Gentleman, Start your engines...

So,

On my Amazon Wish List I asked for this awesome board game from GMT Games called Thunder Alley. Its a Nascar racing game that I was introduced too by Mike over at DaGreenskins Blog with his crazy idea to upscale the game to 1/64th scale cars. The plan was to build this for con games and honestly, Mike likes doing cool things to games like up sizing them!

Well I wanted a copy for myself but never actually pulled the trigger to purchase it, but my brother settled that dilemma for me by purchasing it for me this past Christmas.

Thunder Alley is a very unique sort of racing game in that it uses cards to move the counters rather then rolling dice. You are also racing a team of cars of your own trying to get them to place as high as they can. This then will get you more points at the end of the race to determine a winner. Also, when you move a car, you could be moving the whole pack of cars, which to me is always making the game very interesting.

To make the game more interesting, there are event cards that are generated after everyone was gone. These events could be anything from restarts to major crashes on the race track, it is very amusing to see these events come up, especially when it effects the lead car.

This game is a traditional board and chit game, and everything in it is high quality and well produced. You do get a lot of counters and plastic bags for them, which was nice that they included those.

 My only issue, which was minor, is one of the boards I got was torn apart, it looked like it was a bad seam. The good news was that GMT games took care of replacing the board rather quickly, they have an online chat and I had a new board within days of contacting them. I offered to send the damaged board back, but they told me to keep it. Great service and very quick on helping me out.

Needless to say I got the game on the table with the wife and my brother and his wife on New Years eve. My brother and I enjoyed the game very much, the wives, not so much. I look forward to playing more of this game in 2018 and highly recommend it to anyone looking for a race game. I would have to say I enjoy the game more than Formula D, and that says a lot. I am also now eyeing there other race Game, Grand Prix which uses the same card activation as Thunder Alley.

TK