Scene: A snowy day at a busy intersection. Dramatis Personae: A truckdriver, A man in a minivan, A woman in a Nissan, and Numerous well-known wargame designers A screeching of tires is heard, followed by several loud metallic Thwacks! When the first onlookers arrive, they see a three-way collision: the truck, the van, and the Nissan have all piled into one another. Nobody appears to have died, but nobody's in a very good mood. Enter the Wargame Designers: Scott Bowden is first on the scene. He frowns, takes out a tape measure, and begins to make calculations. The truck driver, massaging a spreading bruise over his eye, asks him what he's doing. Bowden replies, "I know exactly what happened here... the Nissan failed its Turn Radius Check, and was Opportunity Struck by the Minivan. See, that's a 1998 Sentra GXE, without ABS, so that's a +30% modifier.' (To the woman): You must've rolled 85 or less, right?" The woman responds that she has no idea what she rolled, but her arm might be broken, and she's pretty sure the truck driver hit her first. "Oh," says Bowden, "Well, that was out of sequence, then. He shouldn't have done that. That shouldn't have happened. How many Fatigue points do you currently have, by the way?" Bob Jones meanwhile has arrived. As Bowden talks, he's getting increasingly angry. "This is ridiculous!" he finally shouts. "You can't possibly have any idea what happened here. There's no way to model it. All I'm sure of is you turned up the Crash! card at the same moment that guy in the minivan did, and--" "--That's a 2001 Honda Odyssey LE Minivan, by the way," Bowden adds: "+15% braking radius roll. Unless it was part of that series that came off the Canadian assembly line between February and March that year - they'd only have a +10%." By this point several other people have arrived. Among them is William Keyser. He seems very happy to see so many people here, ready to play, or at least talk. He's smiling, unfolding a large map. "Look," he says, "I've got a regional map, so we can do a campaign of this. We could start the set up in the morning, before the snow began, and game it out. Using my new system From Stoplight to Railroad Tracks, we might be able to finish this skirmish in about two weeks." A faint moaning is heard coming from the minivan. The driver appears to be regaining consciousness. Keyser is rubbing his hands together, excited by the prospect. He heads off to the New York Public Library to begin his research. "I have no idea what happened here," says a newly-arrived Arty Conliffe, "And I don't really care. All I know is that I'm going to sell about fifty thousand copies of it." Phil Barker, who much to everybody's surprise, was apparently at the scene the whole time, now adds decisively: "The road is 'bad going.' No doubt about that. I'd say that Nissan is down a pip. It's pretty elementary, really: NIS4 v. MIN3 v. TRK6 = Stalemate. They'd better re-roll." The moaning from the minivan has stopped. The driver has apparently fallen asleep. By this point in the discussion, Chris Parker has already produced a total of six editions of his rules for the event, and is working on the new 7 edition. Wally Simon, who has read them all, doesn't like any of them. He and Fred Haub have sketched it out in the snow beside the road, rolled several dice and moved matchbox cars around, and decided that all the currently-available car-crash rules are terrible. Hal Thinglum, who has been standing some distance from the crash site, has been collecting all the rules. As each one comes in, he places it on a template on his clipboard. It reads: "I just received [Name of Rules] from [Name of Author]. This beautifully-packaged [X]-page booklet looks very complete and is laid out clearly with nice illustrations. It is full of useful information like charts and tables and pictures of [type] figures. This is one of the best [kind] rulesets that I will never play! Good job, [Name]!' Bowden is saying something about fender thickness in the 1997 GMC trucks when suddenly the HMGS Board of Directors arrives. They immediately begin walking around the site, waving their arms and loudly proclaiming: "Okay everybody... this belongs to us now, this is copyright, trademarked, all Rights Reserved, fell as, let's see those I.D. badges, thank you, thank you, thank you..." To their horror, however, the Games Workshop van appears a few minutes later. Everybody under the age of 24 immediately ignores the HMGS guys and flocks to this gala event. The GW guys are wearing bright red "Krash!" tee-shirts as they open the panel of their truck to reveal a seventeen-foot replica terrain board of the intersection. It looks so good that even the truckdriver wants to play, as do the cops and the recently-arrived lawyer for the woman in the Nissan. Nobody seems to mind that playing will cost them each ninety dollars. The GW guys give out Krash! toothpicks while the people line up to purchase the figures. The truckdriver pays $59.99 for a three-inch plastic model of his own truck, even though the figure representing him has purple tubes coming out of its forehead. The GW guys promise to release more supplements soon. Afterword Finally, a thousand cell phones all go off at once. Everybody's wife is calling, demanding a speedy return for dinner. The gamers depart, the sun goes down, and the cops marvel at the huge quantity of soda and chips left at the accident scene. At this point, arriving late, is Sam Mustafa, who immediately begins an article on how everybody has seen it wrong. The article, entitled "How I Learned to Analyze Car Crashes Better Than Everybody Else," runs 47 pages in MWAN # 961. It results in seven lawsuits, an assassination attempt, and fifty-three subsequent articles by Sam on how to do perfect car-crash simulations. By the end of that year a Piquet module appears, called "Crash of Metal." It is followed by a GMT boardgame in which the players draw cards to activate their vehicles, and the game never seems able to replicate the actual crash. Arty Conliffe's game is the best-selling version of the crash, Keyser's is never finished and ends up just being a Yahoo! chat-site, Parker's 72nd Edition actually comes out after the 73rd Edition, and as far as anybody can tell, Scott Bowden and Bob Jones are still walking around the intersection arguing about it. Four and a half years after the accident, a full write-up appears in The Courier, under "Recent Events," the word "accident" is misspelled, and the article cites two trucks and a Ford. In the same issue, Ned Zuparko contributes a piece about how George Jeffrey could have done this all perfectly, had he only lived another four hundred years to produce a working Variable-Skid-Thwack (VST) system. A conservative Family Values foundation sues Games Workshop for their advertising which targets 15-year-old boys in Driver's Ed programs. And life goes on. Back to PW Review February 2002 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com