Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Thunder Road: Ignition is Restoration Games’ attempt to streamline the production, ruleset, and gameplay of Thunder Road: Vendetta, itself an update of the 1980s Milton Bradley game Thunder Road, designed by Jim Keifer.
I’m on record here at Meeple Mountain as saying that Thunder Road: Vendetta is perfect in every single way save for one: the game runs about 30 minutes too long, and it does that pretty consistently regardless of player count. It’s gorgeous, it’s hilarious, it is a great design, and it has almost unlimited amounts of content in its deluxe Maximum Chrome version. Between that version, and the expansion Carnival of Chaos, there might not be a better “beer and pretzels” laugher in my collection.
When Thunder Road: Ignition arrived, I immediately set it up and waited for my nine-year-old to come home. He’s loved Thunder Road: Vendetta for a couple years now, and I was sure he would want to play Thunder Road: Ignition. He saw the cover artwork (once again brought to you by Marie Bergeron) and smiled that big smile. He was home. Then he asked a simple question, which I think defines the break point of where we landed on Thunder Road: Ignition.
“Where are the choppers?”
Son, There Are No Choppers
Thunder Road: Ignition is a car combat dice chucking game for 2-4 players. The box says it will play in 25-45 minutes. In this version of the game, players must get two of their three cars across a finish line, located five track tiles from the starting area. And, yes, players still have to slam and shoot their opponents into oblivion…at least, temporary oblivion.
Two things are important to call out here, and I think this will help buyers make a decision on whether this game is a fit. The first is easy: if you already own Thunder Road: Vendetta, in any form (standard edition or the deluxified Maximum Chrome edition), do not buy Thunder Road: Ignition. It is not for you. Thunder Road: Vendetta is perfect, so you don’t need another Thunder Road game that has less of the things you are used to. And, there are no choppers.
The second thing is really two things, and I think this is where Thunder Road: Ignition does have a specific audience. Ignition is a hair shorter, duration-wise, than Thunder Road: Vendetta, and it does not feature car/player elimination.
Here’s what I mean: In Thunder Road: Vendetta, players begin with three cars (or five yellow motorcycles, or one large red truck), and when a car/motorcycle/truck is eliminated, it is permanently out of the game. Toast. Not coming back. Permadeath. When any player loses all their vehicles, a finish line is pasted to the end of the current lead track tile, and the first player to cross the finish line wins.
In Thunder Road: Ignition, players begin the game with three cars and they will always end the game with three cars. When a player’s car takes a second damage token, that car teleports to an offboard pit stop, where it can respawn into the game on that car’s next turn. It might even re-enter the game and take a normal turn, based on one of Ignition’s special Command powers.
This spirals in a couple of interesting ways. The first is that because everyone has cars that are essentially indestructible (cars have unlimited respawns), you might “destroy” a car three or four times, but they keep showing up and getting more chances to win. In my second play of Thunder Road: Ignition, I knocked my opponent’s cars out of the game four times, but he was still able to get two cars across the finish line before I could. If we were playing by Vendetta’s rules, I would have won that game in a landslide.
That also means the game could run longer than a game of Thunder Road: Vendetta, which is absolutely not the way to go in a game that already runs about 30 minutes too long. So, it’s hard to say what the design team was going for with these changes. In my limited experience, games of Ignition took just as long as Vendetta, depending on player count.
However, there is one positive here: some people hate the idea of playing a game where they might be completely wiped off the board. That’s not a problem in Ignition.
Streamlined in Every Way
Thunder Road: Ignition is very much Thunder Road: Lite.
Thunder Road: Ignition has an MSRP of $35, a fantastic entry-level price point. The Command boards here are completely stripped down, with Drift being the only power that carried over from the base game. You can also shoot a missile at any car anywhere on the map once per round, replacing the Airstrike power and the use of a chopper token.
No choppers mean a price point that I can get behind; OK, fine. The track tiles are a little shorter, and the game is set up to play across just five tiles before a player can race across the finish line with their cars. The plastic tokens aren’t as sexy as the dirty wash look of the Maximum Chrome tokens, but I can live with that. You can shoot at your opponents right from the start, unlike Thunder Road: Vendetta. Slams are just as easy to understand as the base game. The Ignition rulebook is very short.
For a player who isn’t sure about making the full plunge into Thunder Road: Vendetta, I love that Thunder Road: Ignition exists. But for a player who has or loves Thunder Road: Vendetta, there is no reason to play the Ignition version.
My nine-year-old, the one who noted the lack of chopper tokens, played Thunder Road: Ignition once and immediately stated—after WINNING THAT GAME when he was sent into a “Blast Off” across the finish line—that he would never play Ignition again, because he thinks Thunder Road: Vendetta is the “only” Thunder Road game he needs. (He loves Thunder Road: Carnival of Chaos and expansions like Choppe Shoppe that add car powers and crew chiefs.)
When a person wins a game, then insists that they will never play it again, that’s a sign that they really don’t want to play it again. My 12-year-old also prefers Vendetta over Ignition, because there’s so much more juice in the original game.
So, that’s Thunder Road: Ignition. $35 is a great price for a fun version of the system. But if you’ve got the cheddar and a group that loves games that emphasize “big, dumb fun”, drop a lot more money on a copy of Thunder Road: Vendetta—Maximum Chrome Edition, and thank Restoration Games, and me, later.
