Outrider is a simple, but elegant car combat game that uses cards for movement and polyhedral dice to customise the car statistics. I bought a copy of way back in 2013 from DriveThruCards. The product is still for sale there, or you can get the basic rules from the BoardGameGeek Outrider page for free.
Outrider can be played with basic cards for vehicles, but that’s not much fun for modellers and hobbyists. A lot of people customise Hot Wheel and Matchbox cars for use with Outrider, and in general for their own amusement. This means there’s plenty of instructions available on-line about how to take apart and strip these toy cars. Hot Wheel are also ridiculously cheap, available everywhere, and there’s a huge variety of them. From reasonably accurate scale models of classic US and British cars, to original funny car designs from Mattel which vary from interesting to crazy. They’re also surprisingly well made, and very robust too considering how little they cost.
After playing a few games of Outrider recently it seems my gaming group has gone on a bit of a bender buying interesting looking Hot Wheels, and customising them with various bits of plastic card and bits box weaponry. It turns out they’re a great little project. Each car is quick to take apart and build up again with custom scratch building. Repainting them is also fun and a single car can easily be done finished in an evening or two.
The first photo shows the first three cars I’ve repainted. That’s a ’64 Lincoln Continental, a ’70 Chevy Camaro and a ’72 Dodge Demon. They’re armed with a variety of scale model weaponry from machine guns to MANPADs. The Dodge Demon has cut down Games Workshop Imperial Guard 40K Lasguns for weaponry. Rather than paint them the usual subdued post-apocalyptic blacks and browns I went for more Vegas colours baby. The Continental had to be painted in Pimp purple, the Camaro got a horrid ‘Midori green’ colour, and of course the Dodge Demon had to be red – it may also have flames added to it since it’s not varnished yet.
They’re so enjoyable to work on, the real problem now is going to be putting the Hot Wheels aside and getting back to my other projects.