Battlecars

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Battlecars is a simple wargame based upon the Mad Max genre of a post-apocalyptic world dominated by aggressive, waring gangs. It was first published by Games Workshop in the early 1980s and the game designers were Gary Chalk and Ian Livingstone

Each player has one or more "battlecars" that are equipped with machine guns, flamethrowers, spike droppers and the like, with much taken from the cinematic James Bond mythology of super-duper cars.

The simple game mechanics allowed for quick and entertaining game play, with damage being marked off using card counters. The game was too simple for some more mature players, given its relatively basic rules and lack of capacity to design unique vehicles. It is possible that the game was intended to capitalise on the popularity at the time of Car Wars game published by Steve Jackson Games. The game was not successful and has been forgotten by the general public. The production values of the game, however, were higher than those of the early versions of Car Wars.

One expansion set for this game was released, Battlebikes introducing motorcycles and also handling some errata.

A licensed, Swedish language, version of the game was published by Target Games under the name Combat Cars.

Later in the 80s Games Workshop released an expansion boxed set named 'Battlecars' for its Dark Future roadfighting miniature game, however this was just a set of 4 Sanctioned Op Interceptors and 4 Renegade buggies with no rules or templates whatsoever.