds the Defense Class of your opponent, then you hit with whatever weapon you chose to fire with, and get to deduct that weapon damage (ie. a 1xD6 roll for a machine gun hit, or 3xD6 roll for a rocket hit) from the enemy vehicle Hit Points. And here lies the exception I mentioned earlier. The Defense Class of the vehicles in the book are set high enough that it is hard for anyone to hit anything. I found myself going numerous rounds on end in a battle with no one being able to cause any damage. This is compounded by the high Hit Point numbers that most vehicles are given, and all this together obviously drags out the combat for much longer than it needs to be, and it can feel like you are just endlessly rolling dice. The adventure also includes an advanced system whereby you need to keep track of all your ammo. My goodness! I didn't use these advanced rules, but with all the missed shots that go on during combat, I can see you running out of ammo VERY quickly here.

There is also a great inclusion in the form of a "Special Damage" system. Whenever you score a hit and then roll to see how much damage you caused, if any of the dice come up as a 1, you just had a lucky shot which caused special damage. In this case, you get to roll two dice again, and consult the Special Damage chart at the front of the book to see what else you inflicted on your enemy apart from the normal Hit Point reduction. These special hits can include things such as a decrease to the vehicle defense class, damage to one of its weapons, or a hit upon its power core (its engine). Every weapon on a vehicle, along with its power core, has its own number of damage boxes, and if you can score a hit for each damage box, you can knock that weapon out of the fight, or in the case of the power core, totally incapacitate the vehicle. This is fantastic stuff.  

Taking the above into consideration then, and with how fleshed out and intricate the combat system can be, it is somewhat puzzling that there seem to be relatively few combats in the adventure. This is certainly true along the optimal path at least, as on my winning playthrough I only needed to get in one battle, but on the positive side I found it to be a very intense and fun fight. If you go looking for trouble in the adventure you can certainly find it, as there are opportunities to encounter bandits along the road at several different spots, but none of these are required, and from a story perspective you would be looking to avoid them anyway. 

However, I really appreciated how there are several helpful items that can be obtained, but that aren't essential to completing the quest either. When I first started playing the book, I was routinely given the option to stop and investigate such things as truck stops, overturned vehicles, or to detour into a major city. But with your mission here being one of rescue, and with you being advised to get across the map to Twoeagles' ranch in Oklahoma as fast as you can, there is really no reason why your character would stop to investigate anything, and it felt more appropriate to just gun it as fast as possible without braking for nobody! Doing so, I was surprised at how far you can actually make it across the map and close to your ultimate goal without having to really face anything or barely touch the dice, except for the odd Control roll (to keep your car from spinning off the road). It was only once I got to the final third of the adventure, and I started to be asked if I had obtained things like passwords, ID cards, or "laser foam" just before a very difficult fight (and having no idea what they were talking about), did it become clear that those earlier "investigations" I had passed up would have led to items that I badly needed. It is still possible to beat the book by blasting your way through everything in the end game, but you will need to be pretty lucky with the dice in combat for that to happen, so discovering where all the helpful items were located was one of the big pleasures of the book, and made investigating everything you come across eventually worthwhile. 

This is one of those gamebooks that also involves a time limit, with the book at certain sections requiring you to mark off a given amount of hours. You obviously need to get to Twoeagles' ranch within the 24 hour window or all is lost. I've found in the past that these kind of time limits can usually deter exploring, but here you seem to have been given more than enough time to attempt various new paths without having to worry about it too much. In fact, I'm not sure you wouldn't make it to the ranch in time unless you stopped and detoured at every single opportunity, and incurred almost every time penalty. So while making it to the ranch on time is no problem, I did appreciate how events occurred differently depending upon what time you arrived at any given location along the way as you traveled, if sometimes only slightly. There are also a few places where you can trade in your car for a different vehicle, should you be able to afford it, and this is a great inclusion. I found this to be key as well, as the car that you start the adventure with was not very suitable for the one combat I knew I was going to have. More to that point, I believe that most combats in the book involve an enemy coming at you from behind, so you need to prioritize having a vehicle with strong rear-firing weapons.

While I wouldn't call the creation of atmosphere along the way fantastic by any means, Jackson does a strong enough job with the prose that I nevertheless found it an enjoyable trip, particularly when encountering the storms that you come across and must drive through. That said, the adventure does include one of the lamest April Fools' jokes ever, but the police officers who play it on you are drunk at the time, so I guess that can be used as an excuse. I also have to give Jackson some mad props for including an instant death paragraph on the very last section of the book. When confronted with a choice in the late game stages of the adventure, I saw that one of the decisions led to that magical ending section (knowing how many sections the book had beforehand). I immediately thought this was another one of those goofs where the author inadvertently gave away what the right decision was, as the victory section for "most" gamebooks up to this point has been the final one of the book. Not only is that not the case here, but Jackson actually goads you into this insta-death by tantalizingly including it as a very reasonable choice among one of the final options. Well played sir!

This is also the second gamebook in a row I've played that I have noticed some strong movie parallels, notably during the final stretch once you rescue Angela. This time, it's the 1977 road movie "Smokey and the Bandit", with in addition to the stereotypical "CB talk" from that film, we also get the rescue of a girl in her wedding dress, and the "sliding into the rocking chair" scene, where you escape from the authorities by hiding among a convoy of friendly truckers. This really made me feel like Burt Reynolds, and I could almost hear the song "Eastbound and Down" playing in my head during this sequence, and I just had to go back and rename my character "Bandit" afterwards. 

Yes, this actually happens in the book too. "We got a long way to go, and a short time to get there. Just watch ol' Bandit run!" 

Ranking: I had a good time with this. It introduces a fairly intricate and well thought out combat system, but then barely requires it to be used. This is therefore an item hunt through and through, but quite an enjoyable one. You also really need to plan carefully on how to allocate your initial attribute points, and where you will spend your money, as you are provided just enough of both to see you successfully to the end. And while I wouldn't call it anything special, I enjoyed the setup and the atmosphere as well. A good start for the series for sure, and I look forward to the next book to see if Jackson can keep it going and possibly improve upon it.

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2. Fuel's Gold - Score = 6.4    Tier = OK

Attempts to beat: 6

One aspect of the series I had been wondering about was whether you were meant to be playing as the same character in each adventure. While it isn't made explicitly clear, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that in this book anyway, you are meant to be a totally different individual that completed the previous adventure, mostly because your character here begins the book woefully short on cash, which wouldn't make much sense after you cashed in a big payday in the previous book. This story also takes place in a different state (Massachusetts), than did book 1, and here we play as a retired military officer who now makes his way in the world by competing as a professional car duellist, fighting in arena tournaments and living off the winnings. When the adventure begins, we have just finished competing in a tournament, and we are approached by a former commander of ours to see if we would be interested in taking on a courier job for the military, and run a briefcase (presumably containing some top secret information) from Albany, New York to a truck stop that happens to be owned by a friend of ours named Louie, and which is located just outside Boston, Massachusetts and is where a temporary military base has been set up, and a colonel there is waiting for the contents of the case. We are actually given the option of turning the job down (and I immediately thought this would be one of those instant game over scenarios), but if you choose to do this, the colonel just forces you to go on the job anyway! So another one of those "what the heck was the point of that?" no-decision decisions. Heading out, we eventually find ourselves caught up in a plot by a well known anarchist group, the Anarchist Relief Front (or ARF for short), that intends to detonate several gas tankers that they have unearthed in order to cause chaos and destruction in the city of Boston. Gas is no longer used in vehicles in this near future, as everything is now powered by electricity, and as such these gas tankers are also very valuable (although if gas is no longer used, I'm not sure why that is). It is therefore up to us to cast our lot with the local militia, and help them in foiling the ARF plot. 

There is also a fairly lengthy and interesting sidequest here that involves you reuniting a hitchhiker with her altruistic biker gang friends in Boston, and then assisting them in destroying an ARF base. The reward for completing this sidequest is an overpowered vehicle (80 Hit Points, +1 Laser Cannon turret that can fire in all directions and does 3D6 damage!), and while the book can technically be beaten without this car, it is highly recommended to get due to the difficulty of at least one of the upcoming encounters. There is one car combat involved before you can obtain this prize, but you don't even need to win this fight outright, you just need to survive for 15 rounds and are then granted victory, and with how tough it is for anyone to score a hit, this shouldn't pose much of a problem. So while this sidequest then doesn't really require you to do all that much, it is still fun and well written.  

I touched upon the lack of combats along the required route in the previous book, but seeing as how hard it was for either me or my opponent to score a hit, this may actually have been a blessing in disguise. This adventure plays out much the same way, with a fair number of car combats in the book, but only one fight to the death that I believe can't be avoided. And unfortunately, this combat takes the previous problem of dragged out fights and takes it to the nth degree. During this particular encounter, I found that I needed to roll an 11 or higher to hit my opponent, and thanks to the high-powered car I had obtained earlier, the only way he could hit me was if he rolled a 12! With both cars also having very high Hit Point totals, this fight took a truly ludicrous amount of dice rolling to complete, and I actually found myself contemplating using some sort of automatic dice roller to take the strain off my arm. (Has anyone ever called in sick to work with a gamebook induced dice rolling injury?) Hey authors ....maybe dial back on the Defense Class values of these vehicles! 

The book also begins in a tedious manner, by having you participate in a car combat right in the introduction. You can't die in this fight (it's an arena battle with a friendly competitor of yours), and the only difference between winning and losing is a few thousand more dollars to spend. This proves almost completely pointless however, as the money system which played a key role in the first book is all but forgotten here, as other than a shop that you can visit in Boston (and even doing this means you have missed out on the sidequest), I found nowhere where I could buy anything. Forcing the player to go through this battle on every playthrough with almost nothing at stake was not a good inclusion on the part of the authors. 

There is a unique sequence near the end of the adventure where you have 15 minutes to disarm 4 bombs that have been attached to the gas tankers before they explode, which would obliterate the truck stop, and immolate all the hostages now being held there. In order to do this, you need to keep rolling two dice until you get under a gradually increasing number, then can move on to the next bomb and repeat the process, with each attempt (and the act of moving between bombs) costing you 30 seconds of time. This is a pretty neat idea, unfortunately the authors just couldn't help themselves and had to throw in a rule whereby should you roll a 12 at any point, you inadvertently trigger a bomb, and it's game over. With how many dice rolls it took me to disarm all the bombs, it seemed only a matter of time before I would roll a 12, and sure enough, on all three of my attempts at passing this section, I ended up rolling that fateful 12 and blew myself, and everyone in the facility, to kingdom come. Thankfully, I eventually learned that this sequence isn't required to defeat the adventure, but why authors continue to include these "roll this one number and you die" moments eludes me, as they are as frustrating as all get out. 

Unlike the first book, which was authored by Steve Jackson alone, this adventure is credited to three authors, those being Jackson again along with Creede and Sharleen Lambard. I think it shows too as there are some new design elements introduced, such as the bomb section mentioned earlier, along with another one that involves you needing to hotwire a car by trying different options, and you only have a certain amount of section turns in which to get the car running. One other thing that hit me while playing this adventure was how much time you actually spend outside your car, which is in stark contrast to the previous book. With events such as enemy agents ambushing you in your hotel room, the befriending and aiding of a rebel group with similar aims as yours, a big assault on an enemy held location, and finally, the defusing of several bombs, this adventure comes across as more of a "James Bond" type mission than the "Road Warrior/Smokey and the Bandit" style seen in the first book, with your vehicle not playing as much of a factor as you might be led to believe from the premise of the series. 

The final act of the book, that provides several different ways to defeat the ARF's, along with some creative (if sometimes frustrating) ideas, is the strength of the adventure, and there are also a few different successful endings of varying degrees that can be achieved here. Your friend Louie (the owner of the truck stop), can either survive or perish, and his truck stop can either be destroyed or not. However, it is possible to get all the hostages clear even if his truck stop is destroyed by the bombs, in which case Louie even says (should he live) that he can claim salvage rights on the valuable leftover gasoline, so the turn of events might actually be a good thing for him. As usual in a gamebook with multiple successful endings, this makes the adventure somewhat on the easy side, and if I had realized sooner that the bomb diffusing sequence wasn't required, I likely would have beaten this book in several less attempts than it ultimately took.  

Ranking: I can admit that this adventure tries more creative things than the first book did, so I can at least give it points for that. Unfortunately, the majority of these ideas, while not disasters by any means, ultimately fall flat. The dragged out combats that were a minor concern in book 1 have been dialed up even further here, and the bomb disarming section, while original, includes an infuriating "instant death" roll which only serves to anger. The story here might actually be a bit better than the previous book, but I preferred the atmosphere and "road movie" style feel of that adventure, along with its puzzle solving aspect, and overall had more fun with it.

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3. Dueltrack - Score = 5.5    Tier = OK

Attempts to beat: 3

So what do you get when you create a mystery-solving style adventure (a good thing) but then give it one of the most bland and boring (not a good thing) mysteries to solve? You get a middling and mostly boring gamebook is what you get. As in the previous adventure, this story sees us stepping into the shoes of another professional car combat arena duellist. Unlike that previous adventure however, where you were just scraping by trying to make ends meet, here you get to play as one of the top drivers in the country, and a national celebrity. You are the top driver for Simpson Electronics, a large and wealthy corporation owned by your childhood friend, John Simpson, with your exploits in the arena driving the flagship car the "Simpson Special", earning you great renown. This is a really good initial premise, and there is an ego boost to be had here as you stay in the most expensive and finest hotels, and have the media and adoring fans following you everywhere you go. The book begins at a press conference where Simpson announces that he has developed a robot known as RB-4 (I guess calling it R2-D2 would have been infringement) which he believes can replace a human being in performing the task of gunner, and maybe even mechanic, in the arena, therefore eliminating the need to use people in these roles. As the introduction of any people replacing technology is wont to do, this causes considerable consternation and outrage from various members of the car combat community, as this obviously puts some of their high paying professions at risk. Furthermore, Simpson plans to use the RB-4 in your car for the upcoming prestigious Atlanta Classic arena combat event, thus also making you personally a target for your competitors vitriol. The mystery comes into play when that night you are awakened in your hotel room to find a knife embedded in your pillow, along with a note warning you against using the RB-4, "or else". You then take it upon yourself, with Simpson's blessing no less, to find out who is threatening you and bring them to justice. Hang on a minute, surely being the famous driver that you are, you must face such things as threats routinely? And while someone managing to get into your high-security hotel room is nothing to take lightly, wouldn't the extremely rich Simpson have his own people to look into this? Would he really be ok with his famous high performance driver and longtime friend venturing out into the city alone trying to track down this dangerous individual (or individuals), especially with the most important arena event of the year taking place in two days time? Even with all that logic aside, trying to solve the mystery of who broke into your hotel room to leave a threatening note is some pretty weak stuff, but whatever. So off we go into the city to see what we can learn.           

Despite that snooze-fest of an opening, the adventure then proceeds by providing you a bunch of different options and things to investigate such as going to talk to your main rival, or checking out your competitors warehouse facilities, or having a chat with the press or the police to see what they know, so design wise at least, it gets off to a good start. As you begin exploring these various options from a hub paragraph, you begin to discover that while a couple of these paths might lead to some minor helpful information, as it turns out you really only need to investigate one of these options in order to progress the story. And even that option is basically sign-posted for you, as Simpson himself tells you right before you set out who he thinks is responsible. The other paths that contain some possibly helpful but minor information, also contain some really bad design problems. Oftentimes it is not a skill check but a random roll that determines whether you obtain a possible clue or piece of information. For instance you might be looking over a room, and told to roll a die. If you roll a 1 or 2 you miss the clue and continue on none the wiser. Thankfully none of the information contained behind these rolls is essential, but having a mystery adventure whereby the means of obtaining clues is determined by random roll is a terrible idea. 

The Money element, which was very well handled in the first book, then almost forgotten in the second book, is completely abandoned here. You are told early on that you have a Simpson company card, and your money is basically unlimited so don't even worry about it. This is becoming a shame. The Time tracking that was used in book 1 is brought back here, but it doesn't work very well this time. As like in the first book, you need to track how much time you spend doing certain activities, but you are given so much time to do what you need to that the adventure shouldn't have even bothered. Even with being required to return to the hotel room to sleep for 6 hours a night lest you take a hit to your stats, I still found myself with way too much time on my hands even after exploring all the investigating options that were open to me. The adventure also seems to be incomplete to a degree, as a couple of things popped up that made no sense. At one point I found myself having a meal in a diner and was told to count that as one of my meals for the day. Huh? I don't remember seeing any meal requirement system anywhere in the game, not even under the advanced rules. In another section I was told that if I had found a matchbook, I could turn to the section number that had the address of the location on the matchbook. I had indeed found a matchbook, but could not find any address associated with it, either in the section I found it, nor on the illustration. So unless there was a second matchbook that I never uncovered, I'm not sure what happened there. On that note, there are many hidden references here that can only be reached by finding a clue, then when prompted, apply some math to the number within the clue to get to the hidden section. I generally love this kind of thing, which only made the ability to uncover most of these clues through random rolls even more frustrating. Additionally, I also found author Scott Haring's writing to be a step down from the previous books, as the atmosphere here is almost non-existent. I began to wonder if the big twist at the end would be the revelation that my character was in fact a robot himself, created by Simpson as a childhood friend long ago, as he seemed so bland and robotic. A pity Haring didn't actually go this route. 

The best part of the book, and that which almost saves it, is the big arena fight at the end, where you take on not only your heated rival (Eddie Hernandez), but also 4 other duellists to see who can win the event and the money and prestige that goes along with it. The way the battle is set up, Eddie will always fire at you because he hates you so much (and you should therefore always fire at him, even though you can target any of the other cars if you wish), but the other 4 cars can fire on anyone, with their choice of target determined by a roll of the dice and then consulting a table. Since you and Eddie are so evenly matched, it is incredibly satisfying to watch one of the other competitors attempt to do him damage, and just as unsatisfying when they instead take a shot at you! I found this big combat very fun and intense to play through, and was on the edge of my seat during most of it. That said, it does have some drawbacks. Just the setup alone for this sequence is time consuming, as you will need to record the stats and weapons for all 6(!) of the cars involved on a sheet of paper before you begin. To be fair though, the adventure foresees the problem here, and provides separate rules for the 4 unnamed cars should you not wish to play out all their attacks. Then the usual problem of high attack rolls being needed to do any damage rears its head again, although I have to say it was improved to a degree in this adventure, with most of the cars having Defense Class values a couple of points lower than in the previous books (I guess somebody was listening!). And finally, you don't actually need to win this battle to beat the book, you just need to defeat Eddie. Even if one of the other unnamed duellists knocks you out after you have eliminated Eddie, you will still get sent to section 400, which is back to being the final victory section for the gamebook. Speaking of the final victory section, there is quite a bit of pointlessness going on within it, as you are told how much money and Prestige points you can add to your stats depending on whether you were able to win the event or not, and whether you successfully protected the RB-4. But why would the author bother? Unless something changes with the next book and you are carrying this character over, what is the purpose of giving you stat boosts in the very last section? 

Ranking: The adventures in the series are slowly getting worse. Lame story aside, the design of this one starts out very well, providing you a mystery to solve and an incredible amount of freedom in how you want to solve it. But you eventually find out that most things you can do are just a complete waste of time. You also spend even more time outside your car than you did in the last adventure, with only the final arena car battle being anything of note, and the highlight of the book. Here's to hoping the next book reverses this downward trend and returns to the promise the series showed with the first adventure.

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4. Badlands Run - Score = 6.1    Tier = OK

Attempts to beat: 8

Great mustache on the cover! The book itself? Not nearly as good. As suspected, we are once again playing a totally different character here, thus making all the bonuses granted in the final section of the previous book indeed totally pointless (would love to hear the author's reasons for it). As interesting as playing a celebrity was, we are back to playing some Joe Schmoe, in this case a security guard for hire. The story begins with our partner and ourselves being hired to deliver a high ranking Mormon church official from his base in Salt Lake City, Utah, to a meeting in San Francisco, California. This church elder, Orson Whitney, has been invited to a conference with the reformed United States government to possibly discuss the return of Deseret (an area of Utah) to a central authority. Not surprisingly, there is a pro-independence group known as "Deseret First" that wants none of this, and has threatened to make sure that Whitney never makes it to the conference by assassinating him. Our partner is taken out of the adventure very early on (by food poisoning from some bad chili of all things), which leaves it up to us to travel through Utah, Nevada, and California in our heavily armoured security van and deliver Whitney safely to San Francisco.   

The design of this adventure is VERY similar to that of "Battle Road", which was the first book in the series. Like that adventure, this one is also a mostly linear cross-country road trip, with various encounters along the way that can either be investigated in the hopes of obtaining something useful, or they can just be ignored altogether and you can take your chances on powering through the end game without any aid. There are also a couple of places to stop and buy some improvements and weapons for your vehicle, and you must also make sure your vehicle gets a regular charging at one of the various service stations along the way. Also as in "Battle Road", there is a split along the route where you can choose which path you want to take before the roads converge back together again further down the highway. This time however, one of the two paths leads to instant failure (at least as far as I could tell), which calls into question the whole point of having this split in the route to begin with, other than to tease you. This adventure also completely ditches the Time tracking that was used in that first book, which seems odd as it is made clear that you need to get Whitney to San Francisco by a certain time, and it makes me wonder if the authors just couldn't be bothered in trying to implement this mechanic.  

Something that stands out about this adventure is that it is the first one in the series where there is no other vehicles that can be acquired, as you must take your Security Van through the whole journey. A positive of this is that you don't have to go through the process of recording a new vehicle and all its stats every time you acquire one which can become tedious, but that is about the only positive, as driving a large van isn't exactly the stuff excitement is made of. The Security Van is more like a tank, very powerful but with a terrible Handling attribute. This is a problem, because there are a few Control Rolls (which determine if you can keep the vehicle on the road) scattered throughout the book that lead to game over should you fail them. You therefore have little choice but to allocate as many points as you can to your Driving attribute to compensate for this, which really lowers any experimentation with the other attributes that you otherwise might have done. There are some quite creative improvements for your van that you can purchase, but even when shopping for them in-game, they seem awfully specific. For example you can buy a rocket that only fires vertically (gee, I wonder if that will factor into the adventure later somehow?), or a James Bond-style ejector seat called "The Flinger" that can come in extremely coincidentally handy right after you buy it. Of course, scattering useful and non-useful items throughout a gamebook is what it's all about, but what was noticeable here was how just about everything useful you picked up was needed almost immediately following you acquiring it. 

Co-authors Creede and Sharleen Lambard return for this entry, after having also co-authored book 2 in the series, "Fuel's Gold". I think their writing and creation of atmosphere shows some improvement here, and travelling across the desert gives it a slight "Mad Max" type feel without plagiarizing that property (like some other gamebooks have done). You get to fight off cycle gangs, assassins, and even a giant scorpion, with an exciting enough conclusion against a helicopter that takes place on the Golden Gate Bridge. A-ha! I knew that vertically-only firing rocket would come into play somewhere! Problem is, because you can only buy a couple of these rockets, and they come with a combat modifier of -1, you are very likely going to miss with them, thus making them a total waste of money. The helicopter is also maybe the only vehicle in the book that has a low enough Defense Class so that you have a decent chance of hitting it, which makes it probably the easiest fight in the adventure even without using the rockets (so long as your turret doesn't get taken out), which is a bit unusual for the final combat in any gamebook adventure. And speaking of combat, I frustratingly think I may have finally reached a tipping point with this system. We are back again to most of the vehicles having Defense Classes so high that the fights require copious amounts of dice rolling to complete (and sometimes just to score even one hit!). Having your combat system feel like a chore is definitely not what any gamebook author should be aspiring to. Most combats can be avoided if you are lucky, but because your van has such crappy handling, you won't find yourself outrunning too many enemies in this adventure, so don't count on being lucky too often.  

Ranking: Overall from a design standpoint they seem to have gone and used "Battle Road" as a template and pasted over their own adventure, and while that won't win them any creativity points, it wasn't a bad choice of books to do that with, as for me "Battle Road" has been the best book in the series so far. The thing is though, we obviously already had book 1, so if this was going to copy that formula, it needed to up its game beyond that entry, and it doesn't. This is also something that they need to take care isn't repeated too often, lest the law of diminishing returns begins creeping in even more. The story here isn't anything special, but I enjoyed all the different ways you could handle the various situations you came across, and I liked the series returning to a road-trip style of adventure. Unfortunately though, any time you enter combat, the flow and momentum of the book just grinds to a halt and this holds it back from a better score, and with only two books left in the series I probably shouldn't expect that aspect to improve. Additionally, which vehicle would you rather drive on a cross-country trip, a sleek sports car or a clunky van? Yeah, me too.

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5. Green Circle Blues - Score = 5.8    Tier = OK

Attempts to beat: 2

First Pete, now Re-Pete. My concern about the law of diminishing returns seems to be bearing out, as this adventure is incredibly similar in design to the previous book, which in turn was incredibly similar in design to book 1. What's strange about all this is that the authors involved, first the Lambards and now Scott Haring, had previous books in the series that brought in new mechanics and were attempting new things. These new game introductions didn't always work, but they were showing a certain degree of creativity at least. But now Haring, like the Lambards with "Badlands Run", has reverted to copying the design of Steve Jackson's initial series entry. It is almost as if they received some kind of directive that their earlier efforts strayed too far from what Jackson had in mind for the series, and to make their next books more like "Battle Road". And while I really enjoyed that first adventure, doing pretty much the exact same thing for the third book now is starting to wear thin. 

That said, the plot in this entry is actually....quite good. The story opens with you having a beer in a bar in Boise, Idaho, reflecting on your life and wondering how you ended up as a down-and-out autoduellist with barely a dollar to your name. After a bar fight breaks out, you eventually find yourself (whether you win or lose the fight) at the local police station being booked on charges of disorderly conduct. Before you can be brought before a judge however, a couple of federal agents pay you a visit and ask if you would be interested in a top secret mission. (Of course I would!) It turns out a terrorist group known as Green Circle has hijacked a mini-nuke and detonator, and plans to blow up a large food processing plant in Seattle if their demands are not met. The designer of the detonator, Mitchell Havelock, is the only man that has the technical knowledge to disarm the bomb, and because they have a suspected mole within their agency, the agents need someone off the books to get him from Boise to Seattle before the bomb is detonated, with Green Circle having set a deadline of 8 AM the next day before they set off the nuke and destroy most of Seattle. Another James Bond plot to be sure, but there is a fair amount of intrigue all throughout the story, as you are never totally sure who you can trust, with anyone you meet possibly being aligned with Green Circle. In addition, Havelock is something of an eccentric nutcase, and you can never be sure how he will react in any given situation. 

So while the story was a plus, the design here, as mentioned earlier, is basically the exact same that we have done twice already. You begin in Boise, and travel along the highway through Oregon and Washington states, with various towns along the way giving you the opportunity to stop at them and see if you can pick up anything useful, or if you so choose you can just drive right on by them instead. Between each town you will likely encounter a bandit, or a stopped vehicle, and can choose to just try and outrun them, or get in a fight. 

The combat is back to being slightly improved here, and Haring at least seems to realize what the other authors have not, in that the Defense Class of the vehicles needs to be lowered if you don't want each fight to take all day. Even so, your car has a good Handling attribute, so if you put just a couple of points into your Driving attribute, you will find yourself being able to just avoid almost any combat you come across, as it is usually a Control Roll which determines if you get away or not. There is a final combat against three vehicles at once that I don't believe can be avoided, but your car is powerful enough that you shouldn't have too much trouble here. This becomes even more true if you acquired a particular ally almost immediately preceding this fight. This ally, which seems to me incredibly hard to miss, is ridiculously overpowered, and both times I played the book, he and I absolutely laid waste to the enemies in what is essentially the book's final "boss battle".  

There are some really head scratching things about this adventure though that need to be mentioned:

-One of the main puzzle solving aspects of the previous books was in seeking out and determining which items you could find at the various stops along the way that would help you greatly in overcoming the obstacles or final battle during the end game. This adventure though, really has none of that. Oh there are some things you can find here and there, and some weapons you can buy, but I found none of them to have any real bearing on the outcome of the adventure. You still need to stop every so often to make sure your car is charged up, but other than that you are better off just driving past and running away from everything you can. 

-The Time tracking mechanic makes a return here, with you beginning the trip at 3 PM and needing to get Havelock to Seattle by 8 AM the next day. As usual, you are told how much time it takes you while driving and stopping at the various locations along the route and you mark it off as you go, and you must then ensure you make it to Seattle by the designated time. Or at least, that's what I THOUGHT the goal was. I was actually initially quite impressed with how well Haring planned this out, as on my first attempt at the adventure I made it to Seattle at 7:45 AM, with just 15 minutes to spare. On my second attempt I had the opposite result, and was 15 minutes late, arriving at 8:15 AM. Figuring this latter situation surely must mean failure, I resignedly read on to discover that it doesn't even matter if you are late! In such a case, one of the federal agents on the scene just basically tells you "You're late. But it's all good. The terrorists extended the deadline." What??? That just rendered the whole Time keeping mechanic totally meaningless! Bah!  

- There is a very vague and random choice you need to make right at the very end of the adventure after you have made it to Seattle, where you are given a list of seemingly innocent options to choose from. Don't pick the right one though and BOOOMMM! That would be a mushroom cloud in your rear-view mirror in case you were wondering, as depicted on the cover. (This got me thinking, how many other gamebooks show the hero ultimately in a state of game-over failure on the cover?) Did Haring know the adventure was too easy and threw this choice in at the last second to increase replayability? 

- This adventure has one of the worst sequences of "choose-not-to-play" moments I can recall ever seeing. During the opening when you are approached by the federal agents, you are asked almost half a dozen times if you want to hear them out and then accept their offer, or just say "no thanks" and that's that. Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that there was one section later in the book where you are asked to roll one die, and if it comes up 6, then YOU die. I think everybody hates these kind of instant-death random rolls, but fortunately it's not along the required route so I can at least let this one slide a bit. 

Ranking: This would have been scored slightly higher if it had been the first one in the series I played. The story is intriguing and I found the ultimate plan of Green Circle to be very clever once you learn all that is really going on. However the design of the book is old hat by now, and I say this after having really enjoyed book 1, of which this patterns itself after. I also found this adventure to be the easiest one yet, and would have completed it on my very first attempt had the somewhat random choice at the very end not bitten me in the ass. It's decent enough, but there really isn't all that much to recommend here either, especially if you have played the previous books.

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6. Mean Streets - Score = 6.2    Tier = OK

Attempts to beat: 4

With the final book of the series I am greeted with an entry that shows the most promise of any in the range, but it unfortunately isn't able to deliver on most of its creative design ideas. The story itself isn't something we haven't seen before, as this is another secret agent mission, and the second adventure in a row involving a dangerous group having obtained a nuclear weapon. We play here as an agent of Texas Intelligence, and are informed that a gang within the now cordoned off and lawless city of Houston has discovered an old sunken nuclear submarine off the coast. The gang, under the leadership of a man known as Golden Moses (apparently because he wears gold chains and seeks to "set his people free"), has already extracted the nuclear missiles from the sub and is currently in the process of also locating and bringing ashore the detonators needed to use them, which were also stored on the sub. Texas Intelligence firmly believes that once the missiles and detonators are in his possession, Golden Moses will not hesitate to deploy the nukes against the rest of Texas, which would obviously be game over for everyone in the state. We are thus sent in alone under the cover of darkness to rendezvous with a fellow agent already on the ground in Houston, infiltrate the base of Golden Moses, steal the detonators, and then escape from the city.    

One of the things that immediately stands out about the adventures is how it begins, with it being revealed that you are only playing a clone of the actual hero (a highly decorated secret agent who was blown to bits right before the story begins). You awaken in a clone tank within Texas Intelligence and spend the opening of the adventure trying to recover your memories. There is a very silly choice in this first section, with you given three random options and one of them leads to instant death. Why do this? Do gamebook authors seek to annoy on purpose? The opening combat of the book comes soon after, and is a gun battle against two enemy gang members that break in trying to assassinate you, and should they succeed in doing so, you are told that there are two other clone bodies that have been prepared, and you can start the adventure over in one of them, essentially giving you "three lives" to pass this battle. Interesting idea, but one that doesn't really work. I'm not sure what the difference is supposed to be from using these extra lives or just starting the book over completely, as the result is the same. This could have worked as a great save point idea if the clone tank had been revealed somewhere in the middle of the adventure, and any death after that point allowed you to restart from the halfway mark (or later) until your three lives were used up. But as it occurs so early in the adventure, it renders the whole idea pretty much meaningless. The whole clone angle is all but dropped after this anyway, as after this opening sequence it is barely ever mentioned again.   

It is also quite odd how it is made clear that the very existence of the state of Texas is riding on this mission, yet you are only given a certain amount of money at the start of the adventure to buy what you can from a very long list of weapons and equipment. I didn't have enough money to afford more than a few things, but why wouldn't I be provided with anything and everything I wanted considering the mission's importance? They are also going to make me buy this equipment with my own money? Do agents really have to do that? This really calls into question something that has come up in other gamebooks and always bugs me, that is being given an incredibly important world saving "if you fail we're all dead" quest, only to then be told that the quest giver can only afford to let you have a couple of items from a long list. I guess he has bills to pay, apocalypse or not.   

The best design idea of the book occurs once you arrive in Houston, and you can find yourself partnered up with one of three different individual agents already on the ground in the city. Each of the three agents has their own personality, skills, and usefulness. Situations that you come across as you attempt to steal the detonators and then leave the city, can play out differently depending upon who you have accompanying you. This obviously adds a nice level of replayibility, as you could attempt to beat the adventure with each of the three partners. However, this whole process includes what is simultaneously the worst idea of the book, in that which of the partners you get is determined not by choice, but by a random roll. That is just stupid. Why not allow the player their choice of partner so they can experiment with the different skills and paths through the adventure? Big miss on author W.G Armintrout's part here.   

I was incredibly surprised at how easy it was to obtain the detonators, as in just a few sections after landing in Houston, you will have snuck into the base and have found them. It is also incredibly convenient that Golden Moses' gang has just finished retrieving all the detonators and has brought them to their base at the exact moment you arrive. The most recent intel you had said they were still searching the sub for them, so what if they had still been searching for them when you got there? You would have had nothing to steal. And seeing as how important they are, to say they are barely guarded is a huge understatement. So once you have them, the real problem then begins in how to get out of Houston. With the whole city now basically a lawless urban jungle, you first need to acquire a vehicle, then navigate the streets and make it to the edge of the city where a Texas border outpost is awaiting your arrival with the detonators. There are a few different vehicles you can commandeer depending on what you do, and I found this sequence to be set up very well with a cross between "Escape From New York" and "The Warriors", as you are hunted by various gangs all along the way. This "Escape From Houston" sequence also had some more creative ideas about how you travel across the city. This works by providing you with a list of section numbers at a hub section, and you then roll one die and count down the list that many times, and then go to the indicated section, ignoring any sections you have already been to. Each section leads to some kind of encounter on the streets that must be overcome, and upon successfully doing so you return back to the hub section, roll again to determine where you go next, and repeat until you have visited enough sections to escape the city. All this is really doing is randomizing the order of the encounters you need to have as you travel across Houston so it's not anything groundbreaking, but it made for a nice mix to the gameplay from playthrough to playthrough. 

One of the downsides to any gamebook that has a few different routes through the adventure is that any given one of those routes can make the book feel rather short for how many sections it contains, and that is true here as well. There is also once again surprisingly few car combats in the book, which has been true of most books in the series. There are some vehicle battles you can run into while navigating the streets of Houston, but I found these to be easily avoidable as long as you make rational decisions. Most of the previous books at least concluded with one final unavoidable battle which can then end up being quite tense, and while this adventure also contains a final confrontation, this time against a bus that has been converted into a tank, it too is also avoidable and with the tank having stats of 80 hit points and 6(!) dice damage when it hits you, I believe you are probably intended to indeed avoid it.

The adventure also contains some continuity issues that pop up from time to time, mainly due to the sharing of sections regardless of which partner you have with you. There are sections of the book that relate specifically to the partner that is accompanying you (either Kiki, Lorena, or Carl), but other shared sections that are written in more generic terms where supposedly it could be any of the three. The problem here is that it is possible for your specific partner to die, in which case you carry on alone. It then becomes a bit jarring to have a conversation a few sections later with your now dead partner! The Kiki character (an undercover gang member) also has a very primitive caveman-style way of speaking in his own specific sections, but suddenly becomes very well spoken in the shared sections. There is also an illustration that takes place in the security room that shows you with Lorena, which obviously makes no sense if you have either Kiki or Carl with you. I don't normally hold illustrations against the adventure, but in this case it was more fuel to the fire that this whole process wasn't thought through very well. I was very surprised to find that you can escape the city without the detonators, at which point I thought that would mean game over. But no, in this situation your commander just sends you right back into the city to try again. Doing so however sends you back to the gang base, and you then have to repeat many of the same sections, encounters, and dialogue that you have already had, which can be very immersion breaking. There are additionally a couple of reference errors in the book that gives it a feeling of having been somewhat rushed.  

Author W.G. Armintrout's writing is fairly good, as he does a decent job with the memory recovery angle along with the atmosphere within the now dilapidated city of Houston. I did find it a bit strange that on a couple of occasions he wants to make it clear to you that Golden Moses is a black man by calling out that fact. Not sure why he keeps mentioning this, as in other gamebooks where the antagonist is white, I don't ever recall it being spelled out as a defining characteristic. Maybe this is just a product of this gamebook being written in the 80's, but it does seem somewhat awkward reading it today. The book also ends on what I thought was something of a strange outcome. Once you have successfully brought the detonators back to Texas Intelligence, you are rewarded with a trip to Tahiti. So they reward clones with trips to exotic locations? We also never did take down Golden Moses, who all throughout the adventure was made out to be our sworn and bitter enemy, responsible for the death of our loved ones. But to make matters worse, it is made clear that Golden Moses still possesses the nuclear warheads and is attempting to find other ways to detonate them. So if our clone was the best person for the job of stopping him (as mentioned several times by our commanding officer), should we really be on the beach sipping pina coladas while he still possesses weapons of mass destruction? It makes me wonder if there was meant to be a sequel to this book.  

Ranking: This book is one of the most creative in the series. Unfortunately, it's also one of the sloppiest. A bit more playtesting and this could have been much better. I don't think the whole clone thing works very well, but having 3 different companions that you can possibly get is really good and adds replayibility (even though the random roll to determine who you get defeats this somewhat). This does feel like the least "Car Wars" book of the range though, and seems like it easily could have been written for another series or even as a standalone, but instead was crammed in here.  So with the degree of creativity shown here, it's just a shame the kinks weren't ironed out first, or it could have scored much higher and possibly been the best of the six books. As it stands, I put it right near the middle of the series rankings.

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Overall I found the "Car Wars" series to be very similar to the "Middle-earth Quest" series. Oh certainly not from a story standpoint, but from a design and quality standpoint both series contain 6 books from various authors, and both have 1 book that just makes it into the Good tier while the remaining are just OK. Most similarly though, both the series have one really good initial design idea (the grid-map movement system for "Middle-earth Quest" and the car combat system for "Car Wars"), but then they both go on to mostly squander that idea's potential. They both also seem like they would do better as board games, which in the case of "Car Wars" makes sense as it actually was a board game first.