Description

The wheeled combat game Dustbowl uses simultaneous self-regulating play to structure vehicular skirmishing inside a racing arena. Each player competes to eliminate opposing vehicles while completing racing circuits and creating crowd-pleasing catastrophic spectacles, thereby earning frequent deliveries of fuel and munitions to its pit area. Each race ends either when all vehicles on one team have been destroyed or when fuel supplies run out (for example, if the crowd has left or been killed).

Combat includes both direct vehicular combat and combat by proxy—between pit crews, for example, or by spectators—and has a strong secondary focus on orchestrating combined attacks into more and more catastrophic spectacles to earn greater quantities of supplies and more lethal munitions. Each vehicle is rated in various categories, including armor, speed, fuel capacity, and hardpoints, and can be customized by its owning player before the game starts using a building point system that players can use to balance the quality and quantity of their vehicles.

Dustbowl is set in the post-apocalyptic setting of New Amarillo, a setting shared with South Quarter Independent’s upcoming games Poomp! (SQI004, a racing game), Radio Cloud (SQI012, a roletaking game), and Bragging Rights (SQI016, a storytelling game).