So I saw Mad Max - Fury Road today. A solid, very well paced action movie - refreshingly low on the CGI effects too.

It got me to thinking that it would make for a great setting for a Flight Path system vehicle combat game.

I think it has a lot of potential with the FFG model for X-Wing of high quality pre-painted minis, upgrade cards, etc.

It could use a similar representation of Driver(Pilot) skill, differing dials for different vehicles; various upgrade cards for engines, crew, weapons, talents, etc.

Different movement templates may well be required, but that's not a big problem. I think it has a lot of potential, given you're not limited by roads in this setting.

The 100 pt tournament style list would work with building a 'gang' based on the factions represented in the movie.

I can picture it now...

Different vehicles types:

-Bikes

- War buggies (1 crew - e.g. lancers or pole boys)

- War wagons (1 or 2 crew, 'turrets'! flame throwers, etc.)

-War rigs (2 or 3 crew, multiple weapons)

- Specialist 'Boss' vehicles

Different factions with nuances:

- War Boys (drug enhanced suicide boarding parties, musician crew to inspire the gang)

- Canyon Landers (bike heavy/only, grenadiers)

- Green Placers (Snipers)

- Bullet Farmers (lots of automatic weapons - favouring volume of fire over accuracy)

- Gasoline Farmers (nitrous and other engine related upgrades?)

- Road Warriors (few but, elite - two talents?)

Special rules:

- Ramming (and contact weapon upgrades like spikes, etc.)

- Boarding parties

- A 'Control Point' system that tracks effects like extreme manoeuvres (handbrake turns, etc), sideswipes/ramming, and 'control' weapons (tyre spikes, caltrops, harpoons) that cumulate unless action is taken (crew used to remove harpoons, slow straight manoeuvre, etc.) and require a test, or force you to lose control, when they reach a certain point.

- Weapon upgrades with special abilities like harpoons,

- Special rules for boarding parties

- A wide variety of obstacles

- Critical effects that limit speed or manoeuvres, injured driver, dead crew, etc.

I'm sure there are many other things that could be woven into the game mirroring what is already a tried and tested system, with appropriate tweaks for the new environment (both geography and thematic!)

Surely it can be better than GorkaMorka and Car Wars....

Thoughts?

Warmness to my heart this suggestion brings. . .FFG can you get somebody on that license this sounds awesome! .

That would have to be one heck of a long play table.

Reminds me of Steve Jackson's "Car Wars".

I have already played around with some of these ideas of car combat (Death Race) with an X-Wing feel. I made a bunch of custom upgrade cards:

The vehicle card prototype (4 symbols are for Chassis (Hull), Armor, Speed and Handling:

Vehicle movement using multiple maneuver templates:

Everything worked out pretty well, you customize your vehicles load-out with extra crew, more powerful engines and weapons as upgrade cards. You make handling checks with dice to perform certain maneuvers based on speed and the degree of difficulty.

This is still a WIP but it did lead back to a Star Wars racing variant that has been refined and is now a complete game:

Wow some impressive work there DB.

Some of the cards there gave me flashbacks to playing the video game Spy Hunter!

And now the theme music is stuck in my head....

Start with Wreckage, Car Wars, or Dark Future as a baseline for the rules. (or GorkaMorka if you really want to go nuts)

I'll just leave this here: BoardGameGeek: Outrider

I'll just leave this here: BoardGameGeek: Outrider

Thanks NotBatman, hadn't seen that one before.

Have you played it at all? Any good?

Given they've signed up for apparently another three Mad Max films, it strikes me as an untapped opportunity for a high quality finished gaming product.

I note there are a plethora of movie related miniatures games just released or pending imminent release - eg Mars Attacks! and AvP.

Dibs on the music truck.

I'd just use 'dark future' its not a bad game and was clearly based on the original mad max movies.

GW even tried out a LARP paintball and cars version in a quarry once before realising someone was probably going to get killed and shelved it!

I'd just use 'dark future' its not a bad game and was clearly based on the original mad max movies.

GW even tried out a LARP paintball and cars version in a quarry once before realising someone was probably going to get killed and shelved it!

Hi Gadge. Were you working at GW when Dark Future got released? From memory it didn't seem to get much love. Liked some of the ideas, with interchangeable weapons on the cars.

Gorkamorka looked like it had some entertainment value, but questionable depth of replay-ability, especially with the faction choices or Orks or... Orks!

Thanks for the amusing insight re the hairbrained LARP version!

Not quite sure how it would've worked given that the idea with paintball is you know quite clearly when you get hit!

I guess my thoughts on this one was to bring FFGs production standards and same game structure and variables to the Mad Max universe, particularly the cross country nature of it rather than being confined to roads that has inhibited other car games.

Definitely doesn't quite have the breadth of audiences appeal that Star Wars does though!

No i was about 13 when dark future came out.

The problem with dark future is that is didnt *obviously* fit in with the rest of the warhammer mythos and also used a different scale. GW have always had issues with 'non 28mm' scale games and selling them as people hate making scenery most the time so having anything where your old stuff cant be used often annoys people.

Dark Future actually *was* set in the warhammer mythos. There was unpublished material that quite clearly state its in the 'dark age of technology', the period of techno wonder and peaked knowledge the imperium has lost.

There were a few hints, namely the fact there were chaos cultists etc and the weapon designs looked like STC weapons from 40k in a lot of places.

DF was a great game, we spent many a school holiday at my mates huge house in the country, we'd all stay over in sleeping bags for days and have mammoth gaming sessions to a soundtrack of ACDC, Guns N roses and Aerosmith.

Check out white dwarf 106s 'dark future combat racing' rules supplement... we played that all one summer it was amazing.

My mate Evo was in GW when DF came out, he remembers loads of paintball guns being bought, old banger/jalopy cars nd army surplus webbing being bought to play 'live action' DF in a quarry.... then as i say someone realised it was uninsurable and some one was going to get killed even driving slow(ish) so it was scrapped.

My only bugbear with dark future was that there was no way to 'turn' to an angle on a straight. It worked as a game in itslef but like in xwing where a 3d environment is 2d it was annoying that you had to 'drift' behind someone to shoot them.

I'll just leave this here: BoardGameGeek: Outrider

Thanks NotBatman, hadn't seen that one before.

Have you played it at all? Any good?

Given they've signed up for apparently another three Mad Max films, it strikes me as an untapped opportunity for a high quality finished gaming product.

I note there are a plethora of movie related miniatures games just released or pending imminent release - eg Mars Attacks! and AvP.

I haven't played it, but I've been over the rules a few times and it seems perfectly playable.

They had a Kickstarter for a new version not long ago and I backed that, so I'm waiting for the new version before trying it (because I'm lazy and don't have a great printer).

What is that car from?

No i was about 13 when dark future came out.

The problem with dark future is that is didnt *obviously* fit in with the rest of the warhammer mythos and also used a different scale. GW have always had issues with 'non 28mm' scale games and selling them as people hate making scenery most the time so having anything where your old stuff cant be used often annoys people.

Dark Future actually *was* set in the warhammer mythos. There was unpublished material that quite clearly state its in the 'dark age of technology', the period of techno wonder and peaked knowledge the imperium has lost.

There were a few hints, namely the fact there were chaos cultists etc and the weapon designs looked like STC weapons from 40k in a lot of places.

DF was a great game, we spent many a school holiday at my mates huge house in the country, we'd all stay over in sleeping bags for days and have mammoth gaming sessions to a soundtrack of ACDC, Guns N roses and Aerosmith.

Check out white dwarf 106s 'dark future combat racing' rules supplement... we played that all one summer it was amazing.

My mate Evo was in GW when DF came out, he remembers loads of paintball guns being bought, old banger/jalopy cars nd army surplus webbing being bought to play 'live action' DF in a quarry.... then as i say someone realised it was uninsurable and some one was going to get killed even driving slow(ish) so it was scrapped.

My only bugbear with dark future was that there was no way to 'turn' to an angle on a straight. It worked as a game in itslef but like in xwing where a 3d environment is 2d it was annoying that you had to 'drift' behind someone to shoot them.

Well we must be of a similar age. I think I have an old issue of the now long defunct "GM Magazine" with their review of Dark Future - not all that favourable if I remember correctly.

Was there not some fairly non-40kish fiction released to support DF?

Back then I was mech/a obsessed. So my go to tabletop game was Battletech and Robotech for RPGing.

The search for a well balanced and equally well supported mecha miniatures game continues - too many things in Battletech jar.

Allow me to answer that: There are a few tie-in novels (printed by GW way before Black library existed) set in the Dark Future.

Most of them by Jack yeovil (Kim Newman) :

1. Demon download
2. Route 666
3. Krokodil Tears
4. Comeback tour

They are set in some post apocalyptic setting wich doesn't actually contradict anything from 40k, (so as far as I'm concerned it is a pre unification era Terra) and at least one book mentions a few of the chaos gods, aswell as some HP Lovecraft mythos entities. (Making this the 1st chaos/mythos canon welding) There is some character crossover between the novels and game.

Yep, Kim Newman did the only really good GW fiction in those days.

Drahcenfels and the Genevieve series are really credible vampire/horror novels

GM magazine did indeed give Dark Future an iffy review, i used to buy Dragon, White Dwarf and Gm (and later GMI) all the time in those days.

Oddly the magazine im assistant editor on now, well my publishing editor and direct boss used to work on GM magazine.

If you ever remember 'splatter punks must dye' when the GM team tried out paintballing as an option for live role play, well Nigel was in that article!

Its what prompted him to publish a paintball magazine and then later our magazine 'Airsoft Action'.

Robins right in that there is no direct *obvious* mention of the emperor, 40k or the like (maybe one or two about chaos gods) in the dark future rules and fiction but in the studio 'style guide' and writers 'bible' its clearly placed as being in the 'dark age of technology'. The time the imperium has little record of but was a tech wonder.

Like i say its why DF cars weapons looked like scaled versions of las guns, bolters, autoguns and las cannons

RG - thanks for the fiction tips. Some of those sound reminiscent of the fiction published for the Dark Conspiracy RPG - although maybe I'm just judging based on the similar style of cover art!

Although somehow I'm having flashbacks to arguably my earliest 'gaming' experiences with the Jackson and Livingstone Fighing Fantasy series....

Nice to see some work in threading various themes and eras together though. I thought it was a shame when GW moved away from the clear parallels between the WHFB and 40K universes - big mistake killing off the Squats with nary an acknowledgment.

Gadge,

Yes! I do recall that article on Splatter Punks Must Die! Was that the paintball in the woods or the one they did in an old warehouse with pistol paint guns?

AirSoft isn't legal in Oz, but I did have a nice MP-5 when I was living in the States for a bit of indoor fun plinking.

I recall GM as having plenty of fun "flash fiction" snippets in the margins too, with gems like "kill the head and the body will die."

Although I still think Phoenix Command's combat system books were the best for those, one of my all time faves:

Dr Schniderbunk: "(sigh) just another tragic case of terminal kinetic energy poisoning" - a wonderful euphemism and one I still use to this day.

Yep it was a woodland game.

I really liked GM but it did sometimes come across as very amatuer. Then again hobby publishing was at the time very amateur, like GW most companies employed there mates or whoever would be 'least rubbish' at it rather than industry proffesionals to keep their overheads down.

Is paintball legal in Austrailia? At some point i want to do a feature on 'around the world in 80 open days' and feature how the game is different, regulated or banned in different countries.

I came across an airsoft mag at work. It had an add in it for guns shaped like the colonial marine pulse rifles. Looked pretty fun.

Ah yes thats the old CW kit you put on an M1a1 thompson. Some of them have a working ammo counter.

Do you know the title of the mag?

I used to write to Airsoft International but now write for Airsoft Action which i feel little bit more 'down to earth' and doesnt assume players have £3000 kit.

Yep paintball is legal and quite popular (I think). Haven't played in a very long time - for a range of various reasons.

Prefer to keep a range of activities separate these days - exercise, shooting, military stuff.

Ah sorry Gadge, don't remember the title. I did swipe a copy of Blocks magazine wich is an awesome LEGO mag.

I bought a bunch of Hot Wheels to kitbash for this exact purpose in case I find a good ruleset.