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First, I should say this is an out-of-the-box review. In other words, I just bought the game about two hours ago, have spent the last hour pouring over the rules and playing with the pieces, and am now reviewing it for your edification.

What you get:

Krash comes in a smallish box, about 8x5.5x1.5". Inside is a small rulebook and two miniature cars with lots of weapons and stuff to add on. The box art depicts a heavily armed vehicle coming toward you out of an explosion in a desert setting. Other pieces of box art depict painted game miniatures, which apparently consist of either a sedan-style car or a station-wagon style car, variously sporting gatling guns, missile launchers, rams, and whatnot. The game is described as a 'Collectible Miniatures Game', the theme being to build a vehicle with some selection from the 50 or so pieces of equipment available in order to destroy your opponent's vehicle.

The miniatures in the box are of an unstated scale. I would say they are approximately 15mm scale. Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars would be a close match in terms of size, perhaps a little large. The time and distance scale is also unstated... if you assume that distances are meant to be in scale with the car size, then the time scale is probably on the order of a 3 second Round.

The rules:

According to the introduction, Krash takes place 'on a distant desert planet' where 'lawless gangs and radiant rally heroes fight in diesel spouting vehicles'. Okay, whatever. Sounds like a decent-enough excuse to have a bunch of heavily armed cars beating the crap out of each other in the wasteland. (And that's all we really want, isn't it?)

Very quickly, we get down to the nitty-gritty: the object of the game is to blow the other guy up. Ten pages of rules in English describe how to do this. Ten more pages of rules in Swedish follow, then ten pages of descriptions of the equipment used to do the blowing up bit.

Here's the general run-down on the rules:

Cars are placed 60 cm or more apart at the beginning of the game, and no more than 10 cm from the edge of the playing surface. Who goes first is determined by rolling a die, players continue taking Rounds in that order the rest of the game.

Each Round, a player may take up to 3 Actions. Actions consist of things like Speeding Up, Braking, Turning, Using a piece of Equipment, or Sideswiping the enemy. The vehicle's movement can be taken before, after, or between Actions, and can be split up however you desire, with one caveat: Depending on your initial speed, you must move a certain amount before you can make a Turn action, and if you plan making several Turns in a Round, you would have to have enough speed to meet this minimum expenditure before each turn. Also, a car can only Turn a total of 90 degrees each Round, and if it makes a turn of 45 degrees or more in one Turn Action, it must make a Maneuver Test.

Weapons fire is pretty simple. Depending on the weapon, each weapon can only be fired once per Round, and each shot takes an Action. To hit, you need to roll a 2 or more on 1d6. Penalties are applied for your speed, your target's speed, any Cover your target may have, and the weapon's own accuracy or inaccuracy. Still, it looks like hitting will occur pretty often. When you hit, you roll 1d6 for damage, again modifying the roll for your weapon's damage characteristics. Some weapons may have special rules, and other non-weapon equipment can provide a variety of defenses. For example, cars with Sprinkler Systems are immune to Flamethrowers.

The miniatures:

The basic game comes with two cars. Each car has the requisite number of wheels and/or treads, plus an assortment of 6 other pieces of equipment. The car miniatures consist of four pieces. These include an undercarriage, a frame, and then a two piece body. The undercarriage has some detailing on the bottom representing the transmission, axles, and exhaust, four square pegs on each long side for tires and side equipment, and two long pegs on the front and back for equipment such as bumpers and rams. The frame is an H-shaped piece of alloy which fits into a notch on the underbody piece, and serves only to define the sides of the car and support the body pieces. The body pieces are divided into the hood and the rest of the car (from the front window on back). Two body styles are supplied, a sedan and a station wagon. The hood and the body have four very short square pegs on the top of the hood and the roof, respectively.

There are four types of wheels. There are long treads, one pair of which is sufficient for a car and take up all four of the pegs on each side. There are mini-treads, which take up two pegs each, there are regular wheels, which take up one peg apiece, and there are jeep wheels, which physically differ from regular wheels only in having a different type of hubcap. A car must have at least two pairs of wheels or mini-treads, mounted on the extreme front or back side-pegs. If extra wheels are mounted, the car benefits from an 'Extra Wheel Rule' which renders it immune to some forms of attack.

Finally, there is the equipment. There are many different types, mostly weapons. Equipment takes up anywhere from one to four pegs, and can be mounted on the front, back, roof, hood, or sides of a car, depending on the type of equipment it is. Each car is supplied with six pieces of equipment. The equipment you get apparently provides the 'collectible' aspect of the game. Some pieces of equipment are apparently better or rarer than others, or can be used in combination with other pieces to good effect (for example, the Radar system in combination with an indirect fire weapon).

Comments:

The Krash rules are very simple. I would classify this as a 'beer and pretzels' type of game. The only thing making Krash a little more time consuming is the effort involved in preparing and equipping the car miniatures (more on that later). As far as they go, the rules seem to be adequate to the task, with no obvious big blunders or exploitable flaws that I can detect (not having playtested it, however).

The rulebook could be organized a little better... the booklet is designed so that the spine is at the top, making it a little inconvenient to flip through the rules, and there is no table of contents or index. Also, some necessary information is hard to find. For example, these cars have Life Points, and the object of the game is to destroy your opponent's car by depleting these life points. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out where in the rules it says how many Life Points each car gets (30), before finally spotting it in the last line of 'Who Starts'.

There are some minor clarifications or rules fixes that could be made. For example, in the weapons rules, under Firing Arcs, it states that each weapon gets a 90 degree arc of fire. Then, it illustrates this, showing incidentally that side-mounted weapons only get a 45 degree arc of fire. In the equipment section, there is something called a Drill, basically a big screw you can stick on your car. When you attack someone with the Drill, it can destroy an opponent's equipment. However, it says that side-mounted weapons are immune to the Drill's effects... what if you T-Bone someone? If anything, top-mounted weapons should be the ones that are immune.

The 'Collectible' aspect of the game is another topic worthy of some attention. In addition to the basic game, I also purchased a Vehicle expansion set (for $10.95), containing one more car with its own set of tires and 6 pieces of equipment. There is no rule in the book that I can spot mandating that each car only carry 6 pieces of equipment. As far as I can tell, you could leave stuff off, or pile on guns until every spare peg was filled. There is no rating system for equipment effectiveness, so the only way of regulating that sort of tactic is the willingness of other players to tolerate cheeziness.

As is, the rules are very simple, and just begging for some unecessary complications. Off the top of my head, I might consider instituting a point-rating system for cars, an option to give drivers improved skills, a bonus to hitting for consecutive actions spent aiming, trading off max speed and maneuverability for more Life Points, adding Armor, and a critical hit system for quicker car kills. If, as I suspect, these cars are in scale with Matchbox cars, that gives you a lot of new body models to choose from, and you can buy Equipment-only expansions for the purpose of equipping 'em. You could also write up rules for things like semi trucks, construction vehicles, and tanks. Possibly, the makers of Krash may have supplemental expansions in mind for the game that address these issues.

Finally, I would like to critique the miniatures. Short form: They suck. The assembled miniatures don't look so bad on the box, although it's a pity that there are only two body styles to choose from (so far). However, the miniature quality is very low, especially for the price. The detail is pretty simplistic, but most distressing is the amount of flash and just plain crap on these cars. I have to assume that all of the miniatures I received came from molds that were either old or just plain bad. It's going to take a lot of work with a file to clean the pieces up, and a lot of putty to make the assembled miniatures look good. And the alloy used is very hard, which will make the process that much more tedious. On the good side, I'm convinced these miniatures are going to be very durable. I'm sure that getting stepped on by an adult will bend some weapons, maybe even break things off if the pieces weren't pinned on, but they will be child- and dog-proof.

One final note on assembly: Although the rules seem to expect that you can customize your weapons loadout, the weapons won't really stick on the provided pegs firmly enough without gluing. That means you would normally either have to buy new cars and new weapon assortments to change your design around, or rip 'em off and retouch the paint job. However, I have been led to understand that Radio Shack sells a type of very small, very powerful magnet, which some miniature hobbyists use to give their miniatures customizable components. I've heard of this being used for Games Workshop Space Marines, where a normal Space Marine can be quickly converted into an Assault Marine by inserting magnets into the back of the figure and into a normal backpack and a jump pack. However, those are plastic miniatures, and these cars are hard alloy, so I don't know how practical it would be to equip them with magnets. Just a thought.

Miscellaneous commentary:

At $24.95 for the basic game, and $10.95 for the Vehicle Expansion (I don't know what the Equipment Expansion costs), the price is definitely more than the components are worth. Part of this is no doubt due to the cost of importing from Sweden. Until I've actually playtested it, I can't say whether the system is fun enough to play to justify the expense. On the other hand, throwing money is always a great way to support the industry, support your local gaming shops, and support import games.

Cell Entertainment also produced the RPG Gemini, set in a late medieval European fantasy world which has fallen under the power of Darkness. It has been reviewed here, and if I were to review it myself, I would probably give it the same rating (4/3, if you were curious), but with slightly more enthusiastic commentary (I think the core game system is really excellent, the background is interesting, if sparse, and the artwork is quite good. I just find myself unable to come up with a good campaign in the setting). The company does have a website now, at 'www.cellentertainment.se'.

As the game stands now, it's kind of a slugfest. If you wanted to institute a campaign system for the game, you'd have to find some way of dealing with the likelihood that a car which has won one encounter will be too badly beat up to survive another. Also, there is practically no background material, so you'd have to come up with your own organizations and plots.

There are two obvious comparisons for Krash. Car Wars and Dark Future. Car Wars, by Steve Jackson, is of course pretty much the grandaddy of futuristic car combat. Car Wars has a much more detailed game system, with much more background material. My first introduction to Car Wars came in a little black plastic box, and I got much more background material and 'realism' for a much lower investment. Of course, I also got a bunch of little cardboard counters and vehicle control sheets I needed to photocopy. By comparison, Krash comes with detailed miniatures and you only need to keep track of two numbers, Speed and Life Points. Assuming you had the miniatures ready to go, Krash would be a much easier game to just pick up and play, and to introduce novices too. Car Wars takes more of an investment of time, interest, and imagination.

Dark Future was a fairly short-lived Games Workshop product. Although I have never played it myself, I do know that it involved using car miniatures to portray battles between Sanctioned Ops and evil wasteland gang types. I'm sure that there was much more background material than in Krash. I can't comment on the system, not having played Dark Future. That leaves the miniatures as the only remaining point of obvious similarity. I suspect that weapons loadouts are probably more customizable on Krash miniatures, but I'm sure quality was much higher for the Citadel miniatures. On the other hand, Krash's cars are all metal, and I think the Dark Future cars were mostly, possibly entirely, plastic.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 3 (Average)

Krash
Author: Johan Sjoberg, Stefan Ljungqvist and Anders Strid Category: Miniature Company/Publisher: Cell Entertainment AB Line: Krash Cost: $24.95 Page count: 32 SKU: #3-1000 Capsule Review by David Rhode on 02/03/00. Genre tags: Science_fiction Modern_day Post-apocalypse	First, I should say this is an out-of-the-box review. In other words, I just bought the game about two hours ago, have spent the last hour pouring over the rules and playing with the pieces, and am now reviewing it for your edification. What you get: Krash comes in a smallish box, about 8x5.5x1.5". Inside is a small rulebook and two miniature cars with lots of weapons and stuff to add on. The box art depicts a heavily armed vehicle coming toward you out of an explosion in a desert setting. Other pieces of box art depict painted game miniatures, which apparently consist of either a sedan-style car or a station-wagon style car, variously sporting gatling guns, missile launchers, rams, and whatnot. The game is described as a 'Collectible Miniatures Game', the theme being to build a vehicle with some selection from the 50 or so pieces of equipment available in order to destroy your opponent's vehicle. The miniatures in the box are of an unstated scale. I would say they are approximately 15mm scale. Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars would be a close match in terms of size, perhaps a little large. The time and distance scale is also unstated... if you assume that distances are meant to be in scale with the car size, then the time scale is probably on the order of a 3 second Round. The rules: According to the introduction, Krash takes place 'on a distant desert planet' where 'lawless gangs and radiant rally heroes fight in diesel spouting vehicles'. Okay, whatever. Sounds like a decent-enough excuse to have a bunch of heavily armed cars beating the crap out of each other in the wasteland. (And that's all we really want, isn't it?) Very quickly, we get down to the nitty-gritty: the object of the game is to blow the other guy up. Ten pages of rules in English describe how to do this. Ten more pages of rules in Swedish follow, then ten pages of descriptions of the equipment used to do the blowing up bit. Here's the general run-down on the rules: Cars are placed 60 cm or more apart at the beginning of the game, and no more than 10 cm from the edge of the playing surface. Who goes first is determined by rolling a die, players continue taking Rounds in that order the rest of the game. Each Round, a player may take up to 3 Actions. Actions consist of things like Speeding Up, Braking, Turning, Using a piece of Equipment, or Sideswiping the enemy. The vehicle's movement can be taken before, after, or between Actions, and can be split up however you desire, with one caveat: Depending on your initial speed, you must move a certain amount before you can make a Turn action, and if you plan making several Turns in a Round, you would have to have enough speed to meet this minimum expenditure before each turn. Also, a car can only Turn a total of 90 degrees each Round, and if it makes a turn of 45 degrees or more in one Turn Action, it must make a Maneuver Test. Weapons fire is pretty simple. Depending on the weapon, each weapon can only be fired once per Round, and each shot takes an Action. To hit, you need to roll a 2 or more on 1d6. Penalties are applied for your speed, your target's speed, any Cover your target may have, and the weapon's own accuracy or inaccuracy. Still, it looks like hitting will occur pretty often. When you hit, you roll 1d6 for damage, again modifying the roll for your weapon's damage characteristics. Some weapons may have special rules, and other non-weapon equipment can provide a variety of defenses. For example, cars with Sprinkler Systems are immune to Flamethrowers. The miniatures: The basic game comes with two cars. Each car has the requisite number of wheels and/or treads, plus an assortment of 6 other pieces of equipment. The car miniatures consist of four pieces. These include an undercarriage, a frame, and then a two piece body. The undercarriage has some detailing on the bottom representing the transmission, axles, and exhaust, four square pegs on each long side for tires and side equipment, and two long pegs on the front and back for equipment such as bumpers and rams. The frame is an H-shaped piece of alloy which fits into a notch on the underbody piece, and serves only to define the sides of the car and support the body pieces. The body pieces are divided into the hood and the rest of the car (from the front window on back). Two body styles are supplied, a sedan and a station wagon. The hood and the body have four very short square pegs on the top of the hood and the roof, respectively. There are four types of wheels. There are long treads, one pair of which is sufficient for a car and take up all four of the pegs on each side. There are mini-treads, which take up two pegs each, there are regular wheels, which take up one peg apiece, and there are jeep wheels, which physically differ from regular wheels only in having a different type of hubcap. A car must have at least two pairs of wheels or mini-treads, mounted on the extreme front or back side-pegs. If extra wheels are mounted, the car benefits from an 'Extra Wheel Rule' which renders it immune to some forms of attack. Finally, there is the equipment. There are many different types, mostly weapons. Equipment takes up anywhere from one to four pegs, and can be mounted on the front, back, roof, hood, or sides of a car, depending on the type of equipment it is. Each car is supplied with six pieces of equipment. The equipment you get apparently provides the 'collectible' aspect of the game. Some pieces of equipment are apparently better or rarer than others, or can be used in combination with other pieces to good effect (for example, the Radar system in combination with an indirect fire weapon). Comments: The Krash rules are very simple. I would classify this as a 'beer and pretzels' type of game. The only thing making Krash a little more time consuming is the effort involved in preparing and equipping the car miniatures (more on that later). As far as they go, the rules seem to be adequate to the task, with no obvious big blunders or exploitable flaws that I can detect (not having playtested it, however). The rulebook could be organized a little better... the booklet is designed so that the spine is at the top, making it a little inconvenient to flip through the rules, and there is no table of contents or index. Also, some necessary information is hard to find. For example, these cars have Life Points, and the object of the game is to destroy your opponent's car by depleting these life points. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out where in the rules it says how many Life Points each car gets (30), before finally spotting it in the last line of 'Who Starts'. There are some minor clarifications or rules fixes that could be made. For example, in the weapons rules, under Firing Arcs, it states that each weapon gets a 90 degree arc of fire. Then, it illustrates this, showing incidentally that side-mounted weapons only get a 45 degree arc of fire. In the equipment section, there is something called a Drill, basically a big screw you can stick on your car. When you attack someone with the Drill, it can destroy an opponent's equipment. However, it says that side-mounted weapons are immune to the Drill's effects... what if you T-Bone someone? If anything, top-mounted weapons should be the ones that are immune. The 'Collectible' aspect of the game is another topic worthy of some attention. In addition to the basic game, I also purchased a Vehicle expansion set (for $10.95), containing one more car with its own set of tires and 6 pieces of equipment. There is no rule in the book that I can spot mandating that each car only carry 6 pieces of equipment. As far as I can tell, you could leave stuff off, or pile on guns until every spare peg was filled. There is no rating system for equipment effectiveness, so the only way of regulating that sort of tactic is the willingness of other players to tolerate cheeziness. As is, the rules are very simple, and just begging for some unecessary complications. Off the top of my head, I might consider instituting a point-rating system for cars, an option to give drivers improved skills, a bonus to hitting for consecutive actions spent aiming, trading off max speed and maneuverability for more Life Points, adding Armor, and a critical hit system for quicker car kills. If, as I suspect, these cars are in scale with Matchbox cars, that gives you a lot of new body models to choose from, and you can buy Equipment-only expansions for the purpose of equipping 'em. You could also write up rules for things like semi trucks, construction vehicles, and tanks. Possibly, the makers of Krash may have supplemental expansions in mind for the game that address these issues. Finally, I would like to critique the miniatures. Short form: They suck. The assembled miniatures don't look so bad on the box, although it's a pity that there are only two body styles to choose from (so far). However, the miniature quality is very low, especially for the price. The detail is pretty simplistic, but most distressing is the amount of flash and just plain crap on these cars. I have to assume that all of the miniatures I received came from molds that were either old or just plain bad. It's going to take a lot of work with a file to clean the pieces up, and a lot of putty to make the assembled miniatures look good. And the alloy used is very hard, which will make the process that much more tedious. On the good side, I'm convinced these miniatures are going to be very durable. I'm sure that getting stepped on by an adult will bend some weapons, maybe even break things off if the pieces weren't pinned on, but they will be child- and dog-proof. One final note on assembly: Although the rules seem to expect that you can customize your weapons loadout, the weapons won't really stick on the provided pegs firmly enough without gluing. That means you would normally either have to buy new cars and new weapon assortments to change your design around, or rip 'em off and retouch the paint job. However, I have been led to understand that Radio Shack sells a type of very small, very powerful magnet, which some miniature hobbyists use to give their miniatures customizable components. I've heard of this being used for Games Workshop Space Marines, where a normal Space Marine can be quickly converted into an Assault Marine by inserting magnets into the back of the figure and into a normal backpack and a jump pack. However, those are plastic miniatures, and these cars are hard alloy, so I don't know how practical it would be to equip them with magnets. Just a thought. Miscellaneous commentary: At $24.95 for the basic game, and $10.95 for the Vehicle Expansion (I don't know what the Equipment Expansion costs), the price is definitely more than the components are worth. Part of this is no doubt due to the cost of importing from Sweden. Until I've actually playtested it, I can't say whether the system is fun enough to play to justify the expense. On the other hand, throwing money is always a great way to support the industry, support your local gaming shops, and support import games. Cell Entertainment also produced the RPG Gemini, set in a late medieval European fantasy world which has fallen under the power of Darkness. It has been reviewed here, and if I were to review it myself, I would probably give it the same rating (4/3, if you were curious), but with slightly more enthusiastic commentary (I think the core game system is really excellent, the background is interesting, if sparse, and the artwork is quite good. I just find myself unable to come up with a good campaign in the setting). The company does have a website now, at 'www.cellentertainment.se'. As the game stands now, it's kind of a slugfest. If you wanted to institute a campaign system for the game, you'd have to find some way of dealing with the likelihood that a car which has won one encounter will be too badly beat up to survive another. Also, there is practically no background material, so you'd have to come up with your own organizations and plots. There are two obvious comparisons for Krash. Car Wars and Dark Future. Car Wars, by Steve Jackson, is of course pretty much the grandaddy of futuristic car combat. Car Wars has a much more detailed game system, with much more background material. My first introduction to Car Wars came in a little black plastic box, and I got much more background material and 'realism' for a much lower investment. Of course, I also got a bunch of little cardboard counters and vehicle control sheets I needed to photocopy. By comparison, Krash comes with detailed miniatures and you only need to keep track of two numbers, Speed and Life Points. Assuming you had the miniatures ready to go, Krash would be a much easier game to just pick up and play, and to introduce novices too. Car Wars takes more of an investment of time, interest, and imagination. Dark Future was a fairly short-lived Games Workshop product. Although I have never played it myself, I do know that it involved using car miniatures to portray battles between Sanctioned Ops and evil wasteland gang types. I'm sure that there was much more background material than in Krash. I can't comment on the system, not having played Dark Future. That leaves the miniatures as the only remaining point of obvious similarity. I suspect that weapons loadouts are probably more customizable on Krash miniatures, but I'm sure quality was much higher for the Citadel miniatures. On the other hand, Krash's cars are all metal, and I think the Dark Future cars were mostly, possibly entirely, plastic. Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 3 (Average)