August 21, 2019: Autoduel Weekly: Custom Dice

An important part of the new edition of Car Wars is the underlying game mechanics that are driven by custom six-sided dice. Unlike earlier editions, the upcoming Car Wars Sixth Edition game does not use standard six-sided dice. Instead, we have created six different dice that each serve a specific purpose:

• Yellow. A workhorse die, weighted heavily to more damage than defense.
• Green. Two wrench faces make this great for weapons with special effects – flame weapons, for example, that set a target on fire when a wrench is rolled.
• Red. The red die is defense-heavy . . . but that also means it is skid-heavy since the shield/skid icon shares the same face.
• White. With double star and double wrench faces, this die can be a monster that throws a lot of damage at an opponent.
• Black. Insanely overloaded with wrenches; four of the faces are the wrench icon.
• Blue. Effectively the 50/50 die, with three shield faces and three damage faces.

The core game includes the yellow, green, and red dice. The others will be found in expansion sets. Which dice will you roll during the game? Everyone will roll yellow, green, and red dice when maneuvering (depending on the difficulty of the turn), while dice rolled during an attack depend entirely on the weapon used when firing on an enemy. 

Best news of all? Tooling is complete for all six of the dice! Since they are each a different color of plastic, we had to create six different steel tools (which dramatically increased our financial investment in the game). We thought it important, though, to take this step before crowdfunding so that our upcoming Kickstarter campaign can show photos (the pic shown is of an earlier stage; the final dice will not be speckled) of the finished dice. Car Wars Sixth Edition is an important part of our 40th-anniversary plans (Steve Jackson Games turns 40 next year!) and we refuse to cut corners on the project.

Note: To receive email notification when the Car Wars project goes live, please follow both the Steve Jackson Games and Warehouse 23 pages on Kickstarter.

-- Phil Reed