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Well, I got to pitch Thunder Alley to the same company three times. Attempt #1: I went with a very Eurogame feel using abstract rules and honestly it was bad. Attempt #2, a year later: The game had all of the detail of a Speed Network show – fuel usage down to the gallon, pit lanes with pit boxes, percentage tire wear, and gear ratios. It was all in there. Now it was too much – too much to track, too much time, just plain too much. The third time was the charm. Years of cutting things out, emphasizing the fun aspects, and creating new systems unlike anything previously seen all came together to make Thunder Alley a unique and interesting little game. Andy Lewis of GMT Games gave us the thumbs up and soon Thunder Alley was on the P500 looking for supporters.
The Tracks
One of the easiest decisions to make when I started designing the game was which tracks to include. A super speedway based on Daytona and a short track modeled after Dover jumped to the top of the line. When we decided to create another set of tracks I chose two more unique courses, a road course similar to Watkins Glen and a Triangle track like Pocono.
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The next decision to make was how to depict the track. The obvious method would be to use spaces and lanes similar to Formula D or Speed Circuit. The tracks themselves went through numerous changes over the years of design and development. The one fixture that I have kept while modeling the tracks was the formula to determine the number of spaces. There needed to be some method to the number of spaces around the track. I settled on the average qualifying time of the tracks with 1 space=1 second. So, for example that makes the super speedway about 48 spaces long.
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At first there was a very detailed pit lane, but the fixed pit lane caused the same forced feel of pit stops that I don't much like in Formula D or other race games. As the design progressed the game morphed into a somewhat short race of two to four laps depending on the track. As with so many other racing games, inserting those pit stops into that few laps felt scripted and forced. The answer? Remove the pits completely and allow cars to slip down to an "apron" lane for pitting and re-entering the track.
Once the pit stop issue was solved and the track formula was completed, all I needed to do was to adjust the lane and spaces to my needs. Early prototypes have the turns offset, making the inside lanes shorter than the outside. An attempt was even made to follow the "groove" of the various tracks. As the game morphed, however, the offset spaces became a big hindrance to the methods I was using to simulate the racing. Long ago I came to grips that some race fans will put the track configuration on the "con" side of the ledger. But I feel strongly that with the system developed for the game anything but a straight equidistant set of lanes would be a mistake.
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When you sit down to play a game of Thunder Alley, you will have a clean crisp track in front of you almost like a blank canvas to paint on. The cards and player decisions will determine the fastest line for each individual race. The number of spaces on the track has a basis in reality even if it has little to no actual translation to the game. Pit stops become a strategic choice as opposed to a foregone conclusion.
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Anatomy of a Race Card
Like most race games I have played, Thunder Alley started as a dice game. For about two years we struggled to make the dice work. We used custom dice, various dice sizes, and various numbers of dice, but the result was always too random for me. We wanted to have some control over the car movement and we wanted to make the movement capabilities very tight and with important choices to be made. Eventually we settled on a movement spread of 4-8 spaces but the dice still were not providing enough options and far too much randomness. I should state that we really like dice and we wanted to make the dice work in the game, but it became clear to us that we would have to go to cards for some control over movement. At the same time that we were trying to make the dice work, we began to develop a multi-functional movement system, but it was very clunky with the dice. Within a couple of plays after abandoning dice, the classes of movement meshed with the cards to provide what is almost a card-driven race car game with clear bloodlines back to card-driven war games.
Note that in the game you will control a team of cars and each card play activates one of your cars. Each car must be activated before another may be activated again.
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As for the normal information used on the racing cards, each card has a movement range between 4 and 8. The 4-move cards have no wear associated with them, but they are slower. As you move up in speed you gain some temporary wear tokens like suspension, tires and fuel consumption. If you use the top speed 8-value cards, you will take some permanent engine and transmission wear cards. Each card is color-coded to the type of wear you will take, so a black card means you will have to place a black tire wear token onto the corresponding car box on your player sheet. Next the card tells you which type of movement your active car will use for the turn. The choices are Solo (where you have little effect on other cars), Draft (where you have the possibility of moving long chains of cars), Lead (where your car starts a new draft line and pulls all the cars behind it like a snake) or Pursuit (where your car is at the end of a line and "pushes" all the cars in front of it). (These are described in more detail below.) Finally most of the cards have some type of requirement text on them, e.g., on the card "Riding the Draft" you have this restriction: "The car may make no lateral movement". Each text rule must be adhered to and will require you to plan out how and when to use your cards.
The racing cards drive the game and provide the flavor and feel of stock car racing. They are not so complicated as to limit your enjoyment of the game, even for non-racing fans or inexperienced gamers. Most will have clear places in the race where they will be beneficial and where they will be useless. You must use your cards effectively and maximize the benefits to gain and keep track position.
Now a bit more detail about the four types of movement, how they arose, what they do, and how I feel they relate to stock car racing.
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So how does this type of movement relate to the real thing? I relate to it as the single car making a move towards the front or extending a lead. Usually this is a car that is currently running faster than the rest of the pack due to a better set-up or better tires.
Solo Movement was a part of the game from day one. Heck, for a good portion of the design process it was THE method of movement. Once the other methods of movement were devised, Solo Movement remained to address some critical issues. First, Solo Movement allows you to gain ground or extend a lead without being required to bring opposing cars along with you. Second, Solo Movement has variable usefulness depending on the track. On the super speedway, not much effort needs to be made to find useful places to breakout. On the short track it can be difficult to find openings to really make a move and often some of that solo movement is spent trying to force an opening. On the road course there are places to use this movement and places where it will be useless. Finally, Solo Movement will force players to make strategic choices with their team and their card play as all other types of movement will allow a player to move other cars with the active car. Solo Movement becomes important in the game in that it forces the active player to either break up a team, waste the card to keep the team together or in a best-case scenario use the card to put your car in a place where it can receive help from another teammate later in the turn.
• Draft Movement: The concept of Draft Movement was one of the key ideas that we developed to make a small number of cars feel like a track full of vehicles moving together. When a car is moved using a Draft card, it basically gives that car the ability to move a large number of cars both in front and behind it at one time. Cars moving via Draft Movement move forward and laterally at a cost of 1 movement point per space entered. When a car with Draft Movement moves forward with cars linked up either in front and/or behind it, the car surrenders its ability to move laterally and now moves ahead bringing all cars lined up with it along for the ride. New cars can be picked up as the line of cars surges around the track making the line of movement ever larger.
Does this measure up to the real thing? No, of course not – but for my money it is closer than anything I've ever seen. Lines of cars duel along the backstretch. If you are the odd man out at a corner, you can get squeezed as a powerful line of cars freight train past you. Do you surrender some control of your cars when this happens? Yes, you do. You might move your car and it could cover half the track before you get to move it again. But it just feels like racing and every driver has to be opportunistic when the chance arises.
The concept of Draft Movement was the key to the development of the entire game. Once that idea fell into place, all of the other ideas sprung up in rapid succession.
• Lead Movement: This movement is probably the second easiest to explain and utilize. It was also the hardest rule to finalize with no less than a dozed iterations of the rule in use through playtesting.
Lead Movement can be thought of as a take on "follow the leader". A car is activated and it moves exactly like a car using Solo Movement. The only difference is that a visual snapshot is taken of the cars linked directly behind the activated car and all of those cars are moved in the exact same path as the active car. A car using Lead Movement will not pick up any additional cars even if the "tail" of the line passes in front of another car that the line passed.
How does this compare to the real thing? It does have its place where a line of cars suddenly shifts lines and makes a move past the cars in front of them that didn't make the move. In the game this movement is important for keeping your team together and to bring possible allies along when you make your move.
Early on in the process we began to see how valuable teamwork was to the game with the draft rules. But it became necessary to have some movement type that took that teamwork aspect into account while allowing a player to break up a line. Lead Movement does just that. It allows you to make a move to the lead, bring some cars with you (preferably from your own team), and break up the lines of your opponents.
• Pursuit Movement: This option allows you to use one car at the rear of the line to "push" the line forward while that car stays in contact with the line. It is very much a teamwork card, but the ability to get into and glue your car onto the back of a line of cars is very beneficial.
Pursuit works much like Draft Movement except that it completely ignores the cars behind the active car. In our group we even refer to it as "Push" movement. Clever use of this ability can rescue a car from being left behind the pack. It can split a line and possibly break up an opposing team. Or it can be used to push a car of yours that is currently further up the line out further ahead.
I admit that this movement type has the lowest relation to actual racing, but it was required for the game. Something needed to be developed to separate the lines and also to make the cars in the back important throughout the race and even doubly so at the end of the race when a well-timed Pursuit card can push your own car across the finish line.
Individuals vs. Teams
Most of the auto racing games that I have played up until Thunder Alley have had the format of one car for one player trying to get that car to cross the finish line first. The only real exception to that had been Avalon Hill's USAC Auto Racing back in the day. But even that game, which let you pilot multiple cars, had no mechanism for teamwork that I can recall. Now don't shoot me if I haven't stumbled upon a game that you know of with the team mechanism; it's just that I never saw them and I have been hobby gaming since the 1970s with Avalon Hill. I'm sure some are out there, but they were apparently outside my sphere of influence. Race games always seem to me like it's just you in your car trying to outrun the other guys. Obviously then I started with that same conceit when I started Thunder Alley – one player got one car. And like all the other games of that genre, if you had a quorum of 6-10 players it was an okay game, but with fewer players it was very weak indeed. Not to say it was good at all since I was still designing it, but with three or four cars on the track it downright sucked.
The next stage of the development saw me add in a trick I learned from my years of role-playing: NPCs (non-player cars in this case). I populated the board with ten or so extra cars, and tried out the game like that. It worked better and the cars made the track seem fuller and slightly more like racing. However, many problems still lingered. The NPCs moved funny, then unpredictably, then too predictably. Trying to cover every need for the reaction of the NPCs began to clutter the game and when my wife Carla began to feel overloaded, I knew I was heading down a dark path.
At Origins, maybe three years ago, the last time GMT had a presence there, I met with Andy Lewis to show him the improvements I had made in the game. He was encouraging but still the game lacked a spark and I knew it. Here I must give Andy credit as he has a keen sense of what a game needs and a twenty-minute meeting with him can ignite great fires of inspiration. He mentioned that another designer was also working on a racing-themed game about stock car racing but that they were using a team concept. Lightbulb moment! If the players controlled teams of cars, there would be no need for NPCs and no need to come up with the myriad ways they reacted. The path to completion had once again been stumbled upon.
Now players race with three to six cars on their team and a fun game can be played with just two players. The game is no longer winner-take-all in which you either win or lose based on being first across the finish line; instead players must consider the fate of their entire team when racing. Sure, winning is great with high fives all around, but winning at the cost of all your other cars will mean that another player can walk off with the game victory whereas you got only the race victory. Battles for every position down the stretch keep the game interesting for all players right to the checkered flag.
Points vs. Winning
When I made the move from an individual race to a team race, it became apparent that I would need some type of scoring system to adjudicate the winner of each game. I had already instituted the NASCAR official scoring system in the game as a method of running multiple games and deciding who won in a season. It became a natural and easy switch to convert that season-defining NASCAR scoring system into a game-by-game system.
If you are not familiar with the current NASCAR scoring system, it is pretty simple and does reward winning, but if you push one car over the line at the expense of your others, winning the game will not lead to winning the race. The car coming in first is awarded 43 points, with that car also receiving 3 bonus points, so essentially winning the race is worth 46 points. Each of the following positions receives one point less than the one before it. So second place gets 42, third gets 41, etc. If you lead any number of laps you receive 1 bonus point, and if you lead the most laps you receive 1 additional bonus point. Simple.
In Thunder Alley this translates into fairly tight scoring in which you can win or lose the game by failing to plan for your positions in the 5-10 range. Just crossing the finish line in the lead is not enough. You need to make a decent showing with all of your cars, or at least the majority of them.
My Special Relationship with My Gamer Wife
The first thing that I have to say on this topic is that I feel both extremely fortunate and proud that I have a gamer wife. Even more to this topic, Thunder Alley in specific and game design in general, it has been a pleasure to design games with her. She was not a part of Manoeuvre, or Fury for that matter – but when I started designing some non-warfare based games she was eager to throw in her ideas and suggestions. In my opinion we have a very complimentary outlook on gaming.
I truly love games that have a little bit of everything and that make you think on multiple levels and along multiple paths to victory. Advanced Civilization, Age of Renaissance, abstract games, Agricola, Twilight Struggle, and well, the list goes on – they're all my type of games. The more you can do and explore inside a game system, the more I like it. Time is not a concern to me at all. If the game is good, I won't spend just 4-6 hours playing it but I will play days worth of World in Flames or The Next War. I think this also is my attraction to the free-form exploration that is role-playing games. In my opinion the best games have room to explore and outmaneuver your opponents.
Carla, on the other hand, has a completely different outlook on gaming. She prefers the streamlined play of Eurogames; 45-90 minutes is the perfect length of play and she is not a huge fan of long involved games. She can be convinced to play a longer Euro if I really want to play it, but the mere mention of History of the World sends her off to visit her mother for the day.
So when we sit down to hash out a game we clearly have two different ideas in mind as to what makes a good game. Luckily for us 24 years of marriage and an ability to listen to each other has produced some excellent partnerships and some fairly smooth games with deep elements of play. Thunder Alley was our first collaboration and her dislike of many of my more involved rules kept me paring down systems until I found a game she and I both liked. Without her, the game would have been a massive overbearing flop (which it was until she got involved). She is responsible for the smoothness of the movement mechanism. She is responsible for the speed of the game, something that I never would have pushed myself to find. She was the prime two-player playtester, and most of the rough edges were worked out with me and her playing alone on many a Tuesday evening.
So when you get this game, thank Carla when it is over in sixty minutes or if you sit down to play with your wife. Because of her, these things work like they should. She earned her credit as a designer of the game and our partnership is continuing on to other games that will be completed within the year. If you end up liking the game, it is probably her that you have to thank as much or more than me.
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Strategy of the Pits
In racing games a big issue for me is the way that the pit stops are dealt with. Many games make it mandatory to pit. Others make it optional but not particularly helpful. Still others do away with it entirely. Carla and I wanted pit stops to be useful but not mandatory. It took quite a lot of effort to finally get the current system down to where we were happy with it.
The final result sprung from two needs. With a race of 2-4 laps it was detrimental to have the pit lane stay at a fixed point on the track. It was also important to force the cars to slowly wear down and give the players a decision on pitting. Is it all right to stay out and continue with a degraded car, or is it bad enough that I need to pit?
The first solution was easy enough and came quickly. We created an "apron" lane all around the track. Cars could pit at any time by dropping down to the apron lane at the end of the turn, go back five spaces and on the next turn exit the pits at a reduced speed. So everywhere on the track is a pit stop to be had.
The second solution was the wear tokens on the cars. Why pit unless the need arises? As the race progresses, cars receive wear tokens for tire wear, fuel consumption, suspension issues and minor body damage. These problems can all be taken care of when a car pits. Collect too many of these tokens and your car begins to slow down. Collect six of them and your car is so beat up you are forced to withdraw from the race. So not only can you pit at any time, but it will be a necessity during the race.
One final word regarding yellow flags. Thunder Alley has them and therefore "pitting under caution" is possible. You may lose some spots to cars that stay out on the track, but you do remain in the pack for the restart. Just like in real racing, though, the yellows are unpredictable, so counting on one for pit purposes can be dangerous.
Where Are the Other Twenty-Seven Cars?
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As some early playtesters can confirm, they were in there at one time and thank goodness they were taken out. Moving all 43 of the cars each turn was a tiresome experience. Imagine having to deal with more non-player cars than ones the players controlled. There were charts, tables and extra dice rolls. The handful of 43-car playtests were epic in length and complexity. Not at all what I wanted and less of what Carla wanted.
We settled on imaginary NPCs (non-player cars). These are the teams that are not going to end in the top 20 for this race. They will be involved in the wrecks that bring out our yellow flags. They will cause major accidents that the players' cars will become involved in as secondary victims. The rest of the pack is out there; it's just not their day.
Sometimes, shortcuts have to be taken to keep games playable. I can always tell when a game is getting too deep by when the playtesters "check out". Every time we came to the "NPC" phase, the game would have to break while someone had to adjust the NPC position and determine a number of variables. I am sure that if I had kept a focus on them I could have streamlined the system some, but clearly no one had much interest in it. It was possible to use the NPCs strategically but casual/first-time players didn't catch on easily and even when the game was over they couldn't see how to use the NPCs to their advantage. In a normal GMT-style game this learning curve is acceptable – expected even. But in Thunder Alley it was a barrier that I thought would keep some more casual players off the track.
So when you play, envision the track full of cars and when the yellow flag comes out, blame the rookie running 32nd at the time. It's his fault.
Wear & Tear
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One day I was sitting around with all of the charts and tables and cards, and the mental mists parted and I saw the light regarding wear. At the level of the race (2-4 laps depending on the track) each turn is like a snapshot of the race. Each turn is not modeling a couple of seconds of race time, but maybe 10-20 laps and the changes in the pack over the course of that time. Thus, each little wiggle and wobble is not necessary to be depicted. Fuel does not need to be tracked with a calculator.
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So that's a long about way to say that I had an idea that would simplify the game without affecting the importance of wear on cars. No matter what the problem, all problems eventually lead either two places: the pits or the garage. If the wear or damage you have incurred is minor or if you have an urgent need for fuel, you head for the pits. If you have a major failure, it's off to the garage for some milk and cookies.
Problems with the car slow you down. Conserving fuel=slow down, unable to hold a line=slow down, worn tires=slow down. After all, if they made you faster, racers would never pit. But they don't, they tend to slow you down, so if you have one or two wear issues, it's okay, you can correct those issues the next time you pit. But when the ledger becomes full of problems, your speed will drop off and then only a trip to the pits can make you right. It was always my goal to put pit strategy in your hands. In Thunder Alley, when to pit is up to you.
Crashes, Wrecks & Odd Catastrophies
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"Hogwash!" I was told. Carla wanted to play aggressively and not have to worry about sudden wall syndrome. It was fun to get in there and mix it up. I was informed that if I wanted crashes, they better not just randomly eliminate her from the game! She was 100% right. Carla is a Eurogamer and family gamer, I am an old school Avalon Hill gamer from back in the day with a love of Euros as well. She was not about to have her whole game tossed away on the flip of a card and I didn't blame her. In our compromise to realism vs playability we came up with body damage tokens that were the same as the permanent wear tokens.
Yes, you can be involved in crashes, but only peripherally. The narrative of the game stresses that the cars controlled by the players are not alone on the track. The remainder of the field is out there as well. Your cars are simply the most likely cars to be around at the end. All of the racing action is occurring during the game but the devastating effects are being directed at the other "invisible" cars on this day. The big wrecks happen, but not to you. You may receive collateral damage from the eight car pile-up but not enough to keep you off the track.
Once we had that conceit, that the players of the game should have every chance to finish the race, the design of the random event deck became much easier. Randomness was encouraged since even the worst of the wreck cards would not remove a player without any rhyme or reason. I got to keep some strategy in the game through the play of the blown engine and blown transmission cards in which you can have a car blow up, but only one car and only if you played an 8-speed racing card earlier.
Wrecks are exciting in Thunder Alley but they are not the end of your race. With the calling out of the yellow, they could just be the restart you were looking for.
Conclusion
Thunder Alley is a viable mix of an old-school racing game with a card-driven wargame and behaves like a family-oriented Eurogame. Players are always in the race but you can create alliances with players, then stab them in the back. The theme may not be for everyone but the game is accessible to anyone looking for a fun and memorable play experience.
Jeff Horger
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