Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Return of my long-lost Car Wars countermix

Literally decades ago - probably almost 30 years ago now - I introduced a few of my gamers to Car Wars, Deluxe Edition. We played a game. Afterward, I left my whole countermix out on a table on top of the folded-up board from the Dungeon boardgame in the basement. Sometime later - the next day, maybe? - I went down to sort out my counters instead of having them all in one big pile.

They were gone. Nowhere to be found. I searched high and low, and found the Dungeon board on the table, but no counters. All gone.

I searched for quite a while, but assumed they'd been accidentally thrown out during some other cleanup in the basement.

So I literally replaced my entire collection to get a countermix. I found a Car Wars lot on Noble Knight and bought it. Deluxe Car Wars, Dueltrack, etc. I replaced a few map-and-counter supplements, too.

Flash forward to yesterday. I was cleaning out my comics collection, and one by one pulling bags from the comic long boxes and seeing what collection was in each. In one bag, along with a mix of comics, was a weird lumpy mass at the bottom of the oversized bag.

In it was my old countermix.

How it got there, I have no idea. Did someone in my family pour it into the bag and I didn't notice as I put comics in it?

We had cats. Was it possible one sat on the board, dumped the contents into the comics box and therefore the open bag? I used to keep my bagged comics right near my gaming table.

Did I put them away in that bag and complete forgot about it right away?

I have no idea.

But now, decades after my last game of DCW, I have two full countermixes. It's definitely my old countermix - I'd glued wrecks to the back of their unwrecked cars, colored a few favorite black and white counters with colored pencils, and otherwise customized things. And here it is.

Weird.

My replacement mix, sorted, and my old, unsorted mix:



Er, anyone for DCW-era Car Wars?

1 comment:

  1. The same thing happened to me a few years back. I used to keep my counters in one of those multi-drawer parts cabinets from Canadian Tire. At some point the cabinet disappeared and I gave my counters up for lost. Decades later, I re-bought all the counter sets from eBay etc. One day when I was digging through a box of old Hot Rod magazines I found the cabinet... with all my counters.

    I don't run or play Car Wars much these days, but we still use the counters in our GURPS 4e Autoduel campaign (and CW maps I edited in GIMP to use 5-hex per inch grids).

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