Car Wars: 6th Edition Orange/Purple Starter Set & Expansions Review

In gaming, there is something very satisfying about driving cars around, shooting guns, and making explosions. At its most basic level, Cars Wars: 6th Edition is about driving cars around, shooting guns, and making explosions. How you go about doing that, though, is entirely up to how you decide to bling out your car, drivers, and gunners. As it is said, “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” and that really should be printed on a card and put next to your play area.

Steve Jackson Games launched a Kickstarter for Car Wars: 6th Edition earlier in 2025. Gaming Trend received a copy of the Orange / Purple Starter set (one of the many boxed sets available) along with some of the expansions to review. The Orange/Purple starter set includes everything two players need to go head-to-head (literally) in the battle arena.

For a little background context, Car Wars was first published in 1980, used grid paper and cardboard punchouts, and has since gone through several different iterations. The Kickstarter’s goal was to help modernize the game, bringing it more in line with other popular vehicle combat movement games like Gaslands, Aerodrome, and Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures. The use of vehicle bases, maneuver templates, and proprietary dice is common in these kinds of games, but new to Car Wars, which makes a huge difference in terms of playability and accessibility for newer generations. 

Let’s start those engines!

Contents

The Car Wars Two-Player Starter Set: Orange/Purple retails for $44.95 and comes with the following contents. 

• Two pre-assembled minis: Sawtooth (from Miniatures Set 4) and Pure Energy (from Miniatures Set 2)
• Miniatures come pre-assembled and unpainted
• Two car bases (one orange and one purple)
• Two dashboards (one orange and one purple)
• Four counter sheets (dashboard sliders, barrier and wreck tokens, two turning keys, and other assorted tokens)
• Dice pack (20 dice: six yellow, four blue, three red, three green, two black, and two white)
• Updated Rulebook now includes a sample car build with helpful hints for your first game and all-new quick-reference material on the back cover.

The cardboard dashboard and slider tokens are really slick and really enhance the tactical experience for a futuristic racing game. There are a lot of cards for upgrades, drivers, and gunners, so the combinations are numerous. The proprietary dice are brightly colored, so they’re really easy to play with and follow.

The standout elements are the movement template and car bases, which make maneuvering really simple and easy to execute. The car models are cool, but are not really necessary for anything other than aesthetics; the sculpts don’t depict what the car is equipped with, nor does it matter for gameplay purposes (height, space, etc.) In fact, you could use your favorite Hot Wheels if you wanted to.

THE ARENA

The game has a unique rule wherein the size of the play area must have at least four walls (edges of the map), and all the sides must be the same length. What this means is that the play area does not have to be a square, like traditional skirmish miniature games. In fact, if you’re playing with more people, it is advised to make the play area hexagonal or even octagonal. 

No physical terrain is required (like piles of tires, barricades, buildings, etc.), so instead, there are cards with terrain features like mud or clay that get placed onto the arena. These hazard cards can affect the car's maneuverability, making turns and movement potentially more difficult. 

BUILDING YOUR CAR

Customizing your vehicle is really easy and streamlined, and helps provide you with a general idea of how you want to go about battling in the arena. You and your opponent agree on the build total; how many points of upgrades your driver(s) and car each get. Each player has their own upgrade deck to look through and choose from, which means players don’t have to fight over who gets what upgrade. 

The placement of the cards around the dashboard is just as important as which ones you take, as weapons and armor can only be used on a given side. For my game, I opted to go with armor in the front and heavy weapons to try and knock out my opponent as quickly as I could. The drivers weren’t as important for my build, so I just gave them what I could fit and figured I would use them if I needed.

Once your car is selected, upgrades chosen and placed, and your driving dashboards are set, you’re ready for battle in the arena!

GAMEPLAY

Like most games, players work down a list of actions and mechanics in any given turn. For this game, the order of those actions is really important because you may need to extinguish a fire and get your car ready for combat before you actually go to the shooting phase. Players each take turns activating their cars to move and then shoot.

The movement template is a really clever design. It slides underneath the car, pivoting at the back right or left wheels. Movement of the car depends on what speed you’re going (plus any upgrades). Turning is where the real fun begins because friction, inertia, and mass are things, and you can just do a 90-degree turn going really fast. So, you have to essentially make ‘driving tests’ to see if you actually succeed at the turn. Going fast also means that you’re harder to hit, giving you better defenses. In summary, the faster you’re going, the more difficult it is to turn and the harder it is to hit you.

The test game I played went a lot faster than I was expecting. I thought I had a tactical advantage with my loadout. However, going second in this game puts you at a really big disadvantage (unlike other racing or combat movement games). My friend was able to move up very quickly, unloaded an extremely devastating hail of bullets on me, while I rolled my typical ****ing terrible dice rolls. The front armor was destroyed, and I was dealt a damage card. Damage cards do all sorts of fun stuff like cause fires, remove upgrades, kill drivers, etc., etc. 

Combat in the game is pretty simple. Each car has four firing arcs, delineated by lines that start in the middle of the car and extend outward past the base of the car. Whatever firing arc the target car is in dictates what weapon(s) can be used. The attacking player and defending player then roll dice, and then either modify or reroll them depending on what upgrades or abilities they may have. The ‘hits’ aren’t just damage numbers, but are considered ‘successes’ whereby they translate into damage or other effects depending on the kind of weapon you’re using. So, this just further emphasizes the importance of the car build; make sure you bring the right weapons for the job! 

That was just the first weapon. The second attack, using another weapon on a different firing arc (which my car was just barely in), didn’t do as much damage. However, because my armor was gone, it still got another damage card, which was even worse than the first (removed more guns, killed a crew, bleh.) When it came my turn to attack, I was definitely a lot weaker, and so my attack wasn’t nearly as strong, doing only a few points of armor damage to the car. My dice rolls for attack would have been really great for defense, and vice versa, so that was kind of a feels-bad moment. All of this was Round 1. We only needed to play out one more round before it was abundantly clear that my car was not going to make it.

So, for a straight combat game, it was a pretty short match, with not many ways for me to bring it back in Round 2. 

Expansion Packs

The Expansion Packs are where the game really takes off and gets more involved. You can create some wild and exciting car builds with the cards available in the expansion packs. The Orange/ Purple Starter Set has a balanced selection of cards; each player has access to the same amount and type of upgrades. Rockets and machine guns are cool, but the numerous expansion packs open up a large selection for arsenal, armor, and crew. Cars can now be more specialized for range attacks or melee attacks, speed-focused or armor-based, or just general improvements to handling and dice manipulation. Some expansions offer deployable weapons, like spikes or grenades, as upgrades for the cars.

With the expansions out right now, the possibilities for car builds are seemingly endless, which is one of my favorite aspects of these kinds of games. 

IMPRESSIONS

Cars Wars: Sixth Edition is a very easy game to learn. It bridges the two worlds of board games and miniature games pretty seamlessly. There are familiar elements of both that work well together; you get the player dashboard of board games with the resource management contained on the dashboard or car upgrade cards fused with the sandbox movement of the miniature car and its maneuver template, opening up unlimited space for movement and interaction. 

A quick play or reference sheet is really handy as a reminder for round orders, turn orders, available actions, and the like. The rulebook is great for learning to play, but flipping back and forth can really slow down the gameplay. There are a few PDFs of the quick guides floating around on various forums and community pages. 

The Orange / Purple Starter feels anemic. While a 1v1 with cars is great to get the feel of the game, it became quickly apparent that whoever went first usually had the upper hand since you just need to focus on the one other target. Multiple cars, played by either one player or having more players in the arena, would greatly affect decision making in the arena. A focused attack on one car can expose the attacker’s unarmored sections for a weak-spot attack, for example. Additionally, having an objective beyond just straight combat against the opponent forces players to make decisions on the table to either play the objective or fight, which can present advantages and disadvantages within combat. 

Because the Orange / Purple Starter Set feels incomplete, I would recommend picking up the Car Wars: 6th Edition Core Set, which has more cars, dashboards, and car holders. 

For the price point of the starter, the Core Set seems to offer more value for its contents and replay value. The Orange / Purple Starter Set alone doesn’t feel like it has a lot of replay value - it needs more to it. The expansion packs do help add more to the starter set, in terms of customization and replay, but I think ultimately, more cars are needed in the arena.

Have you played Cars Wars: Sixth Edition? Have you played with lots of people and created lots of chaos? Let us know! Don’t forget to follow GamingTrend for more board game and miniature game coverage!