Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll Podcast.
My name is Ryan. And I'm the night rider.
I am the chosen 1, the mighty hand of vengeance sent down to
strike the unroad worthy. I'm hotter than rolling dice.
You, you are hotter than rolling dice, buddy.
Look at you, look at you so. So here we are.
Here we are. Yeah, get it.
When when you said Knight Rider, I was like, oh, and then it kept
going. I was like, oh, I get it.
I so hey, so we're back. We had an unplanned break once
again, as we do basically every month at this point.
But but we're back and we're going to do an actual review and
today we are going to be looking at torque, Torque from the rally
Rd. playing game from Williamst will so listen, we we have we
are unashamedly, very loudly. We are an Adam vast and podcast.
We love world champ games. We love Adam.
They're amazing person and they make amazing shit, right.
But I think we have criminally under talked about
underappreciated the other half of the of the of the brain trust
podcast, which is will Yost. They run good luck press with
Sam Pines. They've done a bunch of amazing
stuff. I have.
I have so much of it and I don't know how we haven't talked about
it, but we got Black Mass here, which is amazing.
Dwelling. Oh yeah, we'll get to that.
That's the only one I didn't grab off the shelf.
We got dwelling and the dwelling edition and and not only that,
real quick, real quick thing, I think just yesterday maybe they
dropped a new expanded version of Dwelling, which I still need
to grab from Good Luck Press. So go grab that.
That's from Sub Pines, but it's also from Good Luck Press, which
is fantastic. The curious sets are amazing.
I have Jasper Park and Albert Manor.
And then I believe that this discord has Ghost and it is with
with Adam, right? It is.
Yeah, so a bunch of amazing games from Will, from Seb and
from from all of Good Luck Press and what's up.
I was like, they're fine, I'm kidding, they're good, they're
great. They're, they're fantastic.
And if you listen to the original Brain Trust podcast
when they did the Kickstarter and stuff like that, that's
where it's so interesting when you actually go back and listen
to the Brain Trust podcast in the beginning, this game
definitely started as idea here. Like that podcast was kind of
like their version of like that Pixar meeting where they made
like all of the good Pixar movies in like 1 meeting on the
back of a napkin. Like not that all other stuff
isn't also good, but like this came from that.
The the project actually came from the Kickstarter.
The A guide to casting Phantoms is is from that, but if you go
back and listen to that, you can hear a lot of ideas that they
actually put into or made games later.
So hey, go check out the Brain trust podcast with Adam and
Will. But again, today we're going
over Torque and you dropped the the Mad Max.
I'm rocking my Inferno Rd. shirt.
Yeah. And for those that don't know,
I'm sure we'll talk about it next time Jurd is on.
But there's a new edition of Inferno Rd. which for those that
don't know it is presented by the Hobo Nomicon, which is
fantastic, like Weird magazine from Doug Kovacs and Wayne
Snyder. The new edition you can get
Space Penguin signed by both of them.
It's the con edition, so I definitely snag this side of the
older edition in the back. But Inferno Rd. is basically
like an adventure down a hell Rd., so I figure that's a
closest racing thing I have for Torque.
But that is that's what we're doing today.
We're going over to Torque. For those that can't see, Torque
is a sideways book shaped much like Cyber Metal 2012 A.
Very nice shape for a book. Also, and I don't know if this
is the reason for it because, because this is torque operator
manual on it, right? Every So I don't know, I my
assumption is that that had something to do with the the
thing of it. But every single car manual I've
ever had? Oh yeah, actually, they're all,
they're all sideways books like this.
That's funny thing to think about that.
That has to be a reference. It has to be the reference.
I almost even brought in my car manual to be like, look, it's
literally basically the same size.
But yeah, so torque, torque, you're a driver.
This is a typical game for two to five players built for single
session or multi session gameplay and it says torque is 2
games built into one and we'll talk about what that means the
road and the rest stop when we get into the game.
Beautiful book. Very yellow on the cover.
TORQ Torque will Yost JOBST good luck press.co check out all that
stuff out. But I think I think I think I
think that's it. That's what we have to to get
going. Yeah, yeah.
OK, well, let's get into the actual game review, which is
what we sometimes do on our game review.
We. Occasionally review games on
this Game Review podcast. Every now, so I will say right
off the bat, we'll jump in. So sideways book, which makes
APDF somewhat, yeah, cumbersome for us in the way that we do our
layout. For those in podcast land, you
don't give a shit. But for those watching, it's not
a big deal. There's a little Gray bar top
and bottom, but but but super fun.
The book comes as spreads. There's no pages PDF, at least
not in what you get from the itch.
So when you have a book that's already sideways and then put it
into spreads, you get a very, very, very wide PDF.
I'm going to go ahead and say that's like there's going to
lose points in usability for me, like right off the bat because
man was out of pain in the Dick to read through.
Yeah, well, I was reading it, so I was reading it on my iPad.
And so when I'd swipe it too far over, it would go to the next
document. And yeah, I was like.
OK, well, dude, that I almost I literally almost moved it to its
own folder so I would stop swiping into the fucking
character sheet. Regardless, though, what are
your Yeah, it's fantastic book. We'll get to the lay on stuff,
but initial thoughts. What are your?
What are your initial quick like one liner?
Oh, this seems like a lot of fun.
I agree. Mine's my one liner, so yeah.
Mine is that I agree, I like this game a lot.
It's great. I like so much stuff about it,
like the wills attention to every detail, both in the
writing and and even like the logo.
So even the logo looks like a car, right, like the the the O
and the Q are like wheels and stuff.
Like everything about it is really dope and it it it's got
it's a really nice level of simplicity to the cover and is
really striking and I love it. I this is a book that stands out
a lot. Oh, I want to did.
I don't know. Where's it going?
We'll never know. He's walked away.
It's just y'all. It's showing me now.
Nope, there he is. That's exciting.
Oh. You got the play mat.
I forgot to show that, so let me go back to the opening real
quick and I'll show this. So when you when you get the
game originally, you get the play mat.
We'll go over what this means, but both will and Adam love to
do these like cloth play mats and I and I love that they love
doing it. They're really great.
So this is the play mat for the game, which is genius in my
opinion, and we'll go over that, but it's basically like a chunk
of Rd. It's got the torque logo on it.
It's great. I love it, and we'll get into
what the fuck that means here in just a second after I fold the.
Torque, Torque. What does torque mean?
You know, whatever it means to you, but you know, So obviously
torque is like, you know a thing.
What is? You know what?
What's the textbook definition of?
Define torque and mechanics. Yeah, it is rotational analog of
linear force. What was yours?
Different. What were you saying?
That it's it's still rotational forced?
Yeah, so. It's a relationship between
force F, torque QA, linear momentum P, and angular momentum
L in the system, which has rotation constraint to only one
plane or or it's a tabletop role play game for two to five
people. And here we are.
So jumping into layout right off the bat, I love it.
Again, it's sideways. Let me actually get to that
window. I love all of the pages.
Will does the same kind of thing that Adam does in this book that
Adam does a lot of his, which is that every page is individually
designed. There's not like a standard
layout like there there's a series or sometimes they're very
similar. But like when you go to the
first page on the inside of the book, it has this kind of like
leather, like worn leather look to it.
It reminds me of like my my car manual is like a Navy and
there's like a a leather stamp into it of the of a compass
rose. And then as you scroll right,
you get to the actual like kind of opening page.
Torque rally raid role-playing is what it's called by Will
Yups, edited by set Pines, who again is the other member of
good luck press photography Ben Garbo illustration by Gabriel
Reese Gabriel Reese play testing from Adam bell, Adam bass and
set Pines. Those are that's a, those are
three people that are great and what they do.
And then Adams. Hey, listen, Adam sandwich
there, Seb, the meat. So good luck, best 2021.
I don't know you, Seb. I apologize if it's not OK to
call you the meat. So I also love this next page.
This kind of like not a rainbow, but kind of a rainbow Rd.
situation. It's like yellow, orange, red,
blue and then back to yellow, kind of like candy stripy thing.
And it goes to our table of contents, which is unfortunately
not hyperlinked, which is fuck. So OK, so again, so the the
issue that we're going to have repeatedly throughout this and
you're going to have me say fuck a bunch.
So if you in podcast land who don't understand why I'm saying
fuck a bunch, it's because in order to show this on screen,
since the PDF is so wide, since it's in spreads and sideways, I
have it kind of chopped in the middle and I have to scroll back
and forth. But if I accidentally scroll up
and down, I'm going to be jumping past even an odd pages
and back and forth. It's going to be a whole thing.
So good luck with that. If you don't like cursing, learn
what we do on this podcast. Yeah, like quick, quick note for
people out there, learn what this podcast is about and listen
to more than 10 minutes anyway. So I feel like it's weird that
this is not hyperlinked because I feel like there are inline
hyperlinks that like go to other pages and stuff.
So it's weird that the index itself is not hyperlinked.
Yours isn't, right? I mean, you're using the same
file that I am. So for for this book to be 94
pages not have hyperlinks in the index kind of sucks.
And I also don't think it has bookmarks.
Oh, it actually does have bookmarks.
So it does have bookmarks, yes. OK, cool, cool, cool, cool,
cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Hyperlinks would also be nice,
but at least for bookmarks, it kind of, you know, it works.
It works a bit. So I'd love the there's a map of
content on the side and it has like a zero 101,000 like 200 at
like 20X or whatever, like a like it is a a map of, you know,
like the distance and stuff. But we have introduction making
drivers, Rd. enemies, obstacles and events, rest stop tools,
ticket generator, loot, rest stop again and speed running.
So we'll go through all of that. We got 2 beautiful spread here
of a road just going off into the distance.
And it says this scheme is dedicated in part to the nasty
little piece of Rd. called the one lane bridge.
Wrought iron trellis caging A2 small St. for cars and
pedestrians and cyclists. The long drop down with Pkwy
intersecting its giant arch the way the bricks would like to
fall below. The myth of the 100 mile per
hour you could hit on it if you timed the lights right.
The signal one mile to your home.
Exactly. I eat the dust of the weird
world. Moats on the wind, unbothered by
my trivialities. The tectonic shift of blacktop,
balding tires and patience. Drivers in formation finger for
convoy or caravan screaming to the next rest stop.
Tape decks melting in the rotten sunlight.
Cars. Cars, if you can call them that.
Cars on ripping hot vertices against the world.
Yeah. Bro, so Will can fucking write,
yeah? They definitely can write.
Yeah, a lot there. There's some other stuff they're
out and you'll notice. Like the way that will write is
it's great. It's great all the way through,
extremely enjoyable to read. Really helps with the vibes of
the way it is. So so yeah, good job.
Big fan. So introduction.
We'll cruise through this a little bit.
You race along the open Rd. collect the pieces of a changed
world and build something new together.
You're a driver with a license to go anywhere and the grit to
handle anything. There's gas in the tank and X on
a map and open Rd. for miles again.
Just just fucking bangers it, really.
Does it keeps hitting all the way through too?
It really does. This is a post apocalyptic
racing role-playing game for two to five players over the course
of one or three hours for single session or episodic play.
It called itself two games and one it is.
I I It's two modes of play. That's exactly I don't I don't
I'm not a big fan of they. They kind of really leaned into
this two games and one thing, but I definitely felt like it's
like it feels better to call it two modes because you're not
going from one game to another game.
It's the same game, it's just a different mode.
It's like I'm not playing a like a car game and then the next I'm
playing like a dungeon diving dragon game.
Like it's just you're in a car for one part and you're not in a
car for one part. Yeah, well, and that's, it's
fine to call it that, but I'm glad that we both have the same
thought where it's just like actually it's, it feels more
like modes, but whatever. So it's a mix between a board
game and a role-playing game, which it really is when you when
you do the road mode, but it still transitions back in.
And I, I really, really enjoy that a lot.
I like when a game can just be a different mode where you don't
have to like try to pretend that like 5E is all the same fucking
mechanics the entire time. Like just play a different game.
That's one reason I love Forbidden Psalm so much is you
can play it as an RPG when you hit combat, you can play it as a
skirmish style. You know, absolutely.
I think I have several ideas of games in my head that have this
two mode thing that I'm like that doesn't work, but this is a
great example of having a 2 mode thing and it being like fairly
seamless and working really well together.
I think another example I think of a good one is like Kingdoms
has that kind of like, yeah, zoomed in, zoomed out, yeah. 3
modes and multiple layer again. Yeah again, one of the best
games we've ever reviewed. I will say this is one that
immediately goes on to our side quest list because I want to
play this fucking game so bad. I would love to.
Play this so and. The other thing too is like it's
GM less if I remember, so like we can just fucking do it like
there. Is a there's a the was of the
Torque AI that tells you how enemies react.
Which I love. Which I love.
Yeah, the only good AI. Yeah, stop destroying the
environment for your shitty pictures with six fingers and
weird boobs. So Torque is a mix between board
game and role-playing game. The board game part is the
actual Rd., which we use the map for, which you showed already in
the The role-playing part is the the rest stop, which is when you
actually like stop and and and interact with the world and the
NPCS and stuff like that in a different way.
So the world is weird gone sour. It's hard to not read some of
this stuff, but it's great. So Torx Torx world exists after
a global change is that is a disaster, an apocalypse, a
choice. Create and play vignettes of
this weirded world, a world where people and communities
strike a truce with a hostile environment.
Surviving and thriving in the post Anthropocene.
Torque's world is more humanistic than its post
apocalyptic predecessors. This is not a game for a prepper
power fantasy, gun nut brinksmanship or a rehash of
feudalism. Torque's world is one of many
communities living independently, tied together by
the drivers who make it from point A to point B Mutual aid in
the weird world. I I really love that.
So I, you know me, I am grim dark to my deep dark, you know
black heart. Yeah absolutely garbage edge
Lord, right? But this game, it's very much
like it literally just says there it is not that thing.
This is not Mad Max in that sense.
This is the world is kind of separated.
Technology might be in not where it was.
And what pulls it together it gives, you know, what it gives
me a tiny sense of is Postman from with Kevin Costner.
I haven't. Seen it, sorry.
Bro OK, anyway, so and basically drivers keep the these
communities connected and the communities are trying to thrive
and rebuild and things like that.
So it's not post apocalyptic and that like you're worried about
zombies and like everything's falling apart.
It's literally supposed to be like, again, it says mutual aid
and yeah, yeah, it's like guest stranding.
Yeah. But you know, I guess you can
have a weird baby in a bubble as an item.
Well, it's more about. Couriers keeping people
connected. Yeah, and I and I really like
that aspect of this game where it literally is like, this isn't
supposed to be a game about ultraviolence and weird like it
says, it's not not post rehashing feudalism and and
power fantasy bullshit. I really like that.
It's more of just like, hey, this is about community.
So how do you use this book? Read it.
I'm not gonna read this part. It's good, but you should read
that part. Rules of the road.
The world was unkind. Against that unkindness, a
special agreement lives throughout every hub of life.
Some people get licenses. So if you get a license as a
driver, you are basically accepted in communities.
That acceptance can have varying levels, but you are allowed to
drive on the road. You are allowed to go to these
communities and and that's kind of how it works.
To be licensed is to adhere to the rules of the road.
I like that it's not like a blanket ticket that you're just
like, you're licensed, you're allowed to be anywhere at all
times, everyone loves you. It's like, no, realistically,
like some places you'll be like really appreciate because you
bring supplies or news and some places you might be just
tolerated because you bring supplies or news.
Exactly. In Torque you determine the
rules of the road before you start playing, and you can
change them as they go. So there's three different kind
of oh wait a minute, I think I scrolled down instead of
sideways. I did don't remind me to scroll
side of it instead of down. Sorry, I don't.
Need it. I need to play, so I thought we
were just not doing that so. Stuff.
Stuff you need. You need the stuff to play a
game. I will say there are some links
here so that the TinyURL to the X card from John Stavropoulos is
linked. Yeah.
Will you have the stitch? And good luck press.co, I think.
Those are links which which then hyperlink the index whatever
there is a little in in thing, a nice blue, a very beautiful
blue. I really like this blue a lot.
Very. Nice.
Very pleasurable to look at. Basically this is the playmat is
compatible with matchbox cars, so.
Fucking sick, by the way. So great, such a great fucking
thing. It's like, yeah, you can go to
like Walmart and get pieces to play this game.
I'm like, that's amazing. For dirt cheap, like the cheapo
matchbox are like so, so inexpensive.
So anyway, so back to rules of the road.
There's three different kinds of play here.
So the 1-2, the top three are always the same in Convoy, Fast
Com and Furious No no Ampersand here and Death Race without
Jason Statham. So the top three rules are
always I can stop at any time for any reason without question.
I can veto any content or description in this game by
using the X card and I am. I'm safe at the rest stop for
all three of these modes. Those 3 rules are the same.
The next ones are there's three more each.
It's I look out for and protect my fellow driver and Fast and
Furious as I look out for my fellow driver.
But I come first and in Death Race it's I'm out for my fellow
driver. And that kind of gives you a
sense convoy in communities. I'm welcome.
I can relax and refuel Fast and furious in communities.
Some treat us like their own. You can relax and refuel however
and help however you can. And in Death Race it is in
communities I'm bad news. I can relax and refuel however I
can. So clearly there's, you know,
there's levels to this shit. And the last one is convoys.
Rated PG, no guns. The world is strange and
pathetic. Fast and Furious is rated PG
thirteens guns are extreme rarity, our world is weird and
stubborn and Death Race is rated R Guns are available but ammo is
an extreme rarity. Our world is a bad and mean.
So I feel like the game is kind of designed for Fast Furious.
I agree they give like. Their options, you know, Yeah,
depending on your group. And I think that all three of
those are incredibly playable. You could definitely get them to
work. But yeah, this game definitely
is to be played as I mean, seems like native Fast and Fast
Furious. Like that was the middle and.
Furious, but that's wrong. Fast comma.
Yeah, I feel like the middle
round is way. I mean, I would love to play all
three. I mean, we know it's we don't
even need to say which direction I would go to.
But the other thing to talk about the layout a little bit,
first of all, the font extraordinarily readable.
I love it. The game being sideways gives
you so much room to kind of like play with the layout a little
bit. So there's like long ways and
then multiple columns, but I love that across both pages,
which is probably one of the reasons that we'll put this out
as just a spreads PDF is that a lot of them are designed as
spreads across both pages. Like this page, for example,
literally from like 3:00 to 4:00, there's this blue shape
that comes down on three and over into four as like a box.
And it's it's it's beautiful the whole way through.
Fantastically done. It says if you're playing for
the first time, try convoy. If you're looking for a hardcore
challenge, go Death Race. For a little bit of both, try
Fast Furious. It continues to talk about like
calibrating the rules to your game, everything like that.
There's a section here on writing your own game.
So rules are formed as I statements like I can stop at
the atomic and veto. Make that work for your game.
And then there is player versus player options.
The roads have plenty of spoils for the winter and some
collateral damage. There are options you can do
player either players don't attack other players, or players
can attack but not kill, or players can kill.
Like again, it's extremely customizable for the style of
world and game you want to play in, and it's really enjoyable
because it's not. It doesn't feel heavy, you know?
Absolutely. Rules of the road community
sanctuary towards the game of a connecting community.
So again, still talking about like getting the game to the way
you want. You could have that.
We can roll the welcome wagon. Communities could keep their
distance. You could be hated but
tolerated. Again, a lot of this is just
about building the world you want to play in.
Content again asking what level of style of content you want to
play. There is a box here that says no
matter the rules, drivers who kill other drivers will have
their license revoked if the secret gets out.
This can be compelling gameplay, but make sure you're all on the
same page beforehand. Photography all the way through
too. I love that they use like real
pictures of cars. This.
Is a great this is a great piece right here and how like I I like
the way that the lines and veils paragraph is around the photo.
I I love the vibe of this whole book has a lot of stuff like
this and like this is great. This is really good.
So Bobby, so I really wish, I think we talked about it a
little bit with perils and princesses, how they really did
a lot of like the art actually like in the text.
So the text would wrap around it as opposed to just do a couple
of columns and stick it on the bottom.
Like, you can make your page look so much more dynamic with
the same words and the same stuff if you just, like, bring
it up in and, like, wrap the text around.
And this one definitely very much does so with a lot of the
art. Strong agree.
So lions and veils, they exist. You know what they are you.
Yeah, yeah. If you don't, just look at lions
and veils. If you listen to this recently
and you're like, these guys never talk about lions and
veils, it's because we did for the first like 40 episodes and
then they're in every game. We're just like, you know what
you like. You as the GM, our Traver and
players have responsibility to know this information, so read
it. Yeah, Lions, veils, X cards,
safety tools. There's a whole website for
safety tools. Use them.
If you think you don't need them, you're wrong.
At least have a conversation. Yeah, you should definitely talk
with your table because people feel differently about things.
Yes. So I looked up Eshkatan before
and I thought it was a fantastic word, Eshkatan.
So Eshkatan, this is no Eshkatan.
Eshkatan is the last thing it's used in theology to refer to the
climax of history culminating in the last judgement.
So this saying there is no last judgement, which there isn't, so
that's cool. So there's a whole page here of
just fantastic, beautiful writing on page 7.
No easy answers, no divinity, no eschaton.
I'm not going to read the like 5 paragraphs that are here, but
just know that Will's writing is fucking fantastic.
I will say I did notice, I will say I did notice there are some
grammatical errors at the book, as in like some missing letters,
some like extra spaces, some missing punctuation and things
like that. So I'm not going to point out a
ton of them as we go through. But there there are there are
there are some through and and yeah.
So no Eschaton again, great spread.
I love though they put Eschaton on this page.
I love the. Jumble like it's falling, you
know? Yeah.
Well, yeah, like the all the color fell out of it and then
it's just a hollow one. Yeah, it's beautiful.
Again, the spreads are are amazing.
A fantastic piece of art here of a driver with just a beat of
shit car and this nice lady serving them like a soda in the
window. Hood's just being peeled away
chunk by chunk. It's.
Yeah, broken window. Like it's, it's a beauty.
It's an absolutely stunningly beautiful piece.
I really, really love this lot. This this piece in and of
itself. I was like, oh, I like if I
didn't have the vibe already, which I did.
Like, this is perfect. Like he just looks so nice.
And she's just like, so happy to give him a soda.
You know, It's cool. So moving into making drivers so
drivers go fast, stay alive and rule the road.
You are drivers. You have special abilities and
skill sets. How does that line go?
Like you have a specific set of skills.
I have a. Specific set of skills, Yeah,
yeah. Yeah, you stole my daughter and
then you stole my daughter again, apparently because
there's like 4 movies. My name.
Is Neil Montoya. You stole my daughter prepared
to die. That's how it goes, right?
That's that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cuz Inigo Montoya has a special set of skills.
Use ambidextrous, you know, so making drivers, you do you make
them. I will say, I will say this is
one of those games where I was like, I wish I would have got a
little bit more of the mechanics before a very big making the
driver section, because when I was making the driver, like
there were a bunch of questions I had about the system.
And this, this reminds me of why I like at least like a a quick
rules intro because at this point the game you don't, you
know, know anything about the mechanics of the game
whatsoever. So as you start to like pick
things, you don't really know what they're used for.
And that's always my issue with character creation.
Obviously you're going to read through it and then read it
again to do character, but it's nice and the first go round to
like understand as you go through.
I agree so. There's two different.
Routes for making drivers right? There's where you get something
else you're going to do. No, go for it.
No, no, no, go for. It there is hard charging for
quick starts, any of the scenic route for more detailed
character creation. And and the the kind of note
here is in the scenic route, there is like a roster of like
pre made characters that have like their own like very unique
traits to them that you can kind of embody and like role play as
these people. And there's some pretty good
ones. I wish there were more actually,
but yeah. We'll just have to get torque
add-ons. You know the cool thing, the
cool thing about those drivers and the scenic group we get to
them is that you can make more of your own because all of the
tools and stuff to make them already there, they basically
use the tools in the book and give you those ideas.
So at the very least they do explain like how to make more of
your own, which is always cool. It's always nice to leave room
for people to do but. Not hard to do, like, reading
them. You're like, there's characters
are fairly simple in this game. They're interesting and they're
cool and they have, like, facets to them.
But they are, you know, simple. Yeah.
Yeah, very much so. And and I like that I don't need
400 pages. No, we need.
I want a 400 page book. I want to know everything about
the character. How the history of their.
Homeland, you know, what city were they born in?
What's that city like? Well, I was going to figure that
out. So a couple of random tables on
the next page. I got to say this is one of my
favorite spreads in the entire book.
I've I it's so good. It's.
So this fucks so hard honestly and.
So good. The the choices that you can get
when you roll because I rolled a few times are they're great.
They're so funny, they're interesting.
Yeah, I, I enjoyed this. And then I think in a couple
pages when we get to the like livery of your car and stuff, I
was like, this is so all of this is so good.
It's so good, it's so good. Several.
Pages are a treat of like the art of layout and they are so
they're so nice to go through and and they're very like vibe
and they're almost inspirational, like how you
could push your own like ideas about how to lay out a book.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely fantastic the whole way through.
So, so these four are all these are all car things, right?
So you get the dash and then there's a picture of a dash and
then there's the back and there's a picture of the back of
a Volkswagen and then there's the hood and then there's the
chassis. So it is a lot of the game
throughout the entire thing is 2D6 year old tables, which my
God, if you if you want a Direct Line in my heart, you just make
your game 2D6, you know so, so do you want to do you want to
roll? Do you want to roll?
Up some shit. So it's 2D6, so it's 6 tables
with six each. So it's 36 options.
So you roll A6 and A6, then you go to the table, then you go to
the table. So what'd you get?
So. For my dash I got 4-5, all sorts
of loose batteries. It's rolling around.
D batteries. C batteries, Yeah.
OK. And then?
For the back, do you want to roll back?
No, you go for it. I'll, I'll just throw in some
some other, I'll, I'll some other random ones.
Dash 11 is one of my favorite human skull with the GPS.
Yeah, that's a great one. Favorite.
Yeah. For back I got 4/3 hold, another
443 unread books, just a bunch of a bunch of loose batteries in
the front of my car, and the back of my car is just a ton of
books. It's unread books.
Yeah. The the 1-3, the teenage
stowaway. Bucko, That's that's a fun one.
Or the fish tank for your octopus.
Lordo A. 41 slime that. Yeah, just so good, so good.
And then then for the what's under the hood?
Oh wait, 555 is analog synth? That's cool.
Might even see that one. OK, under the hood I got 1-2
Satan. Satan under the hood?
Yeah, a lot of these under the hood ones are really great
because you got like the concept of rage.
That's a really good concept. Of rage is good and then there's
a couple other ones that I really loved a lot.
Like there's in there on this is like nothing, Yeah.
Neutron chamber is a good one. Is there one?
Yeah, nothing at all is. For is under the hood, yeah,
love, love. It's just.
It's just empty under the hood bro.
It just runs. 6664 is just me is miracles.
It just runs on miracles, you know, So it's so fun.
These are so good. And then chassis, what's the
what's the look of your chassis? 61 Alien.
You. It looks like an alien.
That's sick. Like truly alien vehicle, you
know? Yeah, a couple other good ones.
There is overcommensating, there is double wide worn out goth,
all biz. So a lot of really great, a lot
of really, really great, just really funny ones on there.
And again, the spreads are really fantastic.
I think the first time I rolled it I got low ride, which I'm
nice, you know, being from Texas as I am.
Yeah. So what?
So what did you, what did you end up with for for your whole
car you got for my car release batteries in the front?
Yeah. We got unread books in the back.
Oh fuck, what was under my hood? Satan.
Satan.
Was under my hood. That's right, I had.
To get. More than Satan, but it has an
alien look to it so I have some like weird alien demon car.
Yeah, very eldritch, eldritch. So there's a picture of the
character sheet, which is cool. And then, then then.
I love this next page because it takes pictures like chunks of
the character sheet and then gives you a detailed list with
arrows pointing to which part and then gives an explanation
for what each part is like. This is how to explain how
please. These people do more of this.
I I prefer this, I think to the whole like your character sheets
on there. It's got numbers next to it and
you go to like next page and then I have to read through all
the numbers and I get to flip back to look at it.
You know, this is great. My favorite one's horn.
Dude the horn is so funny. Just for honking.
Just for honking, just just for honking.
Because if your cheat looks like a it looks like a steering wheel
going across right? And then the stuff is in the
background of the steering wheel.
But obviously on the steering wheel is the the horn honk
symbol and the explanation. Yeah, just for honking is
fantastic. So you you get HP, you get your
character and vehicle details, you get rest stop details, you
get Rd. actions and you get horn.
So in torque you are your car to that end, like your HP and stuff
we'll get to that is all together.
All the details go on there. So name, vehicle, look,
registration, all that stuff goes on there.
And then the rest stop stuff we'll get to is on there.
And then the road action you can do so everything you need and
it's very beautiful vibe sheet. Really well done.
I love how well this explains every part.
So really great. And then then get to a page that
has like a blue engine in the back with like the whole like
all the tubes, Yeah, all the tubes and and wires and rotors.
And I don't know shit about cars I know.
Shit about cars. My car drives mostly so.
So you are your car in torque. Your body and vehicle are
represented by horsepower, which is HP.
Which that tickled me pink. Amazing use of HP.
Yep, Yep, Yep. You get health, you get crashes,
and you get speed. So health is denoted by pips,
which is just dot. Crashes are denoted by a
bracket, which is basically like an LA Capital L with little
hooks. And then speed is your zero to
60, which is the number from 2:00 to 12:00.
Low is being faster because it's your zero to 60 speeds.
The lower is better because I mean, you're faster, right?
I'm OK with like the whole dot bracket thing.
I think it's like you could also just do like 1-2, like 3 dash 4,
but like it's fine. It's interesting, yeah.
It is interesting, yeah. I, I think, I don't think it's
like the most optimized thing ever, but I don't think that's
like the ambition of it. It is interesting and it does
look kind of cool. Yeah, I'm fine with it.
So the full expression is crashes, health and zero to 60
represented by your HP. To journal HP you roll 26 sided
dice and add them together. So roll roll some HP real quick.
9. Nine, OK, so your raw number
you're zero to 60 is 9, which is high.
So it's interesting because you're that means that you're
going to have more like crashes and health, but you're slower.
So someone who rolled one, gosh are a glass cannon but you're
going to go 1st every fucking time?
Right. Well, you can't roll 1222. 22222
Okay, so you are your car, so it says and there's an example
here. A roll of three and a four is
A7, so total 0 sixty is 7. So you are your car.
Likewise, health is nested in crashes.
So one health and it took me I had to go back and read this
again. So one health in one crash looks
like this. The PIP inside a bracket.
Every crash needs health in it, but multiple health can go into
a crash. Spin points from the original
result to build your driver health and crashes cause one
point each. Put health in a crashes and then
write your zero to 60 afterwards.
So the way using that 3-4 and seven example they have, they
decided to do 4 pips and three crashes, right?
So they did a bracket with a pip, another bracket with two
pips, 1/3 bracket with a pip and that's all of their health.
So it's 1234 pips, 567 for three crashes, A7 at the end.
And that is how your character, that's your character, that's
how it looks. And then there's different.
Ways. For mine, I would do 5 pips in
four crashes because I rolled 5 into 4, so I would give me 4
crashes. I'd do probably 2 in the first
one and then one and all the rest of them.
Yeah, it doesn't really. I guess it kind of matters a
little bit after that because of the way that like, when you get
collided and we'll talk about that.
Yeah, because empty, empty stuff matters.
Torque is concerned with how many times characters can crash,
how much help they have and how fast they are.
Obviously. It's literally the three things
that you have. HP is narratively flexible, so
it can represent a bunch of stuff.
So reallocating HP during any restaurant rest stop, you can
reallocate HP and switch up your arrangement of health and
crashes, which is cool basically every time.
If you're just like, man, I fucked this up a little bit.
It's nice out there now, like you can only do this on level up
or whatever. Like I like that.
You can just be like, Nah, fuck it, just change it.
Why not? So the hard charging section,
this is the arcade mode. As we said here, you roll 2D6
and this is your registration, and then you roll to determine
your HP and then take the corresponding moves on the next
page. If you want to spend some time
developing your drivers and relationships with the world,
you can you can take the senior route page 23 again, the it's
not in line hyperlinked. It's totally possible to do hard
charging and do deeper role-playing elements.
It's just quicker to go. So there's a spot here.
This is restop world 2D6 and then #2 add results together and
take the corresponding registration activity.
So what if you so there's it's got 2 to 345678910 and then
11:00 and 12:00 as the tables. So roll 286 and tell me what you
get. I got 10.
I got snap. With your portable darkroom, you
photograph the here and there. The activity is at every
restaurant. Capture a special moment for
your photo book. Cool.
So the, the the registration is the top part.
So snap is your registration and then like the part underneath is
kind of like who you are. So you're obviously a
photographer, right? And you get a dark room.
Some of the other ones are like perfumer.
The aroma of the post Anthropocene is yours to
collect. There's one that's like a a a
rain dog. Weird weather is your game
chasing storms of any stripe. So it's the vibe of your
character and kind of like they're like kind of core
personality bits and then the activity that goes associated
with it for the restaurant. These next two pages.
My goodness. Yeah.
They're so good. So this is kind of like the
build for the characters. So you've got the makings of a
driver, give them the name and stuff like that.
So you want to give an explanation here on the side.
So roll 26 out of dice, determine your HP, take your
stock stunts and pick custom stunts.
So this is a stunts page, right? So you already have your HP,
right? Which it is weird that they kind
of tell you to determine your HP twice on the stunts page and on
the registration page, but roll your two D6 to figure out your
your stunts. Yeah, OK.
So I got 2. OK, so I got experimental
experimental. Yeah, it's a cool 1.
So I can I take both? I can inflict to health to any
target and I can launch everything in current tile.
And that's your stock. That's your stock option.
Yes, my stock and I get to pick one from the customs.
I get to pick one, heal two health on the row or ignore next
crash or swap any tile. That's pretty good I think.
I do ignore next crash. Yeah, that's a good one.
And then each one also has a little like a little blurb for
experimental. So what does the experimental
one say this? Hypothetical vehicle defies a
known law or two. I mean, you have an alien car.
I do. I have an alien car with Satan.
With Satan on the hood. I mean, obviously it defies some
shit. So there's experimental, turbo,
sturdy, stubborn, nimble, streamlined, fortified, hulking
and industrial. And for each one, industrial
dude, industrial. So good car's like a bunker.
Yeah, it rocks 9 inch nails all the time.
So for each one, you do get to 2 stock options, you know, you
know, to the moon. And then you, you get to pick
one of the customs. So though that changes when you
do the scenic route, it kind of just gives you the stuff that
you need. So that's it.
So that's kind of your car, your driver, everything as far as
that goes. The last thing is your livery,
which again, yeah, this page is so fucking amazing.
So there's actually. It's a great page.
So it's another 66 for your livery, but it has a strip of
design for every single livery on the entire thing.
So what what? What did you get for your two?
Two, I got carbon fiber. Carbon fiber, So you get this
nice carbon fiber design right here.
There are some really like the hypothetical 1 I love like the
number one of each one actually is on a car and the rest are
like stripes and stuff like that.
But the the hypothetical one, it's like it's like it looks
like right almost riding on a chalkboard of like math and like
crazy shit. Really dope.
Obviously I'm going to like the the heavy metal one with like
the skeleton do the paper cup on Fox.
I thought, I thought the cupcake, the ice cream one
before I read it was like pills, but it's just like really zoomed
in sprinkles on ice cream. CRT is really cool too.
The what? The CRT 64, it's it's the purple
yellow, kind of like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I also really love the which one is the one that is brand deal
and it's torque. It's torque is like the branded
one. Yeah, it's so good.
It's so good. Like so you got So what what
what what did you get? You got the carbon fiber, which
I mean for an alien car that defies law in physics with Satan
under the hood, you know, carbon fiber, the.
Most normal thing about my car honestly.
Realistically, yeah, I mean, yeah.
And all the batteries, right? OK, so scenic route, again, this
changes a little bit different. So for a longer game, you can
add some specificity to your driver.
You take the scenic route. Each character can only be
chosen by one player because they're one-of-a-kind.
They're already pre built kind of characters.
You basically choose it. You pick your name, the look,
the vehicle, all that kind of stuff.
But so it says, let's take a look at each of the elements
that make up the scenic route. A lot of it's going to be the
same. So you get a starting package,
which is a unique advantage that the driver has which are stock
custom stunts in the rest in the rest stop section, the driver
has special ability to go over the scene group.
Driver has special goals called checklist scenes and these are
iconic moments that take place during the story.
And then for every two checklist scenes, you get a reward and
rewards include a community wide event that you get to put on.
And every driver has a last ride, which is that's the
sunset. Players have both rewards and
can choose to sunset their driver.
So this is this is a way to actually like kind of like
complete the the life of your driver is to get your rewards by
doing the things to achieve your goals.
And then actually decide to like you're going to drive off in the
sunset or pick a community you like and stay there and things
like that. You can also roll 2D6 to
determine how many numbers in the vanity plate if you want to
do that, which is great. Love it so so as far.
As. Oh, that's how many?
So what? How many letters in your vanity?
What's your vanity plate to then it?
Just says. Yeah, of course it does.
So, so the the the drivers are Aggie, which is it says your
seeds are sown to the world. So basically you're very much
like an like an agricultural person.
Yeah, their. Names are definitely what they
are. Oh, absolutely.
Archive is basically you're a librarian, so you go around, be
in the library. Modem is the feed bringer.
You connect communities to a ragged mesh net.
You got speaker box, woofers, tweeters, you are the sound
bringer. You got woes.
It says you're a zoo on wheels studying living things, and
those are the options. So which one was your favorite?
What kind of go through just one of those?
Modem. Yeah, modem's dope.
So modem, yeah, feed bringer.
You connect communities to a ragged mesh net where people
across the wounded world can link up.
You are a modem. You carry the connection.
And every rest shop you stitch together the world, if just for
a moment. The starting package group chat
at the end of every round give any driver one health.
Pretty good and. That's specifically so the
starting package. So what What I love about the
page too is it keeps us kind of like like blurb skinny thing,
blur, like the bracket kind of thing a bunch.
So you have the road, the stock, the custom and the rest of
options. So the starting package, that
thing is always just for the road option.
It's funny how non traditional it is and still broken up really
well. I mean like layout wise semi non
traditional. I just mean not what everyone
else is doing, but it's still broken up in the way that you
can very easily read it and understand it.
So well. So for stock options we take
both of these. I have jailbreak which you can
lock or lure on target Incognito which is cloak self.
So real quick, so this is what I was talking about, going through
character and stuff like that like lock or lore, it means
fucking nothing to me at this point in the game.
Yeah, I totally. I get it.
So I get you can kind of, you know what luring something is,
you know what lock is, you can kind of make it, but but it'd be
cool to have. Yeah, Yeah, I get it for custom.
This one's like what does it mean to send something to rally
right time out, send any target to rally or you custom you pick
1A hotspot, slag any tile kind of slaps or buffering, drag any
column. Yeah, and the other thing to
like about this page is that like the two quote UN quote
games, AKA the modes like the like the one mode is all on the
left and the other mode is like all on the right.
So like the road, stock and custom is all on the left for
the road mode. And then the rest stop section
is its own to the right to even without like explicitly saying
that like that's just how it lined up, which is really great.
Yeah, so for the rest stop stuff, the activity, you ask
yourself what's something you do to help everywhere you go.
Yeah, and there's the checklist scenes.
Reformat is the title of yours. The options are collect,
digitize and memorialize a late artist work, connect a recluse
to their friend and join them for their monthly online
meeting. Next one is Trace, the signal of
an anonymous online bully. Beat the fuck out of them.
Fuck bullies. And also the next one is repair
a surely destroyed hard drive and return its memories to the
community. Now if you do these things, the
rewards, you know. Host an online gaming festival
for the community, bolstering spirits, or bring together the
drivers and set up a dating friendship profile for everyone.
Remake Facebook in this post pocket world.
Make it worse. You know, give me Zenga you.
Know that would slap actually, so and then you're sunset and
when you've completed all of them, find somewhere cozy and
start start that podcast you've been thinking about.
There you go. I will say there's one that kind
of like I was like in the speaker box the the sunset is
collect the last pieces for a high-powered radio station and
set it up somewhere high and safe.
Spread the signal. I don't know why spread the
signal always felt like it feels more MO to me.
To me is kind of like a like me. I'm thinking of signals as like
the Internet versus like noise. Totally.
It absolutely works. But yeah, the only one that I
was just like OK, so that is basically most of
characterization will get to some other stuff.
So you can also roll another 2D6 for your steering wheel for.
Your steering wheel? Yeah.
So roll that up.
Yeah, I rolled over 33 airplane configuration.
What the fuck's going on with my car?
Yeah, like the the the thing and then roll again to see where it
is. God, it's this one's added
together, right? Yeah, it is.
Yeah. Nine, it's in the trunk.
So the only problem with the roll 2D26 sided dice and add
them together for where's the wheel is you can't roll A1 but
one is on here. It's very funny the the left
side, it'll never be on the left side of the car that.
Actually cracks me the I honestly, I thought it was a
mistake for a second, but that's absolutely on perfect because on
purpose, because that's where it is and that's where it can never
be. And that is so fucking funny.
Actually. Like I clear obviously not a
mistake and it it literally is just telling you no, you can
never have it where it's supposed to be, which is great.
Some of the other awesome steering wheel options are is.
That one of them. Yeah, the non skull bones
biological joystick, but some of the other options that are great
is hypothetical. You have a hypothetical steering
wheel, which is. Great set of gloves, you know.
Yeah, and that's it a glass case that says brake in case of
driving. And then the the far right side
of that panel is a is a gorgeous picture of a steering wheel
again, just spreads, spreads for days that are just absolutely
beautiful. There's AGPS page it says some
of these wrecks have a global positioning in them.
Take a look on our on take a look on our own.
There's nothing funny with the device.
There's taking a look on our own.
There's nothing funny with these devices.
Receiver with 16 channels tuned to eat the signal of now dead
satellites. The chip sets are worth nothing.
Now dead isn't quite right. Some of this orbital flossom
came down OK anyway, so it's writing, it's not description.
So it's a big what to do when these meet the dirt.
So basically it's saying that like low flying satellite
sometimes fall to the ground and people want to go scavenge
those. So and then there's three kind
of things blocks on the other side with addition to my
destination mine drivers can get there.
The road just chooses how. And hypothetically here's the
plan and it says kind of how the game goes.
Got a drone, bring the chepsets to a techie, pull a star from
the sky, deliver a transporter to three communities, set up the
route solidifies. So this kind of like an
adventure without saying, hey, this is an adventure.
Weirdly an adventure I'll also love.
It's like pull a star from the sky and drag it home.
Good fucking luck. Yeah, I didn't read the best
part. Yeah, Yeah, it's kind of
randomly like that's how I read it is like this randomly listed
adventure in the game. It's.
Kind of a little adventure fuel. I don't, I don't think I minded
how it's kind of thrown in here. It's just like a little blurb
about like what about GPS for your car?
It's like, Oh yeah. What about GPS?
Well, here's what is about GPS. And it kind of like gives you a
little fuel for later on, Like, hey, maybe this is the thing
that you guys get into, you know?
Yeah. That's dope.
Another beautiful spread from one page to the other the road
and the rest stop torques made of two games who talked about
this road is Rd. rest UPS rest up so the road.
So there's a picture on the far left here.
This is the playmat, which is fantastic.
So going over a little bit is a curved part of the what looks
like a like a NASCAR or F or is F1 like Rd.
It's curving. It's got like the black and
white like lines on the inside, the wall of the outside.
There's three kind of like position things at the top and
it's basically a grid. It's like a tic tac toe board
with a little curve to it. And this represents the road and
your position on it. And I love the way that it works
because that's all you really need because it's just it's
representative of the road always moving and you moving on
and just your position on the road and the road always moving
forward, kind of like in a side scrolling kind of way, right?
So the road is a three by three grid.
It's an abstract map representing a pack of cars.
The road has three sections. There is the road, which is the
actual grid. There's the rally, which is the
bottom of the road, which would be like the behind you, and
there's the head, which is the top of the grid.
And that is what's coming next. It's stylized as a grid.
You can always just play on a grid.
That's fine. And there are four things on the
road. There's driver's events,
obstacles, and enemies. So we'll get to those.
So starting positions are two ways to set up the road.
If you're playing through an episode, read the episode
startup. It'll tell you right?
Or you place enemies, then place events and obstacles, and then
place players in order of fastest to slowest in your zero
to 60. And at the start tiles can only
contain one player, 1 enemy and one event.
But during play, tiles can hold up to a maximum of three
occupants and one event and two obstacles.
So it can get pretty hectic. Very busy.
Potential to be very busy. Very busy.
So the road, there are roads, the rounds and turns.
So the road phase, destruction and turns and rounds, basically
every player gets to do a thing right?
Taking action on the road. On the road, drivers have two
actions. You can use actions to move,
collide, attack, performance, stunt, whatever you want to do.
You get to an enemies act within a zero to 60 alongside the
drivers. Enemies of the same zero to 60
act in file order. There's a, there's a let's talk
about that in a second. And the torque AI, the road is
powered by a simple AI that powers enemies, obstacles and
events. So it basically tells you like
in what order they'll go and like how they're going to react.
And we'll get to that. So round procedures basically
goes drivers and enemies go 1st and then it's they act from zero
to 60, lowest going first, highest going last Rd. flow,
which is the next. The next would be drivers and
enemies. All drivers and enemies that
didn't move shift backwards one on the tile and then you resolve
any collisions. And then Part 3, the road flow
is obstacles and events move. So all obstacles and events
shift backwards one time and you resolve any collisions.
So drivers and enemies all get to do a turn and then the road
kind of moves forward. And if you didn't, if you didn't
move, you go backwards on the road.
It's basically you're just like kind of like slowing down and
then everyone does that and if you hit anything, you resolve
it. And then after everyone does
that, the obstacles and events do that too, and then you
resolve if that hits anything. It's so good.
Basically at the end of every round you just move move in the
road. The road is actively moving.
It's, it's the illusion of the road being moved.
You know, I, I think it works really well.
I it is so. I love it and to me it is so
incredibly clever and I want to play it so bad.
Like it's so as soon as it was like, oh, like it's always
moving and you're just like flowing on it.
Like I was just like, this is so fucking cool.
So the road flow, there's a great there is a fantastic set
of images and graphics on the side that talks about the road
flow like it literally gives you.
But what the road layout is so like the drivers, the the
events, because there's little icons for each drivers are AD in
a circle, enemies are an E and like a A not pentagram,
whatever. And and then at the end of the
road, it shows all of the things moving down and giving you the
flow. And it also talks about
obstacles in your tile, obstacles entering enemy tiles,
adventure in your tile, everything.
So it goes through all of that in a great graphic way that
makes it incredibly easy to understand.
So when obstacles into enter your tile on your turn, you pay
the price or take the penalty. When obstacles enter the enemy
file, enemies immediately take the penalty and the event enters
your tile. You immediately choose to engage
with the event and move it and yourself to rally or ignore the
event. And if an enemy enters your
tile, you both collide to the next section.
I think I had a question at one point about like what you're
paying and remind me to make sure we go over that because it
says pay the price but what are you paying?
You know what I mean? Yeah, we'll get there.
We'll. Get to that with the event.
Yeah. So here's the whole section on
collisions, right? So another fantastic, fantastic
graphic here about like every option of how you collide,
right? It's got a driver section that
looks like a like an old like, like the like mystery wagon or
Mystery Mobile. And then there's an enemy that
looks like a car. And then it's got driver with
more health and then it shows the the pre and post of a driver
with one crash and like, well, like 6 pips in it versus yeah
versus a car. And then there's one for a
driver with the same health, enemy with more health, empty
crash and exposed health. So those are things that matter,
as we said before, with with some other thing.
Let me hear that real quick. So if a driver has the same or
more health, enemy loses a set. So a set is the entire like pip
and bracket thing. That's a set.
It's a whole thing, right? Driver loses health equal to the
enemy's lost health, right. So the the whole enemy set gone.
And if they had two pips, you lose 2 pips, enemy has more
health. So driver loses a set and enemy
loses health equal to the driver's loss health.
And then you have an empty crash and expose health, which is
interesting. So on an empty crash, that means
all the pips in your crash are gone.
An empty crash is when there isn't any health in the set.
Damage wipes out the crash before inflicting damage is
normal. And if you look at the graphic
what it's saying and it's I have to go back and read it and make
sure it's basically saying if you have an empty crash and you
get collided, that crash doesn't does no buffer.
It does nothing for you. So that sucks to have like an
empty crash. You basically lose an HP for no
fucking for like for nothing. So you having more health in the
early rounds is smart because if you lose 1 pimp off of that and
then you get collided and you lose a crash too for nothing.
So having two health in the early ones is great.
And then there's also exposed health.
This is when there's no crashes in the set and damage wipes out
the health before inflicting damage is normal.
So basically if you have a crash with no health or health or
health with no crashes and get collided into, they just get
deleted and you still take the full damage otherwise, which
damn that suck. Don't get collided into.
Yeah, that does suck. Moving, So this is the nitty
gritty parts of stuff. So basically you can move into
an empty tile. If you can move into a tie with
drivers or enemies, you decide whether you're going to get
whether you're going to collide or not because you can be in the
same tile as enemies and not collide to them.
You you can you can choose not to or not.
So there's tie with multiple occupants, tiles with obstacles,
tiles with the vents, tie with a mix of contents and heavy in
traffic. There's different things that
happen when you do that. So moving into tile with an
obstacle, you pay the price or take the penalty.
But if the, if the obstacle moves into you, like that's a
whole different situation and again, pay the price or take the
penalty. Remind me to figure out what the
price is. And then getting into healing.
So in torque, there are two ways to heal.
So you you can rally. So at anytime you want, you can
spin an action and basically go all the way off the bottom of
the grid and you rally there. So you spend 1 action.
So it takes an action to get down there, and then you can
spend an action to regain 2 HP in crashes or health.
And then you can spend as many turns as you want in the rally.
You can spend as many turns down there as you want.
When rallying, you can't act, you can't do anything else, you
can't help push drivers, you can't do anything.
But you can chill down there as long as you want and get fully
healed. And to end the road phase, all
drivers can just go to the rally and you can just be done with it
or you can push it so when you run out of crashes you can push
it. To push it, ask your fellow
players to donate one of their actions.
If they don't have any actions, they can donate an action from
their next turn. For.
Every action a player gives you, you regain a lost set, a full
set crash and health right? Players can bargain and strike
deals here. You can only push it once per
Rd. phase though, so if you run out of crashes after you've
pushed it, your car is totaled. So that's really the only way
you can fucking the car that bad.
Because otherwise you really can just like drop down in a rally
right? Because there's a section here
for out of health and crashes when reduced to to both enemies
and drivers can't move. They just coast down.
Basically at the end of every flow they just move down 1 so
they hit the rally and when drivers each rally they may
spend actions on future turns to regain HP.
So like if you get knocked out of everything you just coast
into you can rally, rally and then come back.
So it's only when you push it can you really get total and be
gone play. This game, this is such AII
cannot tell you how much I enjoy the rules to this game.
It's such a clever way to use the grid and the grid's like
fairly limited. It's three by three, so it's
it's 9 spaces right? And so it feels like maybe it's
potentially cramped, but there's so much going on.
There's room for so many things within each square that it's
actually like a ton of space to move around in.
And it creates this like incredibly like, I don't want to
say strategically dense because that makes it sound like there
it's like confusing, but it's not.
It's very simple but still strategically dense potential
for what you can do on your turns.
Oh, Oh my gosh, when we, when we get into like the lures and
stuff like that, what you can do because like the thing that
like, like I, I, it is super clever.
But then I was like, wait a minute, you can push people into
other stuff and that they've already taken their action.
When the road flows, you can, you can make you don't have to
do stuff. You can drop obstacles into
them. You can make people collide with
them. You can do this.
Yes, it is, it is, it is in my. I think this is one of those
games where like you can play it like straightforward and just be
like, I hit a guy, I hit a guy. But the every time you do a road
phase, you're going to get a little bit better and a little
bit better, a little bit more strategic and a little bit more
strategic. Eventually you're going to be
like, why'd you do that thing? It's going to be like fucking
chess. Like you're going to be like,
oh, because if I like this guy to here, he'll bump into that
and then apps go hit this guy over here and then I can lure
the guy over by one this way. Like it's definitely one that
like, yeah, there's levels to this shit.
And it's it's you're right. It's so clever to.
This shit dog. So good and it's so well
explained and the graphics are so fantastic.
Like this is how to lay out a game so people understand it.
This is an instruction manual for how to play a game so people
know how to play it. Like as a T RPG instruction all
fucking should be anyway. So totaled.
If you ring 0 crashes, zero health and you've already pushed
it your total. That's it.
So roll a six out of dice for your vehicle and a six out of
dice for your driver. There's three options for each
year. And then when you do four to six
on either you re roll or create an entry.
There's a thing later in the campaign mode where it tells you
to like go create an entry for bonus stuff, but some of the
total stuff is is kind of fucked.
So #3 on your right is like fucked up left behind like your
your rides gone a. Mechanic spends the rest of
their life fixing it. Yeah, the number one for
yourself is like you're you're really dead.
You're dead. You're dead.
It just says. It just says really dead.
Yeah, not dead like, oh, you get to come back.
Like no, you're really dead. Like you're you're done though.
And then number number #3 is you're done driving.
You never throw good money after you're out of the game, you're
done. So like if you towed her your
car, that sucks. So pushing it is extremely
risky. Yeah.
OK, so some of the actions and
stuff you can take stunts. There's basic stunts, shifting
stunts, effect stunts, interference stunts, weird
stunts, like all that kind of stuff.
So basic stunts are like collide damage here.
Rebuild. One of the things that I really
like, and they say it in here too, is the stunts and attacks
are expressed mechanically. This is to give you the
opportunity to flavor their stunts however you want.
I really like that that's in there.
It's definitely one of those things where like it's helpful
for anybody, but to be able to explain to be like collide is
trigger collision. But like there's a million ways
you can actually make that happen in the game.
But basic stunts collide, damage, heal and rebuild.
It's exactly what they do. You collide into someone, you
deal damage, you do that shifting stunts, drag, launch,
pull, push swap. It's exactly what it sounds like
it does. We don't really need to dig into
it. You drag someone, you launch
when you pull someone. Effect stunts cloak is really
cool. You cannot be targeted.
Lock means you lock someone in their tile which means it can't
move which is a dope one to be like that means obstacle to hit
them next time so. Come into them next.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
The effect in a fear, it's done to really, really fuck yeah.
Lure pulls you towards somebody. Slag.
We talked about one of the effects at a slag.
So target takes double damage from every source until the end
of their next turn. So I remember one of the ones
was like slag a whole tile so everything in the tile takes
double damage slow. They can't take a move action
which again would make them like drop backwards when the flow
happens. So great one.
Of them like, Oh no, it was drag a call, never mind.
Yeah, I was thinking a slag, a column and I'm like that's
crazy. But yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Drag a column. Yeah.
Interference Stunts Ignore, which means you just ignore
shit. Place a mind, place an obstacle,
reduce, which means target subtracts incoming damage by a
set or send move target to a specified location.
And then weird stunts corrode, donate, double down and steal.
Exactly what they sound like. They're cool.
They're great crashing into walls.
If a road action pushes the target into the wall of the
boundary on the left to right, it's called a wall crash.
Wall crashes apply slow, meaning they cannot do around I I love
that the wall crash is just like bouncing and slows you down.
It's not you don't take damage, you don't do anything.
Like I really, for some reason, I don't know, that really gets
me to be like, that's a nice way to I don't know why indoor
soccer bopped into my head, but I imagine like because people
like it's a thing you can't do in outdoor soccer where you can
like be going to go to somebody and like kick the ball off the
wall around them and shit, you know, So when I thought of this,
I'm like, man, you could totally just like bounce someone off the
wall and have them go down at an angle and hit an obstacle and
like, I don't know, use the whole thing.
A level of tactical tactics that are interesting.
So we. Can hack this into an indoor
soccer game, you know. We could, I'm just saying dude,
I don't. I love these raised like things
on the back of the car. They had it on the back of the
picture with the Volkswagen back, but there's another
picture here that has like the back window with these like like
kind of like bladed armor looking things coming off the
back. They're so fucking cool.
I wish more cars had this stuff like everything.
Everything nowadays is so like everything is just a white SUV,
right? And they all look exactly the
same. I wish cars that were like
boxier and had more more So I love the old boxy BMWs.
I love the old boxy Volkswagens like more personality.
So attack, basically attacks have access, all players have
access to attacks are personalized methods.
But the basic stuff you do is you can inflict one crash damage
to a target in your file, in your tile, you can inflict 2
health damage, or you can inflict one health damage to a
target in any file. Because for a while I was like
what? What's the difference between
health and crash and this and. That file.
Oh, I meant tile. Sorry, Yeah, but so those are
the options. One crash damage, two health
damage, or one health damage to any tile, which I imagine just
like just chucking your batteries out the window at
them, you know? Yeah, you have me throwing those
unread books, you know. Yep.
Enemies, obstacles and events where like how do I do this
book? We'll go a little faster.
So they happen right. The interesting thing about
these is that you give the management of these things to
players instead of having AGM, you pick one person to manage
the events, one person to manage the obstacles and one person to
manage the enemies if you want, and you can portray them their
actions, their behaviors, describe how they act and
everyone can share these responsibilities, which I think
is a really, really cool way of doing it.
It also makes so that like not like if you had AGM, that's a
lot to kind of keep track of. And if you don't have AGM,
that's even more for every single person to individually
keep track of it all the time. So it's really nice to just be
like, these are the three things that can happen.
You pass those out to people and you just make sure you know all
about the events and we'll worry about everything else and you
can just ask each other questions for how it works.
I love that cohesiveness and it also creates like all timing.
That's the other thing about this.
It's like you have to be engaged at all times because at any time
you can get hit, you can get bounced, you get wall crashed,
and then this adds another level to it's like.
Driving, You have to stay engaged, you know.
Yeah, but every single one of us kind of does that thing where it
is like, oh shit, how did I get home for the last 20 minutes,
you know? And don't say that you don't.
Yeah, Yeah, you just go to. Driving to my my 4:30 AM job,
I've never like wait, oh shit, I'm already here.
So human psyche is, is crazy man, to just be able to like
just tune out and and go. So encounter ticket is cool.
So on the road encounters are handled through an encounter
ticket. Basically you have this thing
and there's a picture over here. It gives you situations,
obstacles and enemies. This is the part where I think
that they there might have been an issue with the writing.
It says this tool lets us quickly visualize and note the
actions, enemies and actions. It's actions on the road.
Yeah, what's the no, The actions, enemies and actions on
the road. But maybe that's not wrong.
Maybe I'm not reading it, but I would have thought it would say
situation, obstacles and enemies, because that's what the
road ticket actually shows, the situation, obstacles and
enemies. I could be wrong, maybe I'm just
reading it weird. But anyway, so encounter tickets
are all printouts that you can just write on and they're great
and you just write this stuff down and there's tracking,
there's notes on the side. It's so nice to have just like a
literally just like a little ticket that you can write up and
there's an example later. So enemies, obstacles and
events. It talks about how the enemies
work here. So the enemy AI basically top
left to bottom right, top column to bottom column.
So 123456789 exactly. How it sounds, really.
Really. Yeah.
Couldn't be worth yeah. Easy.
And then it talks about you go in zero to 60 order, it talks
about targeting. It gives you the specific way
the enemies target which is closest driver, slowest driver
and then lowest current HP driver in that order which is
great. So it basically says and then
and in a bowl it explains it again.
Enemies go for a near slow and weak in that order.
I love, I love the way that's explained an enemy movement.
Enemies can only move to one adjacent or diagonal tile at a
time. Enemy HP like driver HP is read
from left to right with zero to 60.
When an enemy is reduced TO0HP, remove it from the grid.
The only issue I have is enemies OF0HP they just die.
Enemies in rally, whatever. So it gives you big dozer here
right? Which is dope as fuck.
It's a giant Mitsubishi van right?
And then it gives you name, horsepower, description, number
of actions taking per turn, actions like listed out on the
what the the enemy stab lock is. Love the way it's laid out.
But how much health does that have in crashes and and pips?
It's got three crashes and seven health.
Add that up. Oh, yeah, that's that's more
than yeah. The 0 sixty is 11, right?
Yeah. So that means the zero to 60.
So for drivers, the 0 sixty is your total HP.
Right. We get an example of a bad guy
here, right? That has all together 10.
But has 11. 11, yeah. And it's not until much later
when you get to, like the quote UN quote bestiary, that it tells
you that enemies zero to 60 does not equal their HP.
So it would be nice. Yeah.
It would be nice if that was explained here because I was so
confused for a while. And then I went back and read
the a bunch of stuff to be like, wait a minute, that's 10.
Is my math terrible? Let me count this a bunch of
times. Yeah, it would.
It would not be a bad idea on this page specifically to have a
little blurb that says enemy HP is different.
CBCR or something. CBCR.
Yeah. Yeah.
So representing the road, we're going to start skipping some of
this stuff. So obstacles are things that are
in your way. When an obstacle inches your
tile on your next turn, you may pay the price.
OK, so here we go. Let's let's look at how to pay
the price. Read this with me and let's see
if we can figure out price here. Obstacles are things way.
Suspending the dice, right? But what's the dice for?
Yeah, OK. That's very fair.
Keep going. Like I nowhere in the rest stop
does it talk about what you spend dice on.
What dice? There's no dice in the game.
You've already rolled the dice to make your character.
After you make your character, there's no dice.
That's The thing is, I don't understand.
I don't know where the dice is. Something usually when we talk
about these things, I get to, I know them better than when I
read them on my own, you know, obviously.
I couldn't, but I couldn't figure out where it was.
So, so, so to get to the point about the dice thing, right, So
it says there's a name, a price, a penalty if an enemy shares a
space, blah, blah, blah. When an obstacle enters your
tile, you're on your next journey.
You must pay the price or take the penalty.
Whenever you enter a tile with an obstacle, you must
immediately pay the price and penalty.
So if you choose to go in, wait a minute.
If the obstacle comes into you, you don't have to.
But if you go into the obstacle, you have to, right?
You have to pay. Obstacles flow with the road,
blah blah blah. Obstacles are noted with the
tile of the obstacle and then the price in dice and the
penalty in parentheses. For example, tight fit is ( 1
dash, one pip, right? With the pip representing health
damage. OK, so I assume the price in
dice and the penalty in parentheses.
SO1 dice one pip. I don't this is part.
The penalty is one health damage, right?
Yes. But what is the price in dice
mean? It says so in tight fit.
If you go to the next. It says if a driver is in a tile
with this obstacle under tight fit, they must spend 1 dice to
avoid taking the penalty of one health.
What dice are you spending? Did we miss something about a
dice pool? I don't because I've read the
book twice now and I don't. I don't control like a like a
like a, like a control F dice thing to see if we miss
something about a dice pool. I'll keep it going while you
look so tight fit and debris are options.
So tight fit is exactly what we just said.
And I love, I love the, the abstraction of that of being
like, oh, this is a tight fit. Like the road has like a
narrowing like, you know what I mean?
Like it, it comes in on you and then debris.
If a driver shares a tie with this obstacle, they must spend 1
dice to avoid taking the penalty of one crash.
Because you bounce off debris, right?
Then there's mines, which are similar obstacles.
They can be placed on the board, they move with the flow of play,
they can be activated whenever the owner wants, etcetera,
etcetera. Read that Marshall one.
And then events, there are unique Rd. moments that can
happen, you can backtrack to get them if you want there that you
can go to get them. There are rewards and stuff.
So an example event here is called Mountain Memory.
And then it gives you a trigger or reward and then additional
stuff for it. So the trigger is on the second
round and every other round after that.
Place this event on a random tile with an obstacle in it.
Right? Reward is tell them about your
name and record yourself in its memory.
Do not go to rally. Move every obstacle to a random
tile. That's awesome.
And then it says if you want to pay one health, you get to do
the same but go to rally also. And then you embed a piece of
the path within your chassis. So there's like narrative and
mechanical to it, which I really, really love.
And the whole reward about like tell your tell the mountain your
name thing is fucking amazing. Pay one crash is above, but
shuffle the obstacles, memorize the name of one who has passed
before. Great.
And then or you can pay one set and then as above and you don't
shovel the obstacles, but you lock the obstacles.
So there's different stuff you can do with the event.
So really, really cool, really great narrative mechanical flow
to it, which is really fucking awesome.
Any anything on dice before we move on?
Yeah, there's some, I mean we're about to get the milestones.
So go through milestones because there's there's talk about
spending dice on milestones I think is the next thing I could
find. OK, All right.
So milestones are ways for drivers and torque to measure
themselves. Milestones are personal.
Torque is filled with milestone driven, player versus player and
other stuff. So milestones come in three
types, small, big and group. The small milestone is something
that takes place one or two Rd. phases to complete.
That's. What it is?
I was right. It's here.
The group milestone is something that group of drivers are
working towards and might take several sessions.
A group milestone can't be randomly generated.
For a milestone generator and how to trade milestones to
upgrade, see page 65. And the most random thing is
that page 65 is hyperlinked of all the pages.
Like the index isn't hyperlinked like a bunch of.
Like the other stuff isn't hyperlinked but this one thing
randomly is. Does that mean like a bunch of
maybe a bunch of the rest is broken?
I don't know. Maybe so is there other other
inline page references that I there's?
One that had like a something to a link to 23 that didn't work so
I don't. Know maybe it might just be
broken. Maybe a bunch of them are
broken, but you'll. This is where you get your
spendable dice. It's in a big mouse.
OK, all right, so let's, let's see where we go.
So small, get your hands on a tape deck.
It's time for paint job, blah, blah, big spend 3 dice on
avoiding damage from obstacles. So again, let's talk about
spending dice, right? Destroy 4 enemies.
Yeah. Drag another vehicle, rally and
then group cross the Odessa Rd. collect the refrigeration
materials. So basically it's, it's it's
levels of milestones. But So what the milestones allow
you to do is upgrade your stuff, right?
And we'll get to that in a second.
I think a group milestone. So in the road, the road phase
is complete. When the objective is met, all
drivers go to rally. When the road ends, play
transitions to the rest stop, describe the events, etcetera,
etcetera. It said this can be via ACV
radio, but it's ACB radio. Unless it's not what I'm
thinking about, but like the actual like the thing that that
that people talk to, it's it's like community band.
I think it was what CB stands for.
But they talk about CV in here, V as in Victor, and I think it's
supposed to be CB as in Boy in Bravo.
I do love this, this page here with like the Mustang with like
the setting sun behind it and stuff like that.
But again, so there's a whole big thing here about like
spending dice and in the milestones there's spending dice
and stuff like that. But maybe we'll get to dice, not
sure. So there's a sample encounter
ticket here, which is fantastic. I love that it's here.
It's interesting that they put the sample ticket here at the
end instead of higher. I like that because you
understand how enemies and obstacles events work.
So you get the the that you have a ticket in the front.
You get the explanation of all that.
And then you get an example ticket in the back, which is
great. It's called jail broken is a
situation. So read that.
It's really cool. And that's, that's the whole
spread there some tracking events on the side.
And then, and then there's a great spread here of a dark like
mountain with like a road going across it and in the background
on like a dark green on black. It literally says don't sleep on
the road, don't sleep on the road, don't sleep on the road,
like don't sleep on the road, like do not sleep on the road.
Like filling the entire sky. This is such an amazing spread.
And it, it looks like, almost like headlights like lit up like
out into the thing. So it says drivers don't let
other drivers sleep under the blank sky.
Take necessary precautions and then there's trips should take
36 hours or fewer to stop at the earliest convenience.
Everything like that. I mean all you have to do to go
to rest stop is go to rally. So like this would be a
narrative choice to choose to stop on the road which I love
that it it gives you that kind of option.
Yeah, but and there's rules here says the sleep is unavoidable.
Leave vehicle in neutral. Remove keys from ignition.
Record your mental state. Rough location any man landmarks
in omen parked vehicles. So the front is north northwest
and the front wheels are angled northwest.
Sleep in pairs. If unavoidable, sleep in threes.
Stay within shouting distance like they're really it's really
cool because again, this has to be a narrative choice.
You don't you're never going to get to you have to do that.
And I love that. It's like don't do this.
And like here's like how to you know, it's very viby.
It's incredibly viby. Another great piece of art to go
to the rest stop is this person like using the car as a
generator to like watch TV and stuff and like recharge things
while they're sipping on something.
So it's really great and we have the entire rest stop section.
So at the end of every Rd. is a rest stop.
A rest stop is inhabited by NPCS and things like that.
And there's a whole section here.
We're gonna, we're talk of that and it's populated with the
options available. It's very open world and this is
where a lot of the RP, like really deep RP comes in.
So there's a procedure here. There's roll up, park, R&R and
roll out. So roll up means you take a look
at the rest stop, you clock it's vibe and discover it's bargain.
Park means each player rolls 2D6 and places them on the rest
stops to represent a point of interest.
I love that. Basically like rolling the dice
and the dice are the things R&R prior trade partaking
activities. Do the thing like you had snap,
right? So go take pictures and, and do
all that kind of stuff. Try to try to do your activities
so you can get your rewards and things and then roll out, kill
up, get out of there. So roll up at the end of the
road phase. You, you, you do that, remove
all the pieces from the road and, and go, go to go to the
thing and then park. As we said, you do the 2D6 and
it says everyone rolls 2D6 and places them on the rest stop.
Assemble a dice on the rest stop to represent different
locations. Name the locations, add new
locations together. One dice represents a type of
location and the other dice represents the person or event
there. And I love that how like you're
each like you pick one of each when you roll it to do that.
So if it's a small community, everyone should just roll once.
If it's larger, you can roll more.
And there's a picture here of like dice kind of spread out as
like representative of like buildings.
It's neat that you would actually put the dice in in a
way that is the community. So you can actually see kind of
a map of the community in your dice.
I really love. Clever like mapping procedure.
I reading this I was like this is amazing.
It's fantastically brilliant and I kind of would like to steal
this for something else that's like a narrative.
Like you get to a place and tell me about this place, players you
know. Steal it.
Hackett I I love those. I really do generally love those
dice that are like dungeons and you just like roll them together
and you get like corners and walls and stuff and you like
build out a little like dungeon with it like a little 6 room
dungeon with your little dice. That's great.
Rest of our fuel. Once you populated the rest stop
rest of our fuel, there are four things to do.
Investigate strand registration activities and checklist scenes.
Reallocate your HP and upgrade your vehicle.
CPH 66 again, randomly hyperlinked.
You can choose multiple activities.
So investigating a strand, you pick a dice at the rest stop and
sketch out a scene. So you literally are like, I'm
going to go check this out and you RP it out.
Do that, it's cool. Set a scene, play, play and role
play that's it's a role play game and then do that.
I almost went to registration activity is the activities that
you get to do. What were your registration
activities? Oh crap, I've forgotten already.
Oh. It's not, it's not a big deal.
Then if you're a driver, apply your trade at each rest stop.
You apply your trade by narrating a scene and using your
registration activity. So it's very much kind of like
a, like a structured round table of, of setting scenes and people
acting out those scenes. So it's very RP heavy in this
section. Obviously, that's the point of
this section. Reallocate your HP, obviously
move stuff around and then roll out leave right?
You can return to this community by placing it on a map.
Even this community might ask favors.
I love that you can just like make the map yourself which is
cool. Where does it say where the map
is? Like a timeline?
You're just making a timeline and it like branches kind of.
Yeah, so it says, I think it says there's two ways.
Yeah, like, oh, maybe not. I know there's one that said
like you can either place it like a, like a like a tree, or
you could put it in a line. And one is, you know, obviously
the line and one is more of just like all the places that you've
gone. I don't remember where that is,
though. I don't think it's here, though.
Yeah, there's a cool picture. I wonder whose license plate
this is, because that's a real car that they took a picture of
and put a real license plate on there.
So tools, you've learned what Torque has to offer.
It's tactical gameplay on the road, free form, role play, rest
stops. The following pages are tools,
milestones, upgrades, milestones and upgrades for drivers, ticket
generator, all that kind of stuff.
So this is all the stuff to do the nitty gritty mechanics and
whatnot of the game. So the right to repair.
The right to repair is an assurance that manufacturers
provide all pieces of tools necessary for independent
mechanics anyway. Yeah.
So you have the right to repair your vehicle upgrades.
So again I still not finding the dice but torque is torque.
Full Torque is full of in character goals and motivations,
spending milestones to upgrade. So if you actually complete the
milestone, you can get an upgrade.
So a small milestone is a small upgrade, big milestone is a big
upgrade. A group milestone is a group
upgrade. And though you get options for
those, right, a small upgrade only lasts one Rd. phase.
And they're generally like if you have one extra set, two
extra health, one extra move, ignore an obstacle, things like
that. They're pretty small, but it's
only for one Rd. phase. Big upgrades are permanent and
it's like one extra set add to HP.
It's very similar to the small ones, but they're permanent.
And the Group 1 is a revelation. So it says add a new totaled
option. That's what I was talking about
before. So if you get this one, you get
to put one of those new options on that board.
Roll up a special tool on page 81, add another car to your
garage, add another driver to your convoy.
So those are really, really big. So these are the upgrades you
can get from completing your milestones, which again I still
am not finding the dice that you spent in the milestones or on on
obstacles and stuff like that. Yeah, I'm so confused about
that, honestly. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I don't, I like,
I don't like. I don't know if we missed
something or if like maybe there was a dicing they forgot to take
a couple of those mentions out. Listen, I'm not sure missing
something very realistic, but me and you missing something that's
slightly less. Realistic but but but possible
because we're fucking idiots that.
Is that's so true? I forget, yeah.
Yeah, right. So ticket generator is here.
It it talks about random column, random row tile, like the enemy
attacks use that we're going to scoot through some of this stuff
that are the tools because just go read them enemies.
So this is what I was talking about before where it says it
explains again the same big dozer tile right?
The the the stat block, same directions and everything like
that. And when building an enemy
ticket, keep in mind the following tips.
Overwhelm the drivers with number of enemies, not HP 1
action a turn is plenty unless they mean business.
The base damage enemy should be able to inflict as a single
crash or to health. Enemy HP should be within a 2 to
12 range of the drivers and there's zero to 60 unless this
particular speed lohi blah blah blah.
Enemies should have slightly inflated zero to 60 scores
compared to their HP to give drivers a slight edge in
creating. Yeah, yeah.
So it basically there's, I think there's another section later
where it talked about more specifically, but it basically
says like the zero to 60 is not it it, it's not indicative of
the zero to 60 or the HP of the car.
They can be totally different and it really depends.
And all of these are are like that.
So for example, shimmer would be an 8, but a zero to 60 is 10.
So basically it's saying inflate the zero to 60.
And I assume that is because the higher it is, the slower they
are. So you want the invoice to be
earlier? On yeah, it totally makes sense.
You give the drivers, this is a driver centric game.
They're supposed to be, you know, the, the road warrior cool
people. And yeah, they should be better
than their the arbitrary enemy drivers that kind of come out.
Exactly. Exactly which?
I'm fine. I'm.
Good with that. Yeah, I love that.
It's fantastic. Yeah.
So for so each enemy step lock has the name, it has the the
crashes and health and and everything.
And then it has like a little blurbs of the big dozers is
Frankenstein construction equipment.
And it says that has one action per turn and one of the actions
has a shover, which is to move into a random tie with a driver
and collide and then spike pod visualizer rodeo.
A lot of them are super fucking cool.
A weirdo with a low hanging chopper bouncing on the road is
a gyro captain. So a lot like the light bike.
A lot of these have to be like Dari's 16 has to be something
that I'm not aware of in a movie reference or something like
that. It's a semi truck filled with a
fragile, dangerous devices. Like that's got to be from a
movie light bike. Obviously we know what that's
from. I have no.
Idea what that's from. Anri Unforgiving has to be a
reference that I'm just like this going over my head.
Anri is a boss. Pair them with other disruptive
enemies. So the boss here is interesting.
It says it has two actions per turn.
It's got a relatively low zero 67 so it'd go quick.
One of the actions is opening a hole in the air and move away
from danger and inflict one health damage.
Just move and and do it light bend.
You cloak your current tile which means you can't be
targeted and then boss. It says refresh Audrey once
after totaled so you you win and then it gets a second phase.
Yeah, very, very Dark Souls, you know.
Yeah, so good. So, oh, here's the section.
So this is the whole section on making enemies and it
specifically says in this. So when assigning HP to enemies,
give them a higher zero to 60 then they'd have if they rolled
HP like drivers. So the first time you see the
enemy snap lock is like page like 40 something and then
explains the enemy step like a little bit as far as the HP and
zero to 60 on page 73. It would have been nice if there
was maybe a reference to page 73 on that previous page so that
you're not a little bit confused on why the stop block is
different. Because again, it doesn't
explain it until the making enemies kind of like GM section
or whatever on why it is that way.
But there's a making enemy section, there's a making bosses
section, there's a fucking insanely cool road map just like
this piece together collage of of amazingness by the book.
Look at this map. It's so fucking cool.
And then as you go down, it goes through environments and
obstacles. So this it gives you this as
like an adventure to run Ignatia, run loading base storm
Halsema. These are different things and
it gives you three things in each part.
So for storm, it's got Moody weather coming down hard.
It says like add a bad visibility, like violent
meteorology, add permanent bad visibility.
So there's like options for each one.
So again, you kind of get an adventure without them saying
like, now here's the adventure, which is great.
I like that. It it, it lets you use your mind
in fun, interesting ways. There's example environments,
obstacles, there's example events.
And then there's some more tables in the back which are
really cool. So like there's a loot table.
There was a reference earlier to like make a random piece of loot
or whatever, and this is or random item.
And this is where you'll find it.
So do you want to just, I mean, I really love like 6 predictive
instruments. Place one mine on enemy's head.
And I love how there are all these gauges off to the side and
each one is like marked off to one of the gauges, which is
really cool. There is #2A little something
special, A little something special.
Oh, so I'm sorry. So loot you would roll #1 the
instrument cluster #2 the little something special.
I like this as pissed. Want to make a busted driver
instead of getting stock and custom stunts?
Roll three times on this loop section and let God sort out the
rest. That's so fucking good.
A special little telescope. Halogen brights.
RIP cords dude. I love RIP cords.
Pull, pull. All drivers.
All of them. So good bolt bolt thrower donate
one crash at event and lock it. So good #3 is guts so bad?
Syringe of expensive petrol, distortion for shortener.
So this is all just cool stuff that you can get or give or use.
It's it's things that the game can have and they're so
interesting. Some kind of box, just about
just a box. There's a #5 number six is just
knobs and switches, just different knobs and switches you
can have. It's so cool.
And then so we're almost done with the game.
We are on page 86 and 84, so we're getting there friends.
There's a rest stop section which talks a little bit more
about like retiring characters and community pressures.
It's got a roll table for like kind of how people will it.
It's basically like the the whole standard like reaction
table to you. Are you a nuisance of boogeyman,
a friendly face, you know, that kind of thing.
There's a section here on like the vibe palette generating a
few sentences for a restaurant to create a palette for your
vibe bargains and things like that.
And then what you notice first table, which is cool to have
just the D6D66 table for like what you notice first.
So roll. Roll on what you notice 1st and
what you know what you see last. OK, what you notice first I got
1-2, the field of flowers on every side.
Well I notice. Well I see last though I get 6
for the statues. Oh well, Weeping Angel action,
you know. And then last two spreads here,
so a bargain between. So there's a second earlier
about bargains. We didn't really get into it
that far, but these are the most kind of far out there.
Spreads that are maybe a tiny bit too far but are still
beautiful. So a bargain between the sky and
its people across the two spreads 2 very, very different
to got a bargain between the sky.
So roll. Roll D66.
Between the world and its people.
Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, a bargain between the
world. I kept reading Sky because Sky
is the first box, the first thing.
A bargain between the world and his people.
So. So roll the D66 for for this.
OK so 1st 152 I got fauna and tell tale and tell fauna and the
people I got 5 four which is exactly.
Yeah, yeah, the people spread is it's, it's it's it's
interesting. It is probably one of the.
Worst spreads. You saw me do this, that's why
you said it. Exactly.
Tuner tuner, it's very much like at an angle on an angle stacked
on an angle and stuff like that. Last ones points of interest.
So there's there's again, these are the, it's interesting that
these are here because this is like the kind of the community
creation tables. Again, this whole section is
tools, but this with the community section would have
been, I think, interesting. I agree.
Or at least a or at least like a find those on page 91 thing, but
it's the one dice isolated away. 2 dice, 3 dice people places
events based on the different dice and stuff that you roll.
And then last bit here there's an example rest stop and then
there's speed running torque, which gives you some stuff to
do. And then there's the torque and
torque conversion guide to switch torque to torque.
You switch out all the G's with Q's.
I think it should be all the Q's with G's, but whatever or or you
play torque. That's kind of it.
Note from the author with these tools and proceeding rules,
you're ready to get into trouble and kick the road.
Kick it. There you go.
Note from the publisher do not under any circumstances launch,
slag, place mind, or attempt any other maneuver described in
these pages behind the wheel of a motor vehicle.
Wait. I do say I have a thing, I have
a thing. Do we have time for a thing?
Yeah. OK, this is from Itch, the IO
someone's asking about. I've still been looking for this
role, by the way, what's really neat, but I'm really confused
about obstacles. They have a price and a penalty.
It says the price has been dice. I'm not sure what that means.
Will Yops has replied. Thanks for the note.
The dice concept was thrown out right before layout.
That should read actions. Basically all obstacles have a
price in the penalty noted. Like the price penalty, the
price is the cost in actions to be in the obstacle tile and
ignore the penalty. So what we should do is update
the PDF. Well, it's on it.
No, we should. We should.
Review this. We'll go.
We'll start the episode over. Yeah, we'll do another hour and
48 minutes. Yep, so that we can.
But I mean, if you're going to explain a fix, fix the PDF, it
would be nice, you know, because how would we know that?
Except unless we dig through the itch, which you can buy this not
on itch and then get APDF. So you wouldn't know unless you
dig like you did. Good job, buddy.
That's the way to fix it. So it was an error.
We did find it. And it does make sense to just
explain to just switch with actions and that would because
you get 2 and a round. So having to play a penalty of
an action totally works really great.
I'm less confused now. That's it.
That's the whole thing. And that's the game.
The Backpage again, more yellow and explanation.
And it's beautiful and I love it.
It's great. I even even the even the back of
the PDF where on the back of the book it says good luck. press.co
is hyperlinked. So I'm really disappointed that
the index is not hyperlinked. I'm going to be honest.
So review scores for Torque, obviously the books, 94 pages
for those that don't know or need reminding.
All of this is our extraordinarily subjective
opinion and is in no way, shape or form a voice of authority.
If you don't like it, that's fine.
Yeah, we're done. So, you know, whatever.
Or we're super smart and you're just maybe not everything is for
you. And if we're not for you, that's
also fine. That's also fair, you know.
But anyway, so we, we, we, we take our terrible opinions and
we quantify them into 5 metrics worth 10 points each, for a
total of 50 points, which means that we do more than just the
game. If you'll look at this, the rule
set is one of five metrics. This is as much a product review
and amateur dev editing as it is a game review.
What it is we do on the show. So the first one is art and
layout. It is the art in the book, it is
the layout visually, it does the visuals of the book.
And if they work for us, usability is things like
hyperlinked index, if a book needs a bookmark, like if things
are in what we consider to be the a good reading order, if you
don't have to hunt for things, if both the book and the PDF are
usable, right. The rule set is the actual rule
set of the game. If it's adapted, how well is it
adapted? If it's a unique new rule set,
do we think it's good? Do we like it?
Originality is exactly that. Originality in any aspect of any
of these metrics or beyond. And value is the bang for your
buck, not just the flat cost, but also what you do you get
with it. Is there a lot in the book?
Is there a lot beyond the book? Do you feel like, again, you get
enough bang for your buck for the money that you spend on
this? So art and layout.
Oh dude, this is I mean, it's this is an amazingly like it's
an amazing pleasure to go through this visually, it's like
it is fantastic looking book. I love the like experimental use
of layout and it it it really hits all the way through until a
couple of the last things are like, but they're not bad and I
still like them you. Mean like the tools and stuff at
the backgrounds? What's up you?
Mean like the tools and stuff away at the back?
Yeah I'm here's The thing is even the point of interest is
still really interesting page and other stuff.
I'm OK with the tools be oh also like the bargain page and the
people page like that one got way far out there that one might
have got away a little bit it's. The only one that trips me up.
I got it, you know. Yeah, yeah.
Otherwise it's it's so easy to read.
It is like all of the graphics are incredibly well done.
I mean, visually, you're right. It was up every time I float the
page. I was just like excited for like
the next spread to pop up. And because they're all fucking
gorgeous. I'm pretty high on this.
This is not what I would call an art book, but it's probably the
highest score we're going to give when it's not considered an
art book. Probably what number?
Are you thinking I'm? 8-9 on this I'm like healthy 9.
I yeah, I already had nine typed in, so we're going to go with a
nine here. This is a gorgeous visually,
this is a absolutely stunning, gorgeous book.
The vibes all the way through, like keep you in the game.
It's readable all the way through.
It's it's, it's, it's gorgeous both with the art that they did,
the photography they did and the layout.
Usability. I think it suffers.
I think it suffers a couple of different ways on usability,
yeah. I think, I think the obviously
we're going to count off for not having a hyperlinked index
because that's what we do and that's the expectation that we
we have and we've set. It's 2024.
Like when you go through the road section and has these icons
and you the has this like the icons make it so easy to
understand and explain and like set things up.
It's explained really well, even though the layouts like kind of
experimental at some points and like far out there are quotes
around that. It's not like it's crazy, but
it's cool. I still it's still incredibly
readable and you can go through it.
Some stuff needs to be moved around, maybe in some different
places, and that's kind of the biggest thing for me.
Yeah, I think so. So as far as usability, it's
it's a beautiful book, right? And it's extremely, it's
extremely well laid out. The graphics are fantastic, as
we said before with the the visual layout.
But you as far as the the actual like usability of the layout,
gorgeous graphics, gorgeous like the explanation of the character
sheet gorgeous. What we want is those
explainers, those things like that.
The issues that I do have are obviously the the missing
hyperlinks author out. I think, I think a bunch of the
inlines must be broken. But the fact that the the index
especially isn't hyperlinked is is is kind of crazy when when
every link is and a bunch of the in lines are.
It's weird that the index isn't. But in addition to that, there's
a bunch of stuff in character creation you don't understand
for a while. There's like there's some like
for example, in like the community section when it talked
about how to roll it. I don't, I don't think it has
like go to page 91 for the resources.
Like when the first time you see the enemy stop block, like they
definitely tripped me up on the fact that it wasn't the same
amount of health. But it doesn't really tell you
to like page 73 that it doesn't have to be.
So I think there's it does an incredibly, incredibly good job
of explaining things, but I think it just like missed two or
three things and maybe we're lit just like even 3 or 4 words or
just like go see here would have been really nice.
I don't think that like tanks it by new stretch of the
imagination, but there's definitely some some things.
And also, I mean the fact that dice is mentioned and it's not
part of the game and the PDF, the PDF hasn't been hyperlinked
or hasn't been updated with that because how long ago was was
that thing on itch because I had this 2.
Years. Yeah, so it two years the PDF
hasn't been updated. So to me, like those are things
that kind of like Ding it down a little bit for me yeah.
I think overall though, like books should look at this book
on how to like have a character she explained to you and like
the the graphics for like the crashes and the health and like
how they work and stuff stunning.
So like, I think that far outweigh stuff, but obviously,
you know, there's some things that could be tweaked a little
bit better. What are your thoughts?
I don't know, you know, I was a strong seven and then we we
retreaded the whole like dice over actions things.
I'm like fuck, that kind of makes it like a six for me man.
I I disagree. I was probably way up more of
like a fat 8 just based on and obviously feel free to disagree
but like the the we talk about flow sheets and stuff all the
time. This is not necessarily like a
flow sheet, but like the real explainers with the arrows
pointing to everything with very specific set instructions like
the. That is very true.
OK, maybe everything is 7. Yeah, I think it's an 8 and it
drops to A7 with those couple with those couple of Dings in my
opinion. OK, if you're good with that,
I'm good with that rule set bro. It's a great rule set.
What the fucking pleasure of a rule set, you know?
Like it's fun, it's easy to understand and has the potential
for like a deeper level level play like we were talking about.
The abilities are interesting. I think also like the way stunts
are later on explained where it makes it easy for you to like
make your own stunts. I love this rule set.
I am dying to play it. Yeah, so one thing again that I
kind of disagreed with, like one thing that Will said was that
like this kind of lean into like it's two games and one.
I remember when we did Were you with me when we did Demon Craw
Gothic that. Might have been one of the days
I missed. OK, so in that game it very much
was two different games. It was like an RPG, and it was
very much like no. I did that one and I remember us
being like this game is worse for being two things 2.
Games that like individually the one game is fantastic and
individually the other game is fantastic, but when you put it
together it really makes this. Disc Yeah, I remember it's.
Fantastic by the way though, standard ID stuff is fantastic.
Go check out like all the stuff they do Bernard, Reaper still
hurts, all that kind of stuff, but that felt like 2 very
distinct games. This definitely feels like 2
distinct modes of play, but it doesn't feel like there's a
discordance. It feels like once you're done
with the road, you just drive down the road to the rest stop.
It's very cohesive and I really, really like that a lot.
I don't remember why I was talking about that.
It was, it was a good thing. It was, it was to say like, I
love the two modes of play. I think it's fantastic that they
does that. And the interesting thing about
the two roads of play too, is like if you're the kind of table
that wants more, more actionless role play, you just stay on the
road more. And if you're the kind of
player, the team, the, the kind of table that wants to do more
like rest up stuff, like more RP, more stuff like that, just
do more rest up stuff. And I think it's, it's the
especially the first like 5 pages where it really lets you
like dictate the style of game you want very specifically.
It allows for so much flexibility and still maintain
the game and in a really good way.
Also the road's genius. I fucking love the grid.
Yeah, and the grid's great and its use is great because I think
I kind of touched us earlier when I initially saw the grid
and I was like, oh, it's three by three.
It's not many spaces, but it's plenty of room.
There's movement to it. More than one thing can fit in
the space and like that has interesting interactions to it.
Yeah, I, I love this. I I think this is really
enjoyable. It's yeah, I the what do you
think? I don't know.
I just I want to say again, the road.
I thought the same thing as you 3 right three seem doesn't seem
enough, but the tactical aspect of like just being on this chunk
of the road. I was just like, oh this it
tickled it tickled me in all the right ways.
Probably at least an 8 to be honest.
I. Think I'm at least an 8.
You know I'm 10 to say 9 honestly.
I, this is so this is the one that we always have to, that I,
I look at, and I think we've talked about this before, look
at more in context of other things than some of the other
ones that can be in context to itself and in relation to one,
maybe two games or 10. So it's not that.
And then when I think of all the nines, to me this is an 8.
OK, I'm good with that. I think you're right.
OK, but I do I do love it. This is definitely if this was a
Zine 1 where we had a vibe score, it would be a tent for
me. The vibes on this aren't saying
originality. Can you point out to another
like Rally Row 2 mode? I and the grid?
Everything we just said about the grid, like the tactical
aspects of the gameplay, like I I think the originality score is
way up there for me. Yeah.
What are you thinking? I don't know, what do you think?
I'm thinking a nine again. Man, I love this game.
I'm between an 8 and a nine too, because I I'm just trying to
think again, the originality of it.
I I'm sure they exist, but I cannot think of another game
that is. It's not.
Even like the genre of the game, although I think is really it's
one. Aspect of the originality
though, yeah. It's like it's how it works,
like how you build the rest stops, how you play on the grid.
Like I would give this A9. Well, and we again, we talked
about the originality can be in all of these or, or any of them,
right? Because the layout, it's insane.
The originality on that is insane.
The the the rule set, come on, especially the grid, insane the
genre fucking awesome, right? Yeah, You know what?
Fuck it, we'll go 9. Yeah, fuck it, it's a nine I.
Think it's fantastic because so many times where like it's
another Dutchie game, but it does it in a fun way.
You know what I mean? Value.
You didn't happen to look up the, so it's.
Whoops. $15 on it for the PDF. Yep, there you.
Go and then on. Good luck.
Press the torque operator manual is oh, I'm missing one of the
curious. I don't have Oh no, there's a
mystery bundle. Never mind.
It's $31.00 for the, it's $42.00 it for the book and the playmat
and it's $31.00 for the book. And obviously you would get the
PDF with it and then it's $15 for the PDF.
I think those are all extremely reasonable prices.
I they're all extremely reasonable price.
I mean, $40.00 for the book and playmat.
Like there are books you'll get for $42.00, you know, Yeah.
Or more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think that's extraordinarily reasonable.
It's a 94 page book, Yeah. And we'll put the insane layout.
You know, put your owns and styles of play.
The only thing I would say is like there's like an endless
things that you can create on your own with this.
Yeah, I would love another a book that gives you a book of a
book of some some some tickets, a book of more examples, like a
book of more drivers. Like if there was like a like a
torque 2, you know, like super torqued, I would I would love
the fuck out of that. I think I think value wise, I
think it's good, but not great. There's not like any more than
what's here, even though what's here is fantastic.
So probably like, I don't know, like 6-7.
Yeah, I'm, I'm also like 6-7, so I think maybe 6 if there were
some more, I don't know. I, I, I think it was a little
bit more. Yeah.
Well, because there's, I mean, there's six drivers, there's six
drivers, which is nice, but that's honestly not very much.
Like you have a lot more you actually can do a lot more with
just like the the non scenic grout drivers because of all the
different things you can roll again, the random small
adventures. Let's go, let's go with six on
this, because again, it's not 5 is just is bang average.
This is the value. The cost is good.
Beyond that. It is what it is and and I think
we're good with with that. So even if you do it, you know,
I'll do it. So let me do it.
I just don't. Do it anymore?
Honestly, I'm just. Like, hey, I don't know why you
ever did because I told you I was going to do it anyway. 39,
dude, that's a fucking banger score.
That is one of the higher scores you've had in quite a long time.
I think one of the ones that got close to that was actually, you
know what I think like parallels and princesses and maybe here's
a cerulean. I got some high scores too, but
I think that is dead on exactly what it should be.
I fucking love this game. I would I want to play this game
so bad and I think also that is an extremely playable game.
If you and me got off of the this stream right now and just
decided to play the game, we we could just draw a six by six
grade and fucking play the game right now.
Three by three, but. Yeah, you know, yeah, three by
three. So fantastic game again Will
Yolps does fantastic work again. We honestly, I honestly we
should apologize for talking as much to do about Adam and taking
this long to do anything by Will because Will stuff is fantastic.
Actually are bad. Sorry, Yeah.
That that there's a fucking travesty and we apologize
thoroughly for that. Check out everything from Good
Luck press. We actually so here's The thing
is we actually mentioned this episode weeks ago and then we
realized the day we were going to do it, the plasmatics
Kickstarter, which is the project, one of the most recent
project that they that good luck press put out was finishing like
an hour before we started the episode.
So we were like, well, the tiniest bump we could possibly
give, we're not even going to be able to give.
So we end up postponing and then getting pushed back by a week.
But we meant to do this during that.
So go check out plasmodics. I think you can still either
pre-order it or snag it from good luck press.
Go check out all the stuff. Buy buy all the things.
Go go grab the dwelling expanded it thing as soon as we get off
stream. That's one of the things that
I'm going to do from set Pines, everything from good luck,
everything from Will Yost, everything from Seb amazing
stuff, fantastic people. Go listen to the The Brain Trust
podcast from the beginning. Fantastic design thoughts and
they finally. Put out a new episode after like
5 months, yeah. So so go do that.
I don't know if the shirts are in the mug just still available
in the Kofi, but but support them.
They will and Adam do amazing stuff specifically for Good Luck
Press. Go buy all their shit.
Everything they do is is fantastic and incredibly well
thought out and it's always a pleasure to to read their stuff.
That's it. Thank you so much.
I don't know. Oh.
I don't. We're doing that.
I don't. Want to annoy what we're no, we
should never announce it because we always end up postponing fuck
it anyway so like fuck you don't get what you get when you get it
yeah thank you so much for listening for everyone out there
that enjoys our stuff we really appreciate you and if you don't
enjoy your stuff that's fine go find things that.
Happy birthday. Not yet, but I appreciate it.
It's closed though. Yeah, and we will.
We'll see you all when we see you.
Everyone. Have a wonderful day.
Bye. Bye.