Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I loved last year’s car combat dice-chucking game, Thunder Road: Vendetta, published by Restoration Games. I loved it so much that it ended up being my #4 game of last year.
I backed the “Maximum Chrome” edition of Thunder Road: Vendetta because when you only back one, maybe two games a year, you want to make it something really special. As a result, I dropped a lot of cash to make my dreams come true. I wanted all the fixins, in part because I wanted the extra vehicles that spice up gameplay—I’m a Mad Max movie junkie and I needed to own The Big Rig and the Final Five expansion. Who wouldn’t want to play with a vehicle that looks suspiciously like the truck from The Road Warrior?
I’ve played with all the extras in Maximum Chrome (save for German Engineering, which “Eurofies” the dice-driven action into a more predictable, less chaotic form that screams “not for me”), and I never felt that the base game had any holes. If anything, I want a way to shorten the playtime with a higher player count, as this was the base game’s only weakness.
Tabletop game expansions are a way of life, right? When I learned that Thunder Road: Vendetta–Carnival of Chaos (the fifth expansion to the base game) was going to deliver to backers by the end of the year, I raised my hand in the hopes that I could cover the upcoming expansion. Restoration was kind enough to oblige.
Party Favors
Carnival of Chaos, like the Maximum Chrome edition of the base game, accommodates 2-5 players, and includes a fifth set of cars to add to the base game components. (In the base game, you could do a five-player game, but only four of the players could use the standard cars. Everyone else had to pick from the Big Rig or the series of yellow motorcycles known as the Final Five.)
Instead of racing on an endless series of track tiles until one player loses all their cars, Carnival of Chaos forces everyone into a fishbowl that plays a bit like the large walled arenas portrayed in video game car combat battlers like the Twisted Metal series. (Or, maybe the fishbowl is a bit like the Thunderdome, if you made it through Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, starring Tina Turner.)
Run by a twisted villain known as Turbo Tina—OK, I see you, Restoration!—players begin by driving into the arena using one of the new map’s three entrances before driving in circles trying to slam and shoot their way to victory. (The arena’s double-sided board provides two options: the Haulasseum and the Slaytona 500, both of which come with “killer pillars” that will randomly spike out of the ground to murder off cars that were in the wrong place at the wrong time.)
Most of the base game’s mechanics persist in this new expansion, so slamming other cars into impassable hazards is still just as viable a strategy as blasting opponents who are in the front arc of your vehicle. Choppers are just as devastating in this version of the game, and using your dice to get into a prime shooting position is still an important aspect of play.
Carnival of Chaos offers a number of differences from the base game. Here, there are no hazard tokens in sight. In their place are Party Favors, which amount to in-game, Mario Kart-style pickups that are seeded on the map to begin play. Party Favors are always good, whereas hazard tokens were a mix of mostly bad and occasionally neutral effects. This fundamentally changes the game, and in my experience across three plays, actually made the game longer because cars were able to survive longer thanks to some of the game-breaking powers found on the Party Favor tokens.
I’ll caution here that longer didn’t mean significantly longer. My three-player game of Carnival of Chaos took about 75 minutes, whereas a three-player setup of the base game took about an hour. But for a game mode that I expected to lead to significantly shorter games, this was a somewhat surprising development. I want more ways to blow up bad guys, but sometimes I found myself struggling to catch the single car that my green opponent was driving in a wide arc around the outside of the arena because of poor dice rolls and no other way to chase that person down.
Carnival of Chaos uses a new currency system called scrap. Players earn scrap for entertaining the fans of Turbo Tina’s arena, so damaging opponents by slamming or shooting them earns two scrap. An elimination earns a tad more. There’s also a one-time-per-game ability known as Witness Me! (yep, it feels like someone is gonna spray white paint on my teeth while I jump to my death in the hopes of reaching Valhalla). Witness Me! gives each player a chance to gamble on earning extra scrap during a turn where it looks like they can do the most damage.
But as you would guess, scrap only matters if you survive the game, so scrap is worthless if a you lose all your vehicles. That led to an interesting scenario in that three-player game—I had about 20 scrap, and my two opponents had less than a third of my total. Guess who became Enemy #1? Worse, as the game goes along, there are fewer ways to damage other opponents because their cars might be inoperable or eliminated…so the only way for those opponents to win is through the elimination of another player. It’s pretty tough to survive in Thunder Road: Vendetta when five other cars (and their two indestructible choppers) are only targeting your medium-sized Avenger!!
In addition to the Party Favors, six Super Weapon tokens are scattered inside the arena. Picking up a Super Weapon gives that specific car an ongoing power that somewhat breaks the game, some of which are ridiculously over the top. Although I have not had all the Super Weapons on my own cars yet, two have risen to the top as personal favorites.
The Amplifier gives its owner the chance to force the effects of a successful attack (slamming or shooting) twice on the same car. In one play, this meant that an opponent who took a Blast Off damage effect had to resolve a second Blast Off. (Someone’s car was blown off in one direction by three spaces, then in a different direction four more spaces. The comedy of this had to be seen to be believed.)
The other one is the Torsion Dynamo. This weapon actually removes the ability of the owning car to shoot for the rest of the game. In exchange, on this car’s active turn, it always forces the opposing car to move in a slam. When assigned to the small car—the Doom Buggy—this makes a small car almost indestructible, because it’s so hard to shoot a small car. That means the owner of the Torsion Dynamo becomes a target whenever it is another player’s turn because getting slammed into a side of the arena walls, the killer pillars, or other hazards on the arena board is fatal.
The Super Weapons are great. However, I wish those tokens re-spawned once during the game. As it is, in a five-player game, there are only six Super Weapons available for 15 total cars. One or two players might not get the chance to taste the sweet fruit of cool loot, in part because once a car is equipped with a Super Weapon, it never loses it, even when it is eliminated.
It’s Different, But Is It Better?
The best thing about Carnival of Chaos is that it does achieve expansion happiness, at least for me—this is a different way to play the Thunder Road: Vendetta base game.
Carnival of Chaos definitely has a video game feel combined with the feel of a real-life demolition derby—drive in a circle to constantly get an opponent’s car in your crosshairs in the hopes of ending that car’s life. It is intended to be a more aggressive way to play an already aggressive game, right down to the expansion’s win condition.
I love the Super Weapon abilities, because they are ridiculous; when combined with the Choppe Shoppe expansion from the Maximum Chrome edition, this might mean that every car has a cool power and some cars have a ridiculous one. (Watch out for Li’l Sammy, which can shoot down enemy choppers…my son got me in our two-player game, and he still reminds me of it at dinner almost every night.) When a player adds all that, plus the Party Favors, it can be a little chaotic to keep up with the abilities of your opponents. Of course, “chaos” is literally the name of this game.
The biggest negative for me with this expansion? It doesn’t make a long game any shorter. I absolutely love the gameplay of Thunder Road: Vendetta, but 90 minutes for a game where you are driving straight down a long road and chucking dice is too long. (My recent experience with Dungeon Kart has reconfirmed my feelings on this.) We had a strange five-player game that only lasted 35 minutes with this expansion, because one player lost all three of his cars by the end of the second round. Other plays, even with fewer players, took a lot longer.
That means you may want to stick with Carnival of Chaos as a three- or four-player game. While it is still interesting at two players, I don’t think the mechanics work as well with only two players both in the base game and Carnival of Chaos expansion format.
One of the Party Favor tokens is called Mega-Repair: it allows for a player to remove one damage token from each of their cars. Timed correctly, this might reverse the fortunes of a player that was about to hit the scrap heap by bringing all their cars back to full health.
This extends the game, and my son was able to use it in our two-player game to heal all three cars in one free action. Less is more, people!
Outside of these points, I’ll take any chance I can get to put Thunder Road: Vendetta on the table. Carnival of Chaos does a lot of great things and comes in at a reasonable price point to expand your car combat collection. If you love the base game, this is a worthwhile addition!
Thunder Road: Vendetta–Carnival of Chaos details
- Designer: Brian Neff, Justin D. Jacobson, Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau
- Artists: N/A
- Publishers: Lucky Duck Games, Restoration Games
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2 - 5
- Mechanism(s):
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.55263 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.5.
- More articles about Thunder Road: Vendetta–Carnival of Chaos.
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