Thunder Road: Vendetta

This is the closest thing to a filler game in this batch, which is funny because it takes up half the dining table once you’ve got the boards laid out. You’re driving armored cars around a track, shooting each other, trying to be the last one moving, and the whole thing is over in under an hour once everyone knows what they’re doing. First play took closer to ninety minutes because nobody had mastery of the rules yet, there’s a specific order to how the movement and combat phases interact that isn’t intuitive from the rulebook alone, but by the third game we were flying through turns.

Component quality is genuinely great, chunky miniatures, satisfying dice, the kind of stuff that photographs well, which matters more to some people in my group than it should. I picked up the Vendetta expansion pieces too and that’s where I’ll flag something, the extra boards and fire tokens make an already sprawling table footprint worse. If you don’t have a big table, or you’re the type who cares about setup-to-play ratio, think hard before going all in on the expansion content, because base Thunder Road already eats space and this multiplies it.

Where it lands for me is squarely in the category of a game I’m happy to play once a session, not the whole night. It’s take-that in the purest sense, somebody’s getting wrecked every round and there’s no way to soften that, so if your group has someone who sulks when they lose, this isn’t the one. Fun, loud, a little dumb, exactly what it advertises itself as. Three stars, no more no less.