2005 WizKids NASCAR Race Day

A friend of mine is big into games, and he turned me on to this neat little game from WizKids. It's one of the constructible card games out there which basically means you buy a pack of cards and it has some little plastic models you punch out and put together to play the games. There's a few of them out there featuring Pirate ships, Transformers and Star Wars ships, but this was the only one that had anything remotely to do with sports. Each pack comes with two cars, a race track, a card to track damage to the car and a teensy tiny little die. I think these were 4 bucks a pop when they first came out, but you can pick them up in dollar bins now. Here's a sample pack in honor of Daytona:

1/28 Tony Stewart common
9/28 Ryan Newman uncommon
Damage counter card
Racetrack 1/4
small black die


This pack has a Tony Stewart and Ryan Newman uncommon. Supposedly the more rare a car is, the better it drives, but there's a lot of cars in the set that only have uncommon or rare cars. I'll be honest with you, I have very limited knowledge about NASCAR other than Richard Petty is the King of something or other, Awesome Bill is from Dawsonville and Jeff Gordon is purportedly a homosexual. Not that there's anything wrong with that. If I had to choose a favorite driver I guess it would be Tony Stewart because he seems to me to be the driver most likely to lose his shit, cause a massive pileup out of spite and start punching people in the wreckage.


The game is pretty easy (and can get monotonous), the driver basically decides if they want to drive normally, step on the gas or hit the brakes to avoid an accident. If you do something other than drive normally, or get too close to another driver, you have to roll a pair of dice and beat the number on the car's card to avoid damage to the body or the engine. Basically you have to roll a save throw vs. rednecks for you D&D geeks out there. Too much damage and the car wrecks. You can also pit stop to remove damage. Rolling dice and moving a tiny plastic car sounds boring as hell, until you realize that the game play offers plenty of opportunities to completely screw your fellow players. The best part is ganging up on the leader, cutting right in front of him on a turn and blocking his path and watching as he plows into a wall. Muahaha! Not leading anymore are you, buster!



The most fun about these things is punching out the pieces and putting the car together. You wouldn't think you could make a little plastic car out of two trading cards, but you can. I took a picture of a completed car, but my camera and my computer are mad at each other and not speaking at the moment. WizKids only made two series of this stuff in 2005 and early 2006 before discontinuing it. The problem with Racing cards is racing collectors are very different from card collectors. In general, they want stuff of their guy and don't want to buy 80 packs full of those bastards trying to beat their guy to get it. Their loss is your gain, you can find boxes of this stuff cheap as dirt now.