My Life as a Gamer: Tabletop Scratches for Mad Max Itches

In addition to Car Wars, tabletop gaming has other offering to get your Mad Max fix, but most of them are not in print anymore. (Which is sad, depending on your tastes.) I'll go over two that I know of, and I'll welcome others in the Comments.

Dark Future was Games Workshop's go at this genre, and like Steve Jackson's Car Wars they decided to up-gun the vehicles for the same of making it easier to design and play. This is a boardgame, and not a role-playing game at all, not even the bone thrown in Car Wars is present here. You're either one of the Outlaws or one of the Bounty Hunters after them. Being a Games Workshop game that wasn't one of the two main Warhammer games, it got some hype and then shelved Because Reasons.

If this sounds interesting, and you're willing to either hunt down used stuff or roll your own, hit up Future Highways and get started. Otherwise, you can wait for Auroch Digital's PC adaptation which they hope to have out this year so hit up the Steam Page.

Maybe you want something else? A proper RPG, perhaps?

Palladium Books' licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game created a post-apocalyptic setting: "After The Bomb". This is now the main setting for the game, as the TMNT license is long-gone, and being that this game has its origins in the 1980s it's not surprising at all that they did a Mad Max tribute: Road Hogs.

Aside from playing anthropomorphic animals as your characters, this is as close to a licensed RPG as it ever got. The majority of car action is ramming, sideswiping, boarding and attacking enemy drivers/crew, some adapted weapons systems, and few proper guns or ordinance.

The setting is Furry Mad Max also, and as such it is ripe for playing it straight as well as parody thereof (and the later, often without intent or effort, is more common). Palladium being what it is, hacking it to work as you like won't be that hard to do if you don't like how it is as-written.

Got any others to add? Scroll down, put in a Comment, and pass on the good word.