Apocalypse Road
From GMT Games
Apocalypse Road is a game for 2 to 10 players simulating a violent and dangerous type of racing which can occur in the apocalyptic near-future. Players control racing teams that are competing to score the most points in a single race by finishing ahead of their opponents with the most cars while at the same time trying to destroy as many of your opponents cars as possible. Strategic racing, unforgiving tracks and a dead-eye shot are all needed in a game of Apocalypse Road to win. It is the player who is best able to manage all three of these attributes, that will determine who will be the winner.
Components
The following are the components included with the game. The components are:
- 4 Race Tracks on two boards
- 80 Car Tokens
- 1 Sheet of Tokens
- 96 Race Cards
- 52 Movement Event Cards
- 48 Combat Event Cards
- 10 Team Mats
- 1 Rule Book
Game Setup
The first thing that a player must do is to select a track to race upon. (If you want more track options, the tracks from Thunder Alley and Grand Prix can be used with this game.) Next, each player selects a team and takes the cars, VP Tokens and the Team Mat of that team’s color and symbol. A player will start with either 4 or 5 cars, depending on the number of players in the game. Next, a player will shuffle the Movement Event cards, Combat Event cares and Race Card decks. After this, each player will place one car from their draw bag onto the race track. The first car drawn goes onto position one, the second in position 2 and you continue this until cars are placed on the grid.
Sequence of Play
A full turn of the game consists of players activating all of their cars on the trace once and an Action Segment of each car’s individual activation. The Sequence of Play for each turn is:
- Fill Hands
- Perform Action Segments
- Perform End of Turn Sequence
- Discard unwanted Race Cards
- Change First Player marker
The Action Segment/Phase consists of a number of Action Phases which are performed in turn order beginning with the player with the First Player marker and proceeding clockwise around the game board. The Action Phase is over once all cars have been activated for that turn.
The Active Player performs the following actions during the Action Segment:
Play one Race Card for one car from his team.
Move that car based on the Race Card’s Movement Points and Movement type. The Active car may shoot its weapon either before or after or after all movement is completed.
Following the cars movement or combat, you will flip the car to its other side which indicates that, that car may not be activated again this turn.
Important Game Concepts
Every time a car passes the Finish Line, it scores 1 VP and the instant one of the players accrue their final VP from the team’s pool of VPs, the game ends. There is no Lap Counter and laps are not tracked for the race.
The Race Card is the heart of Apocalypse Road, and controls the movement of the cars around the track and governs movement events and ramming. There are six types of movement and they are:
- Solo Movement
- Line Movement
- Pursuit Movement
- Lead Movement
- Ram Movement
- Overtake Movement
Cars that are adjacent to one another in the same lane may become linked. A link consists of any number of cars and can include cars in corners or straightaways. When a Linked Car moves, the cars linked to the Active Car move as well. A nice feature of Linking is that when all of the linked cars move, only the Active Car pays any movement expenditure. There are a number of different movement options and they are:
- Conditional Linking
- Solo Movement
- Overtake Movement
- Line Movement
- Pursuit Movement
- Lead Movement
- Ramming Movement
- Lateral Movement
- Racing Lines and Corners
- Crossover
Each of these different types of Movement Options can have profound effects on the outcome of the game.
Combat
During almost every car activation in Apocalypse Road cars will most likely perform some type of combat. The first thing that the active player needs to determine is that the target car is a legal target. A legal target can be defined as an opponent’s car that is in one of the adjacent boxes and that the firing car has a weapon that can fire at the opponents target box.
Next, you will look at the Defensive value of the target car which will be between 1 and 3. Now, draw the top card off the Combat Even Deck and if the number of the card equals or exceeds the Defensive value of the target car, the target car is hit. If the car scores a hit, using the same card you look at the type of weapon used and inflict that damage on the target car. Each Hit Point adds one damage marker to the car.
Summary
Apocalypse Road is a futuristic racing game in the genre of the Mad Max movies. It’s a fast paced game where it is move and shoot, move and shoot and move and shoot. While you may not think that there is no strategy to the game but you couldn’t be further from the truth. Because you are racing in teams (you have multiple cars on the track at a time) your goal is to win with the most Victory Points, not to just cross the Finish Line so there are strategies that will appear. There can be anywhere from between 2 and 10 players taking part in the racing with a short game having 12 VPs in a players pool and a long game having 15 VPs in the players pool. VPs may be claimed for eliminating opposing cars and crossing the Finish Line. The winner of the game is the first player to claim all of the tokens from the pool.
This is the third game from the husband and wife team of Jeff and Carla Horger. There other two entries are Thunder Alley and Grand Prix. Jeff and Carla have included specific rules for integrating the racing tracks from Thunder Alley and Grand Prix into the game. This, with the Thunder Alley Track Pack, gives you a number of different challenges that you need to overcome for a win. Apocalypse Road is the perfect addition to round out the trio of games dealing with cars and designed by the Horger, husband and wife team. It is that perfect weekend beer and pretzel (or soda and pretzel if underage) to round out that fun weekend of gaming.
