I played the first edition of this game like ten years ago. Don't really remember it at all other than that I liked it. If this second edition is much like the first then I don't know what the heck I was thinking. CW:TCG is based on Car Wars, Steve Jackson's wargame of Mad Max post-apocalyptic road combat. In the regular Car Wars game you get to design cars, trucks, motorcycles, even tanks and helicopters and speedboats and pit them against each other in a wide variety of arenas and terrain.

So there were a couple of strategies they could take. One was to create an independent game that embodies the ethos and world of the main game. Much like Star Fleet Missions does for the Star Fleet Battles game. SFM does not even try to be a card-game SFB, it's a game in the spirit of SFB. A second choice is to make a game that is based on the main game but is simpler, faster, more family oriented. Again, for SFB you have Star Fleet Battle Force, a much simpler card game where you command a squadron of ships and shoot at each other, using various weapons and doing damage, very reminiscent of the main game.

CW:TCG takes the second approach. You don't design cars, but you do command a car and use various weapon and armor cards to do battle, doing damage to the other cars and trying to take them out. Everybody starts out with a car that is exactly the same, with 12 point armor in the front, back, left and right; 9 point tires; and a 5 point driver. You draw to six cards, then play one and discard as many cards as you want. Cards are either weapon cards or defense cards with a couple of special cards.

Weapon cards have a weapon, damage, and where that damage is applied. The weapons are Flamethrower (6 damage), Autocannon (5 dmg), Missile (4 dmg) and Machine Guns (3 dmg). There are some special cards that let you do called shots or aim at the tires. Defense cards are Armor (stops 3 damage), Swerve (to avoid damage), Spin (to shift damage to another location), and some special cards like Weapon Jams or Weapon Backfires.

It's a very simple game, the objective of which is to score 60 points over a number of rounds. Winning a round (being the last car standing) is 20 points, each kill is worth 10 points, and there is a 5 point player-voted prestige bonus each round. The components are well done, with heavy stock cards having full-color pictures and six heavy-stock vehicle cards. The game unfortunately suffers from some serious flaws.

First is the "killer gets all the points" syndrome. There is no incentive to whittle a guy down just so that someone else gets the kill. It's made worse because you only get one attack and you can only do so much damage. As Shannon pointed out, someone with one of each Autocannon can just wait and reap the kills (though it's not that easy to get those one-shot kills a driver weapons). Note that Car Wars has the same flaws for Arena battles unless you have other rules to stimulate combat.

The second flaw is that it's way too random and generic. There are way too many defense cards, more than half of the attacks can be countered partially or totally. Every car can shoot every weapon and every car is exactly the same. It's really tough to develop an interesting strategy in this game. Eric commented that people have said Battle Cattle is exactly the same game. Now, that does make for great interoperability, but it's boring.

The third flaw is the everybody-beats-up-on-the-leader syndrome. If you win' that first round, there's no way you're winning the second round, or even getting any points other than maybe the prestige bonus. One car has very little chance against two and no chance against three. It helps that you can draw up to your full hand and there are lots of defense cards. But the flaw is that everybody will go up to right about the same point total (about 50) and then someone randomly wins. I'd like skill to be some factor. Not total, but a skilled player should be able to win significantly more games than random.

All in all, the game has seriously flawed victory conditions and rules and it has no individuality. But not all hope is lost. This would be an easy game for people to customize and tinker to make it more playable. I'm not going to suggest anything because it's different for every group. The components are gorgeous and it'd be a shame to just buy the game and not play it because of the current rules. For $15, I'd still buy it. For $25 though, I expect better rules.