Discover Car Wars

Continuing the discussion from Discover Mario Karts:

We were looking for an apartment in Berkeley, a bunch of us adults (5 in all). We were walking down a residential street and I saw it: a beat up box saying , “Car Wars” on the cover, and little else on the faded cover.

But it had all the pieces inside! Paper tabs and tokens, still in the sheets! I never played it, but I held onto it for years before passing it along the way I received it: left on the corner of a Berkeley residential street…

Game page

Oh, this would make a great premise for a PBBG!

My brain got wires crossed for a second and thought there might be some sort of connection to the Joe Dever gamebooks. But I had their name wrong. Those were Freeway Warrior.

Then I remembered it was a Steve Jackson thing but I could not remember which Steve Jackson.

But no. UK Steve Jackson’s fighting fantasy line did Freeway Fighter.

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Hey, read the wikipedia article for Car Wars. What is it?

A game? A series? Franchise? Shared paracosm?

I am trying to figure out for taxonomy reasons.

Same for say, D&D. What is a “game page” for something that has editions?

It seems like from our own discussion on assasin’s creed as a series. I think you’d end up dumping most cross-media franchises into the series designation. And while it’s kind of a stretch to think of car wars as a cross-media franchise. It KINDA is. Just not on the same scale as we usually think aout it.

I’d vote to consolidate editions into a single game page, and track the shifting of the default settings as different paracosms the gamepage could link to. Thinking of rules changes more as new editions of software. Possibly linking to different OGL rules examples that are represenative of the different editions, in lieu of a rules changelong.

Because as much as I like dwelling on the stylistically differences between say D&D Whitebox vs D&D BECMI and D&D B/X. A lot of people treat them as interchangeable D&D Basic and D&D Basic as equally interchangeable. The industry also has some games whose erratta basically turns the game into new editions. D&D 4E before all erratta and after all errata with all new consolidated rulebooks can be seen as two different games by some.

What is and isn’t a new edition, is very mutable for tabletop. With publishers kinda interchanging edition and cleaned-up print run however they feel like it.

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