Thunder Boats!

A short post today after  a long break with some pics of a new (to me at least) game, "Thunder Boats". Its  a lovely set of rules for powerboat racing written by Dave Schueler in the US. Dave sent me a copy recently and I've spent the last few days printing up the rules, laminating the boat and event cards and making the few markers needed (course marker buoys and "rooster tails")

As far as models are concerned I haven't been able to get hold of any of the hydroplane boats similar to the ones Dave and his friend Kevin Smyth but I have been able to get hold of some modern "Hot Wheels" model boats which do the job nicely. The only issue here is that they are larger than the hexes on my hex mat, but to counter that I just have the boats filling two hexes instead of one and after plying it through a few times that works perfectly well.

The game uses a dice based movement system with the type of dice thrown depending on the throttle setting of the boat. It uses unconventionally numbered dice, the same that are used in the "Formula De" tabletop motor racing game.. I've colour marked the boat control sheets to make it easier to tell which dice to use for each setting.

So this joins my (short) list of naval non-wargames, and I'll be looking to try this on the chaps at the BV club sometime. But it has got me wondering about a "death race" version, and some of the ideas would work very, very well for a Star Wars pod race variant.......