Thunder Road: Vendetta Maximum Chrome review – Witness me!

Cars roar across the blasted wasteland and broken highways. The retort of heavy calibur gunfire rings across the salt-wastes. The greatest, and only, entertainment in the post apocalypse is the Thunder Road Rally, a last man standing race across the blasted desert. If you wanna win this thing, you gotta have a team, and you gotta be ruthless.

Thunder Road: Vendetta by Restoration Games is a remake of 1986’s Thunder Road, which sees players control a team of road warriors as they race across the post-apocalypse. Each team is made up of a heavy vehicle, a medium vehicle, a light vehicle, and a helicopter (AKA the chopper), all heavily armed. Smash, crash, and shoot your way to the finish.

Each turn, players roll 4 dice, and then take turns assigning those dice to their 3 cars, moving up the road based on the roll. They have the option of moving up or down lanes, but always, always must move forward. That last die? They can use it to take a powerful command action, from boosting a car with nitro, drifting to avoid collisions, repairing a vehicle, or dropping an armed chopper on their opposition.Of course, it’s not a Thunder Road race without crashes, weapons, and most importantly, elimination. In fact, this is a game that requires player elimination. The finish line will never even spawn until at least one racing team is out of the game. There’s a number of ways to take competitors out of the race. First, the guns on each car. Each car ends its movement by shooting at the car in front of them. Each damage causes an unpredictable effect, from causing a skid to exploding and sending it flying. 2 damage and a car is out of the race, unless emergency repairs are put in place.

The second way to take out a car is to bash it out of the way. When you move into another vehicle, one of you has got to move. Who goes where is decided by some dice. On one die, there’s 2 symbols indicating the aggressor, and 4 indicating the aggressed. This means it pays to be the smasher, not the smashee. The second die indicates the direction the smashed car gets sent. If it sends that bash sends the car into another car? Do it again! And keep doing it until things finally settle. If a car gets sent into a barrier, or off the map? It’s gone. No repairing that kind of damage.Other competitors aren’t the only thing that can take you out. Each raceway is littered with randomized hazards that are kept face down until someone runs over it. Could be landmines, a broken down wreck, a ramp, fire, oil, any number of things under those tiles. Might be good to avoid them, but sometimes the risk could be worth it. It could, after all, be smooth asphalt under that tile, and you were worried for nothing!

The base game of Thunder Road: Vendetta is a blast. It takes only an hour or two to play, and the sheer chaos of it is a beautiful thing to behold. When people talk about games and strategy, they usually like to see a game that reduces random possibilities to either initial setup states, or things that can be controlled. There is no controlling the randomness of Thunder Road, and letting go and living with that is a key to enjoying the game to its fullest. You roll a bunch of dice, and someone who rolls higher has an obvious benefit. However, the person in front is almost always swarmed by choppers. If someone is stuck going only 1, 2, or 3 spaces for their team, then they drop a chopper on their opponents, or give their furthest car forward a nitro boost. What’s more, the people in front are likely to have to deal with at least a handful of hazards, which may do terrible, terrible things to those front runners. If you lose all but the last car removed, well, you go faster by default, and shoot more often. In the worst case, if you’re eliminated, then the game’s almost over!So despite being annoyed with how bad my rolls are, I love this game. And that love only increases with the expansion content (included in the Maximum Chrome Edition that was provided by Restoration Games). There are several modules which you can add in. The first, Carnage at Devil’s Run, provides a few new hazards to deal with, most notably fire. When on fire, a car will have to roll a die when they move. The die will either put out the fire (good!) force additional speed and distance on the car (usually good, but can be bad!) or simply blow the car up entirely (Very bad!). This expansion also adds ramps, which can allow cars to ramp over obstacles. This being Thunder Road, the distance you ramp is randomized with a die, and approaching a ramp from any direction but head on will get you killed.

The next expansion, the Choppe Shoppe, adds a lot more mechanical diversity to the game. It includes several modules, including an upgrade system for the base vehicles of the game. With these upgrades, a car might be able to shoot further, have more control of slams, or drive further. In addition, you can have team captains which change up the command card and provide unique benefits, like the fire clown who likes fire, who prevents cars from exploding from fire.Finally, there are two alternate race teams added in: the Big Rig and the Final 5. The Big Rig is a massive armored tank of a vehicle, and you just get the one for the race. It’s a 3 section tractor trailer with guns on both the front and back, as well as a number of other gadgets, like a cow catcher that can flatten any obstacle, or a missile launcher. When other cars hit the Big Rig, they get out of its way; the Rig is never, ever slammed. Of course, it being so big, it can only change direction so much in any single round, represented by the power steering die that has to be applied at the beginning of each round. Further, the dice the big rig uses are rigged as well, but not in its favor. It has dice that have three 1’s, two 2’s and a single 3. This means it moves about the same as the other vehicles on average, but definitely has a higher possible speed.

The included storage solution on the Ultimate Chrome edition is a work of art itself!The Final 5 are basically the exact opposite. They are a team of 5 motorcycles. Unlike cars, they each only have 1 hit before getting taken out, and cannot slam anybody. However, they can swerve through the crush without worrying about slamming into anybody until the end of their movement. They move 2 bikes each turn, allowing them a bit more tactical flexibility. In addition, when they inevitably lose bikes, they get faster than anyone. If they survive.

Not only does this extend the chaos from a 4 player game to a ludicrous 6 player game (though the rules only officially support 4), you also get a lot more new possible options for playing the game. Characters and upgrades bring the cars up to the level of the Final 5 and the Big Rig, and they give unique builds that players can explore through many, many games, all without losing the base mechanics that make the game what it is. It’s still fast, it’s even sillier, and allows for absolute madness on every play.