‘Can we make a game like Mad Max: Fury Road before everyone forgets about it or a massive backlash starts up?’ is probably a question on a lot of developers’ lips right now. Pure momentum, minimal exposition, a whirlwind of wordless world-building: this is the stuff digital dreams are made of. Avalanche are working on an official game, but I think it’s the games which react to the finished film rather than were made contemporaneously which are more likely to evoke some of the George Miller film’s breakneck ferocity and backstory-by-implication. We’ll see. In the meantime, while we’re still thirsty for more, here’s another latter-day adaptation of the 1980s concept of the post-apocalypse. Games Workshop’s road combat boardgame Dark Future. Witness it:





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Dark Future: Blood Red States comes from Auroch Digital, who recently handled another GW adaptation, Chainsaw Warrior. This time, they’re tacking a crack at 1998 boardgame about vehicular battles in 2023. Dark Future’s dark future isn’t quite as bleak as Fury Road’s – it posits a world on the brink of collapse, rather than one long-gone. There are cities and towns, but they’re owned by either cyberpunky corporations or Immortan Joe types, and in between are the subtitular Red States, a vast and lawless area in which sanctioned road warriors try to keep innumerable Warboys renegades in check.

Stylistically, it’s a collision of cyberpunk and the post-apocalyptic tropes of armoured, weapon-laden cars. In practice, it’ll be a turn-based strategy game, “played out in simultaneous real-time action”, and in which you get to fiddle around with car and driver upgrades in between battles.

Dark Future: Blood Red States is due out this Winter, and you can find out more here.