WipEout F3600: the futuristic racing boardgame

Tuesday 17 October 2017

WipEout F3600: the futuristic racing boardgame



Nowadays is not strange to find boardgames based on videogames or known franchises, and I suppose that was what made me think in the possibility of turning WipEout into a boardgame. First I investigated if someone had already marketed something like that before, and the closest thing I found is a game called Rush n' Crush. Thematically close to WipEout, as far as I could discover about it, it didn't convince me. Oddly, beyond that game there's no other racing boardgame with a futuristic theme, at least from what I've seen. Racing boardgames with cars are plenty, there's even one that seems to be inspired in Carmageddon, but nothing like antigravity vehicles fighting for the best position in a track that always ends too fast. Therefore, I intended to bring as much as possible of the essence and style of WipEout to a boardgame, and making it as agile and fun as possible.

I decided to base it in the first game of the saga, the 1995 WipEout, since, it being the simplest of them all, it could ease me the process of extracting the rules that I would apply on the boardgame. From that decision, I started the process of documentation and translation of the videogame's most important characteristics into rules. I thought it would be more obvious, but in the end it has taken much longer than I initially expected. For instance, how to solve the corners has been possibly the hardest thing and what has determined the most the boardgame's working. That, and how to establish the ships' speed on each turn, which from what I thought at first to what has proved to be more effective in the end there's a huge difference. Summing up, the boardgame that I introduce you in this post has had it's evolution. Next I leave some images of the spanish version (there's also an english version) so you can make yourself an idea of how it looks.


In this first image you can see the board with all the game components, also the original videogame's box on the upper part. As in the PSX (and other platforms) game, there are four teams among which you can choose a ship, and each team's vehicles have their own characteristics indicated in the pilot cards. The pieces that stand for the ships appear unmounted from their stands.


In this one you can see the cards, the handling dices (used to maneouver in the corners), the mine counters (for the MINES weapon) and the game's reference card closer. There are 36 cards and 15 mine counters in total.


All the teams have two pilot cards, two ship pieces, and dices to thrust their vehicles. Each team has their own thrust dices since they have different engines, which implies different acceleration and top speed.


Altima VII is the only circuit I've made (for now). It starts feasible but, after you make the jump, things get quite complicated. The orange corners are easier than the reds.


An example of a game with all the ships racing on the circuit. The game has no trouble in putting up with eight competing players, each one with their ship, or with four controlling each one the two vehicles of a team. Nevertheless, you must bear in mind that with more crafts, more time it takes to end a lap, and more if the players still don't have experience with the game. With four ships a lap can last around forty minutes.


A closer look to the race. I didn't have the ship models in a format I could bring to a 3D printer, so I had to put up with making those paper and card pieces. They don't look bad and fulfuill their function.

If you've liked what you've seen, and you're willing to spend some time and money in printing and assembling this game for you and your friends, here I leave you a package that includes the images of the components in high resolution, the pdf manual and a txt document in which I tell you how I've assembled the game.

2 comments :

  1. That is really cool, found this while searching for wipeout paper models. My plan is to hand-make a wipeout diorama (vertically, as I really like some concept art showing the course being sideways along skyscrapers). Thanks for the idea though, as now instead of hard-mounting them to my diorama, I'll add in a magnetic mounting so they can be used as game pieces.

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