Is Time Driver a variation of Car Wars?

Time Driver is a game that uses weapons and vehicles in a future setting, and to create vehicle ID cards we use an Excel spreadsheet to create printouts that can then be applied to stronger matte board; then Plastiklips are used as sliders along the bottom and right of the card, to track component damage and speed tracking, and then flipping over the card, a slider is also used on a number scale from $100 $900 then 1k to 15k (in increments of 1k) for cash tracking with another Plastiklip; along the left of the card you see above, on the back, we applied another slider to the scale of 1 to 11 for mission accomplishment tracking. You could use a pencil for all this and erase it to resuse the card, but why? The Plastiklips work pretty darn cool.

Given that our rules regard the use of weapons on vehicles in a future setting, is Time Driver a variation of Car Wars?

Of the main differences between the concepts is that we design vehicles by body type which designates how many internal components are available, and we are not concerned with weight as much as they are in Car Wars. In the coming days and weeks we'll post more details on how car design is done; it's not that difficult at all, and in fact, the basic car has a speed of 3, an acceleration of 1 and a handling rating of 1. This fits all cars from compacts to SUVs with two weapons and 2 occupants of which one is usually the gunner. The more passengers added, the more handling falls. Once handling falls to zero, acceleration stays at one. As passenger accommodations are removed, acceleration increases to a maximum of 3 and handling max's out at 3. Only vehicles smaller than a mid-size that is smaller than a Ford Taurus can go speed 4 or greater.

Time Driver is not Car Wars because it doesn't play like a Car Wars game, but honestly we can't even determine what a Car Wars game is because over the years, so many variations and player tweakings have been created that coming to a conclusion doesn't seem possible. Our story doesn't deal with any post-nuclear storyline; in Time Driver, that event was avoided- barely.

There may be some very close similarities between Time Driver and Car Wars in weapons because there does not seem to be anything proprietary in the Car Wars weapons list otherwise we couldn't use it; everything they list is a standard weapon, for instance, spikes were invented in the middle ages and even used in ancient times, so the spike gun we use seems realistic as it is simply a gun that fires a package of spikes a certain distance. Another example might be the Recoilless Rifle- see the Wikipedia for information on just what a Recoilless Rifle is; in Time Driver, a recoilless rifle is a projectile firing weapon that vents gasses so as to produce no recoil when it fires; thus we apply a Combat Bonus of 1 whenever this weapon fires.

The biggest caveat of Time Driver is that we do NOT believe any of these weapons are military-grade. Our story uses the background that during the breakdown of the early 21st Century, a cottage industry of autodueling springs up and this is fueled by people making their own weaponry for it; this of course leaches out into the everyday world and eventually everyone sees the need to arm themselves especially on trips between towns. The easiest way to imagine this is to imagine your town with NO police and only a volunteer fire department and volunteer force of plumbers and waste haulers; few citizens remain as volunteer police because of the danger involved, so whatever police there are they are usually corporate-sponsored or what remains of the national guard. Remember, we're talking about a total collapse of the society, not just a small banking downturn like that which recently happened during the final development of these rules. Remember, the story here is very similar to actually having returned to the old west; alot of people have died in the process, there's alot of poor people wandering the wildernesses and generally it all looks like the film Blade Runner.

We don't know if because of these similarities we are obliged to point any viewer toward the Steve Jackson site and their policy page, so we are doing it here anyway because it seems like the right thing to do because we were big fans, for a few minutes, of the Car Wars concept. When however, just like Apple computer and Steve Jobs, they could no longer support the product we drifted away to BattleTech and this is how we came to where we are today: Our concept was originally called "QuarterMaster: Bring Your Inventory to War." This concept was almost exactly what we see today: the idea was that you bring your die cast toys and toys of just about anything in the appropriate scale to the game table, and our rules should enable you to game with them.

So, our next rules that we're re-releasing are Hex Command NOVA, where we return to the gridded gaming surface in a sci-fi setting using Games Workshop and other manufacturer's miniatures. Why don't we use their rules? Because frankly their rules don't work unless all you're interested in is beer and pretzels non-sense. Sorry, but that's the way we see it.

Link to Steve Jackson online policy.