Wrecking Yard on a Tuesday

Somebody at the after-shift table brought this in a rolling case like it was headed to a tournament, and honestly, given how much stuff comes in the Maximum Chrome box, that tracks. Thunder Road: Vendetta is Restoration Games’ redo of the 1986 MB racer, seven designers credited on the box, which tells you something about how many cooks were in this kitchen before it hit shelves. Plays 2 to 4, 5 if you spring for the Big Rig expansion.

On your turn you roll four dice, one goes to each of your three cars, and the last activates a special ability, a helicopter strike more often than not. Then everybody just watches cars slam into each other until the board looks like a wrecking yard.

I’ll say this straight, I bought in for the theme before I’d read a single rule. This is Mad Max the board game, plain and simple, three little cars each, shoot em, ram em, watch em cartwheel off a cliff. That part delivers every time.

What I didn’t expect is how much the setup eats into a weeknight. The insert looks great on the shelf, everything nested in its slot, but it’s not practical, it slows down both setup and teardown, and more than once I’ve just tossed it aside and bagged the components instead of fighting the foam at 1am. Worth knowing before you commit a Tuesday to it.

Play it at six and there’s real downtime between turns, waiting on someone else’s slam chain to resolve, dice bouncing, damage cards flipping, fun to watch the first time and less fun the fourth. Two, three, four keeps it moving. The endgame can drag too, once you or somebody at the table figures out the trick, feed your best rolls to the small car and let the other two die on purpose, since every dead car in your trio gives the survivor a speed boost. Feels less like racing and more like a math problem once you see it.

Getting knocked out early stings less than I expected. You don’t sit there and wait for hours for everyone else to finish, the game just ends once someone crosses.

Would I own it? Probably not on my shelf. But I’d play it again at somebody else’s table any night I don’t feel like thinking, beer and pretzels, cars in pieces, nobody keeping real score by the third round anyway.