Thursday 31 January 2013

Dark Future



As part of my 'play more games' approach this year, I've been looking out for boardgames that I can pick up and play with the kids and at the club. I've long had an interest in Mad Max style automotive mayhem, having been an avid Battlecars player in my mis-spent youth, and having established small collection of diecast Hotwheels conversions that I put together for Axles and Alloys a couple of years ago.

I've also been inspired by orlygg's excellent Route 666 blog, which is definately worth a look:

http://route666darkfuture.blogspot.co.uk/

This is a great example of wargame recycling, using an obsolete but perfectly good set of rules as a basis for the re-animation of long forgotten but once 'trendy' gaming systems. I really like this approach and have always tried to follow the same philosophy, with the Darkest Africa and Back of Beyond projects as good examples.

Why jump on the bandwagon while it's at full steam ahead, when you can climb on board at a leisurely and parsimonious pace, once it's been shunted into a rusty siding somewhere?

Anyway, I now have an almost mint condition Dark Future box set, complete with unpunched counters, weapons sprues, bikes and cars, all for not much more than twenty five quid. The cars are assembled but not glued together or painted, so can easily be pulled apart and rebuilt with added extras. I've also downloaded the free version of the rules and the White Line Fever supplement onto the Kindle Fire HD, giving me the opportunity to work through the rule manual in my spare time, whenever that is?

A bit of a result and a very promising project for the future, dark or otherwise.

7 comments:

  1. I loved this game as a sprog and had forgotten all about it.

    where can you d/l the rules for free?

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  2. PLayed along time ago. Got out of it because of the "you must stay on the road or explode" rule.
    -J

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  3. used to love this game, but if you wanted a real Mad Max game get Car Wars a brillent game that gets better the more people you have playing. It is a bit more involved than Dark Future so if you are introdcing a new gamer I would stick with DF but in the long run try Car Wars
    Peace James

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  4. I keep on hearing people mentioning this game, wonder if FFG is going to get on the case of an eventual reprint.

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  5. The DF rules are available via boardgamegeek.

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  6. I used to play Car Wars, too. Sometimes, we had more fun building our cars than having battles. A friend and I ran a Mad Max sort of campaign one summer.

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