Thunder Road: Ignition is a shining example of a board game tuning up, and pricing down

I am, generally speaking, Not A Big Fan of car board games. So, when Restoration Games’ team racked up $762,000 on Kickstarter for Thunder Road: Vendetta in 2023, I just watched with interest from the stands, eating an oilstained hot dog and breathing in the gasoline. It’s never quite made my shopping list since, either; $60 is hardly expensive, but it’s dear enough to disqualify it from being a ‘little treat’ impulse buy.

Apparently, I’m not alone, because Restoration (more specifically designers Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson, and Justin Kemppainen) have specifically engineered the new version, Thunder Road: Ignition, to deliver the same post-apocalyptic, rock-em-sock-em racing for half the cash. And, blow it all, if they haven’t done exactly that. Restoration Games kindly handed me a free review copy at Gen Con, and it’s been my pleasure to learn that a) I really should have been playing Vendetta all along, and b) I don’t need to now – because this game is at least as good.

If you, like me, didn’t play Thunder Road: Vendetta, we should cover the basics first (TR:V veterans, feel free to jump straight to the changes in Ignition). Note also that all the images below are of my copy of Ignition – partly because, with a few exceptions and missing helicopters, there’s very little, visually, to tell between them. Trust me, it’ll make sense.

The baseline: Thunder Road Vendetta

So, Vendetta is our starting point. One of classic game-rebooting specialist Restoration Games’ biggest success stories, Brett Myers and Dave Chalker’s board game is a reimplementation of designer Jim Keifer’s 1986 creation Thunder Road, which was itself, er, ‘inspired’ by the original Mad Max movie that came out in the US six years before.

You’re a desperate, gas mask-clad daredevil in a souped up, gun-armed scrap wagon, and you’re racing along a post-apocalyptic American highway with absolutely zero health and safety regulations. You control three cars (one large, one medium, one small), and whoever gets one of theirs across the finish line first is the winner.

The straight road starts with three interlocking sections, but each time a car reaches the end of one, a new stretch is added from a random stack, and the rearmost segment removed from the game, along with any unfortunate drivers still lagging behind there. Only once the second additional tile is added does the finish line come into view at its end.

You can’t get there by just being fastest, though; this is a death race. You’ve got to clear your path to the chequered flag by ramming rivals’ cars off the road or into obstacles (called a Slam), and/or using your in-built machine guns to wreck the vehicles in your way. Big cars are better at ramming, but easier to shoot; small ones vice versa.

The action economy is as grinningly unsubtle, yet effective as the theme. Each round, you first roll four six sided dice and reserve them. Each turn, you then apply a die to one of your cars and move that many spaces. The forth die you’ll use to trigger a special Command ability, once per round.

You can Repair damage from a car; use Nitro for an extra move; Drift a car to overtake someone without Slamming them; or order an Airstrike, having your pet Helicopter swoop in and shoot a rival.

That’s the bones of the game right there – but the meat is in the destructive melee you’ll wreak with those tools, as the inevitable circus of collisions causes cascading chaos.

Almost everything on the track is there to ensure the cars smash into each other as often as possible. Even if every player’s on a pacifist run, terrain obstacles scattered along the track ensure the Destruction Derby doesn’t become a Regular Derby.

Oil slicks send you skidding into other cars. Impassable rockslides are instant death to any unlucky enough to career into them. Landmines will blow half your car off if you roll over one.

Take damage twice, and your car becomes inoperable until Repaired – but stays on the road in the meantime, as an obstacle that’ll trigger further Slams when driven into.

And here’s the kicker: Slams beget Slams. Hit another car, and you’ll stack your car on top of the other one before rolling two neat, custom ‘FX’ dice. One tells you which car (top or bottom) gets shunted, and the other shows you which adjacent space they’re shunted into. If said shunted-into space also contains a car, another Slam begins, with no limit to how many can be triggered this way. It’s Slams all the way down, baby – and these cascading wreck scenarios are, unsurprisingly, some of the game’s funniest and best moments.

So, that’s the original game, Vendetta. It’s a big $60 box with multi part, multi color plastic cars and cute little choppers with rotating rotors. Ignition costs just a tad over half that much, aiming to “streamline play for an easier and quicker point-of-entry”. So, what got cut, and what’s left?

What’s changed in Ignition?

Describing Vendetta’s gameplay in detail right up top was a very deliberate choice for this Ignition review, because – spoilers – almost everything is exactly the same.

The cheaper version has fewer moving parts than the 2023 original – both metaphorically and physically. But, as the incomparable Dan Thurot rightly says in his Space Biff review, this really only serves to amplify Thunder Road’s greatest strengths (momentum and slapstick mayhem), to the point where it’s arguably superior to its more expensive older sibling.

Let’s examine the change notes. First up, no more choppers. That’s a quarter of the plastic minis eliminated, right away. We trade the tactility of playing with a chopper toy for the Missile action, which shoots an imaginary rocket at a rival car instead, but otherwise works exactly the same.

Second, the toy cars are worse. Instead of each vehicle being multiple different colored injection molded parts fitted together, like a proper toy, Ignition’s are hollow, one piece, single injection jobs. They’re still cute, they’re still detailed, it still feels good to stack ’em – but they look and feel cheap, because they are.

Third, cars can’t die now. There’s no Repair action for damaged cars, no inoperable cars staying on the board, and no eliminations either; if your car crashes or takes two damage, it just goes off for a pit stop and comes back next turn, at a predetermined re-entry point that’s usually several spaces behind its grave site. The trade-off is that it then misses a go, unless you spend your one Command for that round to bring it back on immediately (that Jumpstart action replaces Repair on the Command Board).

And forth, on a related note: instead of a straight road that randomly generates new sections during the game, Ignition has the complete track laid out from the get-go, it’s shorter, and it now has bends in it. As far as I can tell, the kinks in the road have little effect on the gameplay, but they’re a small change that, for me, boosts the game’s atmos. And, crucially, the shorter track (combined with other streamlining) cuts play time from 45-75 minutes down to 25-45.

Though I haven’t played Vendetta, these two feel like the biggest changes here. There are fewer states for a car to be in, with less friction between them; things move more smoothly; and the competition stays tighter from start to finish, because no team gets left behind or knocked out of the running. The slight balancer is that you now have to get two cars over the line to win, rather than just one.

On the other hand, no car death means there’s no option to win through vehicular murder alone, and it also means no mangled car wrecks adding dynamic new obstacles to the track, so those have just been removed from the box. Another saving on plastic, but perhaps a bit of life, death, and thrill sucked out too. Your mileage may vary.

Priced down, tuned up?

I’ll be honest, I went into testing Thunder Road: Ignition with only a passing knowledge of the original Vendetta, and only while doing wider research for this review did I discover how similar the two games are.

Considering the specific, streamlining amendments by Restoration’s designers added a much needed layer of context to the (already very positive) initial opinions I had from my test games. As a result I was left  even more impressed with Ignition, not just as a cut-price adaptation but as a game in its own right.

Just from playing it, Ignition defeated my anti-car prejudices and slammed its way into my gateway game rotation, right alongside fellow newcomer Magical Athlete and my beloved Azul. Just from opening the box, it was clear Ignition had somehow kept most of its big sister’s aesthetic quality intact despite a 42% price reduction – an unusual achievement in itself.

But doing all that with gameplay adaptations that, at worst, achieve a slightly different thing just as well and, at best, achieve the same thing, better, for less money, is what elevates Ignition from ‘great’ to ‘exceptional’.

For a lot of existing Vendetta fans, this isn’t going to be a necessary play. If you already love the bigger game, you might miss your choppers, the random extra track tiles, or the thrill of winning mostly by murdering your enemies. And sure, the cars feel cheap, because they are cheap. But sometimes, cheap games can feel like a million bucks – and this one does.

If you’re itching to tell me why I’m wrong and the bendy roads change EVERYTHING, or why I’ve utterly missed the point because I haven’t played Vendetta, come park your scrap wagon in the free Wargamer Discord community and tell me so! I’d genuinely love to learn more, and hey, stick around for the constant, unhinged tabletop chats, giveaways, AMAs, and more!

Source: Wargamer