Home Games Board Game Reviews Thunder Road: Vendetta – Board Game Review

Thunder Road: Vendetta – Board Game Review

February 16, 2024

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Thunder Road: Vendetta is a board game published by Restoration Games in 2023. It is a remake of the 1986 game Thunder Road from Milton Bradley. The new version adds a plethora of new features over the original.

Thunder Road: Vendetta is available for purchase from Amazon.com. This is basically the Mad Max of board games, and it’s a whole lot of fun.

The game is for 2-4 players and takes about 60-90 minutes to play. It is a dice-rolling, car-racing, and shooting game in which players race down a variable track, trying to be the first one to cross the finish line. Along the way, they can shoot each other’s vehicles, ram into each other, and use special abilities to try to gain an advantage.

Thunder Road Vendetta has simple rules, fast gameplay, and exciting action.

Contents:

You get 12 car minis – 3 vehicles per player

You get 5 doubles sided road boards. That makes for 10 different boards, and a lot of options.

You also get Hazard Tokens, Damage Tokens, FX Dice, Movement Dice, Command Boards and Dashboards

You also get a colorful, and well written 12 page rule book.

Gameplay:

“Thunder Road: Vendetta is a game of fast turns, and dicey decisions. Command your crew of cars as they race though perilous roads, dodge hazards, slam into cars, and fire those guns. HOW TO WIN THIS RACE – Be the first player to move one of your cars off the final tile –OR– be the last player standing.”

Players carefully (or uncarefully) move down each section of the track from one end to the other. There is no set Finish Line at the beginning of the game until one player has been eliminated. Once a player has been eliminated, the lead tile becomes the finish line. The player that drives off the board first wins.

Everyone’s fate is decided by dice rolls, hazards, cliff walls, pits, shrapnel, sand, oil slicks, mud, and more. Players can try to navigate the tricky terrain and avoid other players. Or they can simply go bonkers smashing into every car they can, trying to knock players into hazards. But any move can backfire at any time.

Here are some of the pros and cons of Thunder Road: Vendetta:

Pros:

Simple rules
Fast gameplay
Exciting action
Great production quality

Cons:

Can be long, depending on how safe players play
Can be chaotic, bad luck can be your undoing
Not for everyone

Not a real image from the game, but this should give you a feel of how chaotic it plays. 😉

Conclusion:

Overall, Thunder Road: Vendetta is a fun and exciting game that is sure to please fans of dice-rolling and car-racing games. This game cranks the fun factor to 11!

If you are looking for a more strategic or complex game, then you may want to look elsewhere. You can go from 3 cars to zero in the blink of an eye. We think the chaos is fantastic, some people might not enjoy that in their board games.

Pojo Notes:

This was probably the most played game in our house in 2023. This is a game that I wish I had back in grade school and high school to play with my brother and our friends!
There is player elimination, but the game ends fairly quickly after the first player is eliminated.
The base game is for 2-4 players. The Big Rig Expansion can bring this total to 5 players. My game group has 5 players quite often, so we break this bad boy out a lot.
The BIG RIG AND THE FINAL 5 EXPANSION adds two new crews for players to control, allowing for a 5th-player and two unique styles of play. The Big Rig plows through everything in its way, lumbering forward like a turbo-charged bulldozer with a rocket launcher. The Final Five (motorcycles) dart between other vehicles like a swarm of angry hornets.
The CARNAGE AT DEVIL’S RUN EXPANSION adds 5 more double-sided road tiles, 21 new hazard tokens, and ongoing damage effects and challenges – like ramps, toxic goo, a nitro leak, and FIRE!
The CHOPPE SHOPPE EXPANSION adds 10 crew leaders with unique powers and custom commands. Also adds 27 car upgrades: smoke screen, ghost mode, the BIG RED BUTTON!, and more.

None of the expansions are mandatory whatsoever. First pick-up the base game and see if you like it. Then grab the Big Rig expansion if you want to play with 5 players, or want to spice things up. We like the Devil’s Run expansion for the crew leaders. The Devil’s Run expansion also adds a bit of card drafting so that each players car’s have a unique special power. And finally, the Devil’s Run expansion if fun for extra boards, and driving while on fire!