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Since its announcement, I’d been interested in Thunder Road Vendetta, but I was concerned that the two-player experience would be lacking. Ah well, just add it to the other games I’d love to play but don’t play well at two. Then I read about a two-player variant on boardgamegeek.com designed by Jerry Hawthorne of Mice and Mystics fame. The original designers of the game had posted and agreed it was indeed a good variant.
I was intrigued.
So, I took the plunge and bought the game. And I’m very glad I did.
How Does It Play
It’s essentially a roll-and-move game like Monopoly, Sorry, and Klonks ‘N’ Klones. That’s not what you wanted to hear, is it? But don’t worry, it’s a bit more complicated than that. You roll four dice at the start of your turn. These dice can then be assigned to any of your three cars, allowing you to move the car that many spaces or to a side-board with four special powers. This gives you plenty of interesting choices to make.
Thunder Road Vendetta is billed as a racing game, but it’s more of a smack-your-opponents-around-and-then-try-to-pinch-the-race-in-the-last-second game. You’ll ram into other cars, causing them to spin out and crash into hazards. You’ll get up behind other cars and shoot them, causing shrapnel to come flying off at a random angle and take out a car on the other side of the board. And you’ll shoot other cars with your helicopter, causing them to veer all over the road before crashing into a mountain. It’s all good family fun.
The Two-Player Variant
To find this variant search for “Two Player Big Team Variant Thunder Road Vendetta Bgg”. In the variant, you play with two teams of three cars. You roll all eight dice, and you can assign them to the appropriately coloured cars in any order. The end-game is triggered when any one team is obliterated.
I played the game as the standard two-player game out of the box. It was okay but lacked the chaos of a four-player game. The variant brings back the chaos. The road is much busier, and the repercussions of slamming into another car are generally much funnier because of this.
What’s Good About It
Thunder Road Vendetta, played with this variant, is a strange beast. At times, it plays almost like an abstract strategy game, where you are trying to position your cars to block your opponent's path and make sure that your cars can’t be shot at. It can be quite a thinky game. But in Chess, when you take someone’s piece, you just remove it from the board, here you shoot at them or slam into them and watch chaos ensue. All manner of funny things can happen as cars swerve all over the track and are blown into the air, only to land on top of another car, which throws them off onto a mine. Boom!
Then you’re back to carefully planning your next move.
It’s strange, but a lot of fun.
The two-player variant works very smoothly and feels like it could have been included in the base game rule book. Maybe it will be in future printings.
Any Problems?
Replayablity is a minor concern if you’re going to want to play this a lot. There are only a limited number of ways that you can destroy your opponent. But there are expansions available that will alleviate this with player powers, motorcycles, and ramps! Oh, and your car can get set on fire.
Conclusion
One of the things I love about Thunder Road: Vendetta is that you’re very rarely out of the game. Your opponent can have all of their cars, and you can have one car left—the rest having been gloriously destroyed—and you can still win. Once the end-game has been triggered by the destruction of one team, the end tile is put on the road, and it’s a race to get there.
Even if someone has their buggy miles ahead of you, there’s still a chance that you can fly your helicopter in behind them, shoot them and send them spinning off the road, leaving it clear for you to come charging through and take a cheeky win.
I played one game where my opponent was floundering with hardly any cars, but he still had a chance to nick the game. He only needed to move eight spaces, and the tarmacked road was clear, allowing him to use the road die to move an extra 1, 2, or 3 spaces depending on the roll. He had a pretty good chance.
He rolled a one on the road die, and his dice came up as 6, 6, 6, and 5. I couldn’t believe how good his roll was. That was until we realised that he couldn’t use his nitro special power because he hadn’t rolled a 1, 2, or a 3. He ended up one short. It was an exciting end to the game.
All in all, Thunder Road: Vendetta is chaotic fun with interesting tactical choices.
Scores:
Total Score 90/100
Artwork 4/5
Complexity 2/5
Replayability 3/5
Player interaction 5/5
Component Quality 4/5
You Might Like:
· The surprisingly thinky gameplay
· The chaos of hitting other cars
· You rarely feel like you have no chance of winning
· The Mad Max style theme
Might Not Like:
· The luck factor—you are rolling dice, after all
· The replayability is a tad limited without the expansions
