Toybox Wars is a table-top miniatures game in which the inhabitants of your toybox rise up to fight each other to the death. The core mechanic is simple. Each toy — be it a miniature car, squad of army men, teddybear — is represented by 10 six-sided dice divided into one of three pools: Dodge Dice, Attack Dice, Floating Dice. At the start of every turn, players allocate their dice between the pools, depending on whether they want to focus on offense or defense, or hedge their bets with the floating dice, which can be used for both.
To use Attack or Dodge, players roll the dice and look for scores of three or better; successful attacks will hit their targets, successful dodges will soak incoming attacks. Rolled dice are put into a Spent Pool to be re-allocated the next round. If someone takes more hits then they have dodges, they take damage and lose dice equal to the number of hits; those dice are permanently removed from the game.
Larger characters, such as Godzilla, receive more dice, usually in multiples of ten. Movement is measured in terms of playing cards (for smaller figures) or sheets of paper (for larger ones). Range for weapons is line of sight.
Arrrh … Here there be Car-nage!
For my playtest of Toybox Wars, I decided to go with a knock-off on Car Wars (inspired partly by Market Forces, the capitalist Mad Max novel I’m reading as part of the Secret Lair book club). The game pitted four pirate-themed Matchbox cars battling each other through two laps around an oval racing course. Line of site was blocked across the map by a plateau in the center.
Because this was a racing game, I lifted some of the rules from an earlier incarnation of the game that Berin had posted, called Car Pool, which dealt entirely with car-vs-car combat. Specifically, I added a “Stunt Pool”, which controlled how fast the cars could go — each success on a die rolled as part of the stunt pool gave players an extra card’s worth of movement.
The alpha rules didn’t have an initiative system, so I decided to borrow the playing card mechanic from Savage Worlds, in which each player is dealt a card. High cards go first; ties are resolved in reverse alphabetical order based on suits (spaces to clubs). Jokers gave players an extra success of their choice (Dodge, Attack or Stunt) and allowed them to pick which initiative they’d go on.
My playtest team consisted of four players (three guys in their 30s, my 5-year-old daughter StarGirls and myself (who refereed and helped StarGirl strategize).
Four on the Floor
Toybox Wars is very much an alpha release — witness the lack of an initiative system — but it was still very playable. The rules fit on a single sheet of paper with enough room for an oversized logo, and I was easily able to explain the rules in a couple of minutes. My players picked up the rules immediately, and even my five year old had a good graps of the game after a round or three.
The Dodge vs. Attack combat mechanic works well — the math is limited to figuring out if you’ve hit a target number, and the ability to re-allocate dice pools each rounds means players don’t have to lock themselves into a particular strategy. For a Mad Max-inspired autoduel, this mechanic made it easy to imagine drivers hastily trying to repair damage, shifting their attention from screaming around a curve to blasting away at their enemies, or hitting the afterburner to spring to the finish line.
The Stunt Pool nicely modeled the ability of drivers to speed up or slow down their cars based on that rounds objectives, but the mechanic really needs to be fleshed out to include some special maneuvers — 180 turns, ramming, jumps — as well as some negative consequences for failures, particularly critical failures. These existed in the earlier Car Pool draft, and Berin’s already said he plans to incorporate Stunt rules back into Toybox Wars.
While I’m talking about vehicle-based stunts, I can easily see the game including some melee and ranged stunts that could be used for warring teddy bear tribes or pitched battles against Godzilla. Based on my playtest, I’d say the mechanic should work well in either of those scenarios, or just about anything else you can come up with.
My only complaint about the rules is that they’re a little too solid, which is to say they didn’t tend to spawn those great “holy crap!” moments where someone gets off a lucky shot and blows away someone else’s car. There’s something to be said for a game that keeps the vagrancies of the dice from knocking players out of the game on the first round, but at the same time, the game itself plays exceedingly fast. We ran through our session in 30-45 minutes, with three of four cars making it across the finish line. There’s some wiggle room for chaos there, perhaps something like exploding dice where rolling a six yields you a success and let’s you re-roll. That mechanic is part of what makes Savage Worlds such a blast to play, and I think it could be a good fit with Toybox Wars.
I also think this is a game that calls out for as interactive a playing field as you can make — next time around I’m thinking of creating some water hazards, trenches, robot-controlled gun turrents, anything to make it more than just a mad dash around the track. That was certainly fun, but I think some hazards would kick things up a notch.
Imagination Required
The key thing to remember when playing it though, is that you need to bring your imagination. This isn’t Car Wars or Warhammer or any other flavor of highly detailed tabletop war gaming. Toybox Wars is abstract, and you need to bring a certain elasticity and creativity to the game.
It doesn’t delve into weapon ranges, defensive cover or any of the other intricacies that some grognards love to geek out over, and I think that’s fine — if you want to play something detailed, go pick up an Avalon Hill game, if you want to have your G.I. Joe figures battle to the death, then try out Toybox Wars.