Warhamster Rally

Lead your character from the Dork Tower comic strips
 to win the wild Warhamster races

(Interior pictures are from my own collection, much played and enjoyed - Egor)

WARHAMSTER RALLY™ is the crazy racing game based on the award-winning DORK TOWER™ comic strips by John Kovalic. Players take on the roles of Dork Tower characters and compete for the ultimate prize in thoroughbred racing:

THE WARHAMSTER CUP!

What, you thought this involved horses?

In WARHAMSTER RALLY, 3 to 5 players run amok, trying desperately to control their wild Warhamsters on the racetrack, dodging deadly Battle Budgies, Juggling Jongleurs, the numerous Kobold Kin, and the most ferocious monsters of all... the other players!.

 Basic Idea of the game:

Players are racing big, giant, killer Warhamsters around an open field racetrack marked by a pair of Battle Budgies. The race starts on the 4 hexes between one Battle Budgies and the edge of the board (marked Start) crosses the 4 hexes on the other side of the board (from the other Budgie to the Post Mark), and back around to the Start hexes

Features:

• 8 pp rule book
• 4-piece, very thick, double sided playing board
• 5 Warhamster Racers (Triangular wooden bits in brown, blue, green, yellow and white)
• 9 Kobold-kin (large Gray wooden disks)
• 2 Battle Budgies (larger purple wooden blocks)
• 4 Jongleurs (smaller brown wooden blocks)
• Sticker Sheet of full color Adhesive, die cut Character appliques including Kobold-kin, Jongleurs and Budgies (to be applied to the wooden bits before your first game
• 70 Action Chips
• 70 Cards (including 5 character cards, 5 action summary cards and some blanks)
• Nice Fancy box with great artwork
• For 3 – 8 players ages 8 to undead (but 2 works fine too).

Warhamster Rally is the first commercially published game by Frank Branham, the curator of the late Gaming Dumpster, and author of the devilishly wonderful Dia de los Muertos card game. Warhamster Rally is themed after characters from the world of Dork Tower, a comic book series with which I'm completely unfamiliar. Lack of knowledge or even interest in the Dork Tower universe does not in any way stop one from enjoying the game, however.

The premise of the game is that players are racing one lap around an oval arena, riding on Warhamsters. I'm sure you can picture what such a beast should look like. The arena floor is laid out in hexes. Each hex has an arrow drawn on it. These arrows indicate which direction your not-so-bright Warhamster will be facing after he stops in that hex. This means that you could very easily find yourself facing left when you would rather be facing right. That's the way it is with Warhamsters. They do their own thing.

Movement is card-driven. Each player has a hand of 5 cards. The cards show different patterns of hexes, which are the movement you'll do in your turn. The hex you are standing on is shown on the card with an arrow, which aligns with the direction your Warhamster is facing. Your ultimate destination hex is shown on the card in red (in some cases there is a choice between 2 destination hexes, and 2 paths will be shown on the card). If nothing is in any of the hexes in between where you start and where you end, you simply move to the new hex and orient the front of your Warhamster with the arrow on the hex he's now in. You then play a card for your next move (keeping in mind that your orientation on the board may have changed), and draw a replacement.

Sounds simple enough. But Frank is a chaotic sort of guy, and he needed to add more chaos to this arena in order to feel good. Chaos comes in many different ways.

First off, you can bang into other Warhamsters, shoving them onto other spaces, changing their orientations (remember, their movement card for their next turn is already down), and screwing up their moves.

Secondly, there are three different types of creatures loose in the arena. These are named after Dork Tower creatures, I suspect. Kobold Kin are round tokens that Warhamsters like to eat. In fact, if you enter a hex with a Kobold Kin, your Warhamster will stop what he's doing (helping you win a race) and will eat the Kobold Kin. You'll lose a turn while your trusty steed has his snack, but you'll gain a chip. (More on chips later). Jongleurs are mid-sized beasts, which act as obstacles. Battle Budgies are large creatures. The two of these are used to indicate the start/finish line and the mid point of the race.

I mentioned chips a second ago. Each player receives a supply of chips at the start of the game, and can get more by eating Kobold Kin during the race. Once per turn a player may choose to do a special action by spending chips. Actions available include:
   -Move an extra space. (costs 1) At the end of the red hex on the movement card is a black line. By spending a chip a player can extend his move one hex further than the red hex in the direction of the black line (expand the Geek image showing the cards and this will make perfect sense).
   -Move a Jongleur to an adjacent space. (costs 1) You can use this action to set a Jongleur in the way of an opponent, or to shove your Warhamster out of a space he's in and into one with a better arrow on it.
   -Move a Jongleur 2 spaces (costs 2). Or you can move 2 Jongleurs one space each.
   -Discard and redraw your hand. (costs 2)
   -Move a Battle Budgie 1 space (costs 3) This one can be especially helpful, like when your move ends on hex before the finish line. Simply spend 3 chips and move the finish line to where you are. Just like that, you win. Remember to save 3 chips for the end of the game if you want to try this, however!
   -Make an extra move (3 points). Play a card from your hand and make the move, either before or after your face down movement card.

Finally, each player has a specific character from the Dork Tower universe who happens to be riding on his Warhamster. Each character has a special ability that can be used once per game. These abilities include burrowing underneath another player or a Jongleur, making a Jongleur move, moving an extra 2 spaces in the direction last moved, remove a Koblod Kin from an adjacent space from the board, or move another player's Warhamster 1 space. As these are one-shot powers, and some of them require you to spend a chip, they aren't all that unbalancing.

One other bit of chaos I neglected to mention. On each of the movement cards you'll find a number next to a picture of a Kobold Kin. The Kobold Kin on the board are numbered to match those on the cards, and their starting hexes. Whenever a movement card is played, the Kobold Kin matching the number on the movement card is moved one hex in the direction of the arrow on the hex he's currently in. Assuming he hasn't been eaten yet, of course.

A typical turn goes something like this. Arnold turns over his movement card, moves his Warhamster, finds that Carl's Warhamster is in his path. Arnold pushes Carl's Warhamster one hex over, turning him 120 degrees to the left. Arnold plays a card face down, draws a new card, and it's Bob's turn. Bob turns his card over, makes his move, and notes that his destination hex has an arrow which points the wrong direction for any of his cards to help him toward the finish line. So Bob pays one chip to move his Warhamster 1 extra space, allowing him to turn and face the finish line. Bob plays a card face down for next turn, crosses his fingers that he'll still be in this hex, and draws a replacement. Carl realizes that the movement card he played last turn will take him far away from the finish line. So he pays one chip to move a Jongleur into him, shoving his Warhamster over one hex onto an arrow that will allow his movement card to at least move him in the direction he was trying to go.

Considering the complexity in describing it, all the chaos in the game works together quite well. Turns are reminiscent of Robo Rally or Dragon Delta, in that you are programming your movement ahead of time. However, this is a much simpler game than either of these because you are doing only one move at a time, rather than five. The chaos factor, however, is what makes this game fun. Without all the chaos the task of preprogramming one move would be far too simple. I love games with the challenge of pre-programming your move, and Warhamster Rally takes that challenge and makes it difficult in a completely different way than Robo Rally or Dragon Delta.

I rate the game a 7.5 on the Boardgame Geek rating scale.

One thing that must be noted is the lower quality of the first edition, which I own. I understand most of the concerns have been corrected in the newer editions of the game, but there are a few minor quirks with the first edition. The illustrations in the rulebook are blurry and hard to figure out, plus they show pictures from the prototype version of the game, which had an undersea theme instead of a Dork Tower theme. You can still figure out what is what, but it's tougher. Second, the Kobold Kin aren't numbered, and once they start moving it's pretty hard to remember which one is which when you have to move one every turn. Also, there is nothing on the Warhamster bits to indicate which end is the front. Since you need to know which way you're facing in order to correctly move on the arrows, this is a pretty big error. (I corrected the problems in my set by numbering my Kobold Kin with stick-on numbers and by painting a strip on one end of the wooden Warhamsters). Finally, the chips are a mixture of colors that have no significance to game play. Brown, pink, blue, gray chips, but all chips count the same. Just a bit confusing.

This is a new, unused copy of the second edition from 2002 that has spent its life in a warehouse. It is unused and still in original factory shrink.

JOL222 2002, boxed