There’s something refreshing about Thunder Road: Vendetta. In a bygone era we would have called it Ameritrash, although there’s an elegance under the hood that belies its spots of rust. Designed by a whole committee at Restoration Games, it’s a reimagining of the 1986 Milton Bradley Thunder Road, albeit with all the advantages of nearly four decades of intervening design and component upgrades.

Thunder Road at its most basic.

I think, when the world’s seams come apart, I too will race. It’s not so much a question of risk as one of ideation. When the highways are slick with oil and the desert has been baked to glass, what remains but to glide across their surface, hand on the shifter and foot on the pedal, one eye on the sky and another on the glints in the rear-view mirror. To race is to live. For the last time.

Okay, I’m making Thunder Road sound sad. It isn’t. If anything, it’s unusual in its honesty.

For one thing, the stakes are clear. There are no victory points to tally, no hidden objectives. Either you reach the finish line or you’re the last person standing. Or you’re dead. That’s not only possible but likely. Even if your crew happens to cross the line, it’s likely that some of them will have reached Valhalla along the way.

For another, this is not the sort of game that rewards planning. Some board games resort to contrivances to reproduce the concept of reflexes, timers and so forth. There’s no need on the Thunder Road. You roll dice, you assign dice, you roll more dice, you see what happens. There’s input and output luck alike, but its ultimate effect is to produce a membrane between foresight and reaction, no thicker than skin, which threatens to rupture but somehow holds strong.

Assigning dice to your vehicles.

In mechanical terms, that mostly means embracing fate. In olden times, people lived awash in gods and spirits, always one forgotten sacrifice away from catastrophe. In this crumbling future, the same could be said of the aleatory dice. You roll four each round and assign three to your vehicles to dash along the highway or trudge through mud. The fourth is reserved for some bonus. Nitro for extra moves. Drifting past a collision. Calling in a helicopter to swoop down on a rival vehicle. Maybe scrambling around the underside of the car to make hasty repairs.

And then, more dice. There are dice for everything. Stunts, such as when a car careens in an unexpected direction or hurtles off a ramp. Fire, which can propel your vehicle forward or burn it to scrap. Shooting, of course. Slams — oh yes, slams, one of the game’s most interesting ideas. When two vehicles bash into one another, you roll the slam die to determine which vehicle gets knocked away, and the direction die to determine… look, you get it. In some of the game’s most humorous but fatiguing exchanges, a tight cluster of vehicles becomes an overcrowded crop of bumper cars. One vehicle veers into the pack, you roll those dice upward of five, six, a dozen times, and in the end somebody is spat out the front, unexpectedly leading the pack.

There’s an element of risk evaluation, of course, but that’s obvious. Smaller vehicles tend to be pushed around by larger trucks, so you learn to avoid plunging your buggy into the fray. Your truck, meanwhile, presents such a broad profile that it’s easier to riddle with bullets. Again, you learn to keep your hulkers clear of those mounted guns.

More dice!

But while the dice are interesting, the game’s social questions are both subtler and more profound. Take, for example, the question of when to break away from the pack. Thunder Road excels at producing specific beats without throttling the action. Early on, everybody necessarily clusters together. Especially in games with higher player counts, that first board tends to be a hopeless mess. Over time, as vehicles break down or fail to keep up, the herd thins. By the last stretch, it’s usually down to only a handful of cars.

Choosing your moment, however, is hardly easy. Like the dice themselves, this is an exercise in risk assessment, but this risk has everything to do with the cutthroats seated with you at the table. Thanks to an array of clever catch-ups, foremost among them those pesky helicopters, racing too fast often means getting shot to pieces. More than once, I’ve watched somebody’s buggy dash forward, putting an entire board’s distance between them and their closest tail. More than once, too, I’ve watched every other player converge their helicopters onto that lone buggy and tear it to shreds.

Sometimes, though, only sometimes, the breakaway racer will play it smart. They’ll watch to see what everyone rolls. They’ll wait until some of those bonus dice have been assigned. And then, when they pull ahead, there isn’t much anybody can do to stop them.

Or you could just gun it. Why not? Live your life. For the five minutes of gas you have sloshing in the tank.

Crowded highway.

There are plenty of superlatives to describe the experience. I’ve already employed a few. Perhaps the most accurate, though, is that it’s glorious in a madcap way, like taking a corner too fast and feeling gravity threaten to pull you off the road, but leaning into it and hurtling out the other side, alive and stupid and alive. Not the end of the world, but for a few seconds you could smell the salt flats on the horizon.

The expansions, of which there are heaps, only add to the experience. The Maximum Chrome edition has all but the most recent, and it’s such a treasure hoard that I still haven’t quite gotten a handle on everything. There’s a big rig, a three-part truck that wins every slam, crushes straight through obstacles, and is such a slow crawler that it might not be capable of winning the race through anything other than bloody attrition. There’s a crew of five motorcycles that are easily picked off, but also so nimble that they stick around anyway. I would say they exist more for spectacle than for the value of competition, but the spectacle is at least three-quarters of the point.

What else is there? Rather, what else isn’t there? Crew leaders with unique abilities, check. Special weapons that adjust the behavior of your vehicles, check. There are new ways to damage vehicles, new hazards on the road, new stretches of highway to race. Even the Chrome-exclusive offering, the German Engineering deck, manages to be interesting even if its reduction in randomness poses a frontal assault on what makes the game so entertaining. Unlike some of the other options I don’t see putting it in regular rotation, but it isn’t like I begrudge it as an occasional mutator.

The Maximum Chrome edition includes a bunch of expansions.

More ambitious even than Maximum Chrome’s tidal pool of expansions is Carnival of Chaos, a separate box that transforms Thunder Road from a linear race into an arena deathmatch. The highway boards become entry points stuffed with grab-bag balloons where hazards would have been, while the circular arena funnels everybody into roundabout kill-zones and threatens to slam them with pneumatic pillars.

The whole thing is impressive for how it alters the feel of Thunder Road without actually retouching the rules. Movement works more or less the same way, the board’s reshaped spaces allowing cars to turn rather than merely altering the angle of their velocity. Meanwhile, the same social questions remain intact. Diving into the arena is deadly, prompting some cars to linger in the rear, but the temptation of super-weapons rewards those drivers who plunge into danger headfirst. It shifts the needle more toward the Borderlands end of the scale than the base game’s Mad Max, especially with its “Turbo Tina” deck governing the hazards and rules tweaks, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I still prefer the base game on the whole, but Carnival of Chaos functions well as a diversion from the usual proceedings.

Carnival of Chaos goes Twisted Metal.

The First History Man asked, “Where might we go, we who wander this wasteland in search of our better selves?”

The answer, of course, is to ride the Thunder Road. Far from sputtering along, this is a fine-tuned (if chancy!) engine, one that putters and purrs with all the oomph of the last V8. Once again, Restoration has produced a game that not only captures the spirit of the original, but supercharges it.

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Complimentary copies of Thunder Road: Vendetta — Maximum Chrome and Carnival of Chaos were provided by the publisher.