Expansion review — Thunderverse Track Pack

Asphalt As the Eye Can See

Designers: Carla & Jeff Horger

Player count: 2-11

Publisher: GMT Games

It was back in 2014 that designers Carla and Jeff Horger brought their first racing game into the world: Thunder Alley. NASCAR hot rods duked it out on four different tracks, battling each other as well as random events until a team cut through the chaos and emerged victorious.

The very next year, in 2015, GMT Games put out the Thunder Alley Expansion Tracks: four more speedways for enthusiasts to burn rubber on. Business as usual, right? Except ...
Each track, albeit clearly designed for NASCAR action, nonetheless featured fidgety detours intended for subtler adventures. There were also intriguing markings on the lap indicator—instructions about something called "Grand Prix" lasting an additional lap.

Thunder Alley wouldn't remain an only child for much longer.

(Fans of GMT productions knew all about it, because the new game wasn't kept a secret during its development.)

One year later, the foreshadowed Formula 1 version of the racing system came out, also shipping with four circuits of its own. In a departure from the typical NASCAR-looking tracks of its predecessor—misshapen ovals several lanes wide—the new offerings twisted this way and that in a manner more attuned to typical Formula 1 hair-raising maneuvers.

The official party line was that Grand Prix was absolutely playable on Thunder Alley tracks; not only on the expansion pack with its dedicated carve-outs, but also—why not?—on the four original tracks. The more, the merrier. And as if repaying an overdue favor, the circuits that shipped inside the Grand Prix box invited Thunder Alley enthusiasts to also enjoy the fun, with lap indicators sporting TA mentions (and usually making the race a lap shorter).

Just like that, the Thunderverse was born.
Two games, 12 high-velocity playgrounds—thus far.

It would take a few more years for the next entry in the series to reach publication. That was the Mad Max-adjacent Apocalypse Road, in 2020, replete with roof-mounted machine guns and other friendly appendages. Four more tracks joined the ranks; and even though, in this case, they looked more like battlefields—what with their chutes and rough & jump sections—they proved amenable to occasional visits from their more civilized brethren.

Three games strong, the Thunderverse was now racing across 16 different speedways.

In 2023, a mere three years after Apocalypse Road, GMT released the Grand Prix New Track Pack. Because what's wrong with more tracks?
This one offered—you guessed it—four new circuits, once more purpose-built for Grand Prix but usable to quench any Thunder Alley or Apocalypse Road thirst that might be keeping you up at night. (They failed to include any of the specific terrain required for Apocalypse Road to function, but it's something you can remedy with homemade markers.)

So, got enough with those 20 tracks of yours? Hardly.

GMT just published the Thunderverse Track Pack, an additional collection of four racecourses that, as its name suggests, isn't happy to simply offer more tarmac for all sorts of four-wheelers to zoom upon: it was designed with all three games in mind. Two of the new tracks zig and zag just like Grand Prix likes it, while the other two propose big oval shapes sure to keep any and all Thunder Alley enthusiasts happy. Even Apocalypse Road racers get their due. Mostly.

AUTODROME SIMARD-LALUMIÈRE

(Yes, a buddy of mine and I forked over some cash in exchange for the honor of naming this track that's very much shaped like the Canadian Grand Prix circuit located on an island right next to Montreal. I mean, as Canucks, how could we not?)

One of the two Thunder Alley-first tracks, the Autodrome gets right to the point. You want wide? You want fast? You've got it—but don't get too comfortable. The road surprises racers with several 3-to-1 and then 1-to-3 switch points that'll rain chaos on your orderly group of little cars.

It's got a discreet squiggle to satisfy basic Grand Prix requirements, adding a bit of finesse to an otherwise roaring experience. Alas, no accommodations for Apocalypse Road have been worked into the layout, so you'll have to rustle up your own.

I must also point out that the gray texture applied to the track itself does look good, except when it makes it difficult to read individual spaces in a sector.

Is that one or two spaces in those corner sectors?
What about the bottom sectors leading into the corner?

And since you're asking, yes, this is the one and only Canadian track in the entire system. So far, most of them have been located in the USA. Of the non-American speedways, three (!!) of them are in Spain, one in Ireland, one in England, one in South Korea, one in Mexico, and one in, well, Atlantis.

RICHEY RACEWAY

Another pedal-to-the-metal experience, Richey Raceway nevertheless manages to slow down horde after horde of mechanical beasts by virtue of its unforgiving funnels. A 3-space sector tightens into a 2-space sector, then a 1-space bottleneck, before opening up again through a reverse 2- and 3-space sequence that really messes up even the most well-intentioned pack. 

The Grand Prix/Apocalypse Road carve-outs are more extensive this time around and work rather well, though some graphic design choices will sometimes create contradictory interpretations as to what constitutes a space. Apocalypse Road is once more mysteriously left out, even though the board offers plenty of space for those rugged markings.

TRIMPERIAL RACEWAY

The only track in this new pack that clearly displays its Grand Prix DNA, the Trimperial Raceway goes first and foremost for those twisty bottlenecks that are delightful to puzzle out when you're playing Grand Prix or Apocalypse Road (thanks to the miracle of conditional linking). Those kinds of tracks give no quarter when it comes to Thunder Alley, however, in that whoever squeezes first in that narrow corridor will become difficult to dislodge.

The center section is dedicated to Apocalypse Road, with everything road warriors have come to expect from a speedway that shows no fear.

CARLA HORGER MEMORIAL SPEEDWAY

Named in honor of co-designer and wife Carla who passed away last year, this is ultimately the one true multi-game track: some Thunder Alley, some Grand Prix and an Apocalypse Road corner all rolled into one. (While the opposite corner serves as a launching pad only, never to be touched again.)

Despite its busy appearance, the track never actually gets into crossover shenanigans the way the Tieran Raceway or the Essendarium have done in the past. There are various points where different games will go different ways, but everything's clear enough not to spark any of those traditional boardgame-fueled bar fights.
And I am thankful for the design intention that ended up trapping Apocalypse Road vehicles in that tight corner, never to escape; otherwise, on a track this expansive, targets would have grown few and far between.

This most recent pack bolsters the collection all the way up to 24 tracks—enough to run entire seasons for years to come, for all three games.

Because of the recent death of Jeff Horger, the other co-designer, the future of the system is currently unknown. But should this be the last hurrah of a much-heralded system that has brought me and many others endless joy and excitement over the past decade, it would already be an amazing legacy.

Thank you for brightening our lives, Carla and Jeff.

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CC: Adversary, Part 2 — New Horizons (I)

This is part 2 of a series of articles about my upcoming Combat Commander: Adversary game module—a solitaire system that lets one player duke it out with an automated opponent on the storied battlefields of GMT's classic wargame.

I explained in part 1 of this design diary that I started working on Adversary quite a few years ago, slowly chipping away at one problem after another. Most of those problems I expected from the get-go: I knew going in I'd have to design systems for the bot to select units, to order them around, to react to player actions, to act according to secret objectives, and so on.

But there was one problem that did come as a surprise—a shock, even—and which nevertheless made me smile in wonderment, because it unveiled a process we humans all go through without thinking about it when we're playing games like Combat Commander. And that thing's never mentioned in the rulebook, either.

Wargames all run on a variety of metrics: line of sight, range, firepower, cover value, movement allocation, and so on. Most of those concepts have a numerical value, or else a binary state, attached to them. The rulebook can direct you to perform X "if the attack roll is higher than the defense value," or that you can't perform Y "if the unit lacks sufficient movement points to reach its intended destination." Those concepts are quantifiable, and the rules teach you how to handle them.

When I set out to test an early version of, say, the movement system, I had the bot run through a simple algorithm intended to conform to the automated opponent's "intentions" at that point in the game. It wants to send some of its units to better cover? That's easy enough: look at the cover values of neighboring hexes. On a quest for higher elevation? Climb a neighboring hill. But what do you use to break a tie if several hexes qualify? Well, obviously you just send the units to the hex where they'll better be able to see the enemy that's com—

And there it was. What I started out calling "coverage" was that elusive metric, that value we all compute in our heads even though we never speak it aloud and the rulebook doesn't cover it. (It just doesn't need to.) How well can you see around you from that point on the map, so that you can fight off incoming enemy units? It's a very human, very intuitive notion that's blindingly obvious to us meat sacks. But for a bot trying to hold its own in a tactical game, it's a different matter.

No sooner had I made that realization, however, that I put it aside—temporarily. I wanted to finish the ordering system first, always keeping in mind that the bot would eventually make use of that "coverage" thingy.
(Much later, Kai Jensen at GMT would suggest I pick a different label for that value, pointing out that the game already used "cover" as an operational term, which might bring about unwanted confusion. She was right, as usual, and I renamed that concept "Horizon.")

A workable definition of Horizon became a burning need when I set out to design setup rules for the bot. At the start of any given scenario, each faction gets assigned an array of units it must deploy on its side of the map. Humans perform this task without a hitch, using established notions to hedge their bets and spread the risk: "I'll split my forces into two main stacks so that I can pack serious firepower at both ends of that road, and still remain mobile if I need to leave in a hurry." We also wield the idea I'm calling Horizon like we came out of the womb playing games like Combat Commander: "I'll put my guys at the very edge of that hill, so they can see—and shoot at—the entire valley below." (It's something akin to balancing a mathematical equation, except you're using machine-guns in lieu of plus signs.) No need for numbers, man: you just LOOK at the map and you see it, clear as day.
But a bot lacks eyes, and so it very much craves its numbers.

My first definition for Horizon remained open-ended. I knew I had to give the bot a Horizon value for each hex on the map so that it could compute decisions in an effective manner. And it seemed to me like that value should be the number of directions, from each hex, into which units standing there could see "far enough." Just how far was enough remained to be determined.

I decided to start with 6; in other words, Horizon would be, for any given hex, the number of directions into which you could see at least six hexes away. Since I defined direction as "looking through one of the hexsides," it meant the maximum Horizon value for a hex would be, coincidentally, 6.
So far, so good. I now possessed a metric I could access to steer adversary units towards hexes more suited to their nefarious purposes.

Of course, on most maps, a line of sight six hexes long is very hard to achieve, which meant that most Horizons would be listed as 1 or 2; maybe a little more in certain, rare cases. Hardly a usable data point.

Map #2, also known as "Where LOS Comes to Die"

For a brief moment I considered including in my calculations the range of that hypothetical unit (i.e. how far it can shoot) standing in the hex. But considering the wide variety of ranges assigned to units in the game—not to mention the weapons they carry!—it became clear that that way lay madness.

So I opted to attack (assault? melee?) the problem from the opposite direction: I made the Horizon requirement a LOS of 1. I knew it wouldn't suffice, but I wanted to build up to the right number. Plus, looking at Horizon values for hexes with such a short LOS (which instantly became 5 or 6 for almost every hex on most maps) helped me rephrase my question: instead of wondering how far is enough for a unit to see around itself, I started asking myself how far the unit needs to see. Or, considered differently, when do human players stop caring, in the heat of the moment? Two hexes (as in "two hexes away") opened things up a bit, but three hexes felt just right to me, and I proceeded to run Horizon evaluations using that metric.
(Much later, out of curiosity, I ended up computing the average range of "common" units across all six nationalities in the game, ignoring those elite dudes who only show up in a handful of scenarios or when they feel like it. It worked out to 3.17 hexes.)

It didn't take me long to realize that my "base 3" Horizon system worked like a charm: the adversary was making great use of it, shifting its units towards spots that would put my own guys at a disadvantage. Naturally, I took some time to experiment with making the requirement 4 hexes, but there was no joy to be found in that expanded definition. Without doubt, Horizon was a 3-hex-range affair.

End of story? Hardly.

You see, back when I was attempting to read my bot's intentions in hex leaves, I still wasn't in "publication mode." I had yet to reach out to GMT, and I was still building this thing for me. (Take a look at Part 1 in this series of articles for a detailed retelling of those halcyon days.) And as such, I was trying to make do, as much as possible, with whatever shipped in the Combat Commander box. This doctrine meant that players (i.e. just me at that point) were required to figure out the "best Horizon value" at various moments in the game, and to compute that value mentally. I got really good at it—although it still slowed things down—but it was an insane thing to ask of everyone else.
Would you find it thrilling to stop in the middle of a turn to compute LOS in six directions for half a dozen hexes? Yeah, me neither.

Then Jason Carr (that guy again!) reached out across the screen during a video call and virtually slapped me. And I'm glad he did.

(Next time: MOAR about Horizon charts!)

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Flash Review — Attila

Players: 2-4 
Works well with just 2: Yes—but see my houserules
Age: 10+ 
Playtime: 45 minutes
Complexity: 4/10

[An oldie that's still a blast today... Attila was first published back in 2000!]

The dreaded Huns are pushing Germanic tribes to scatter all over Europe, and it's up to you to help them thrive (and eliminate some rivals while they're at it) as they breach the outer reaches of the once-mighty Roman empire.

On your turn, you play a card to add a meeple of that color to a region of the board, then increase your influence over that tribe... or add a second meeple in that color to the same region. As soon as more than four meeples find themselves in a region, a conflict breaks out. Each player gets to play face-down cards that match one (or more!) of the colors involved: total power is tallied for each tribe (number of meeples + number of cards played in that color) and the weakest tribe is eliminated from the region. Then the region is pacified: nobody can play there for the rest of the game. 

The game moves through four eras, each one lasting a little longer than its predecessor and granting players a little more influence whenever they place a meeple on the board. Scoring takes place at the end of each era, for each tribe: the player in 1st place on a tribe's influence track scores 1 point per meeple from that tribe on the board, while the player in 2nd place scores 1 point per region those meeples occupy. After four eras, the game ends and whoever's managed to score the most points is declared winner.

The beauty of the game lies in its simplicity, and it's fascinating to think back to 2000 and realize that, at the turn of the millennium, this was as complicated as most eurogames got. Some of those did not age well (Doge or Vino spring to mind) but Attila sailed through the decades without shedding any of its charm or bite. It's a fast and brutal end-of-the-evening little game, and I can't believe I hadn't played it in a decade. Shame on me.

The game does come with two-player rules but they suck.
So here are my battle-tested houserules for a fun two-handed skirmish:

1. Each player plays one card per turn, per standard multiplayer rules.
2. In order to get points on each tribe's influence track, the second-place player must be within X spaces of the lead player, where X equals the current era (1, 2, 3 or 4).
3. For each conflict, after both players have played their cards, X cards are added to the conflict from the top of the draw pile, where X equals the current era (1, 2, 3 or 4).
4. No action tiles may be played during era 4.

Most easily forgotten rule: I mean, this game is so simple... but if you really need one, don't forget to score points after each era.

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