With the help of my wonderful group of friends on our dedicated car channel, we've been making progress on The Garage Building Simulator.

Cars!

The 65-car roster has been finalized. It comprises mostly Japanese mostly 80s-90s cars with a few outliers, to capture that Gran Turismo feel.

Cars are arranged by price, which determines rarity using a star system. 1-star (★) for the cheapest road cars, 2-star (★★) for mid-priced road cars, 3-star (★★★) for more expensive road cars, and 4-star (★★★★) for truly special models, such as racing cars or concept vehicles.

All pricing is totally arbitrary and does not reflect in any way the current bullshit of the car market. We are not trying to build a pain simulator like Gran Turismo 7 here; this is meant to be a dumb fun board game.

Below are a few screenshots from one of the google docs I'm using to build the game.

The cars displayed in these screenshots are as follows, alongside very brief thoughts on what I think of each:

• ★ 1983 Toyota Sprinter Trueno GT-APEX (AE86) - because it's against the law not to include an AE86 in this kind of game
• ★ 1989 Toyota Hilux single cab 3.0 V6 AWD - pickup trucks belong in gran turismo
• ★ 1995 Toyota Sera Phase III - One of my very favorite cars. Ever.
• ★ 1974 AMC Hornet Sportabout V8 - Because AMCs are endearing.
• ★★ 1995 Honda Integra Type R - because VEE-TAAAAK
• ★★ 1998 Daihatsu Storia X4 - because it's hilarious to me that a turbo four-cylinder could simultaneously be 0.7-liter and make 118 hp, and also because Daihatsu is cool
• ★★ 1998 Mitsubishi Legnum VR-4 Type V - when Mitsubishi and station wagons were both still cool
• ★★ 1995 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution III GSR - old Evos are cooler than newer Evos
• ★★★ 1997 Toyota Supra RZ - you know the meme already
• ★★★ 1996 Dodge Viper GTS - my first love, the car that made me love cars
• ★★★ 1997 Venturi 300 Atlantique Biturbo - besides my absolute brainrot for Gran Turismo 2, VENTURI WAS COOL, GOD DAMN IT, LOOK AT HOW PRETTY IT IS
• ★★★ 1996 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport - we needed at least one Corvette so I picked my favorite

What's next?

Now that the cars are in, I need to write the little event cards for each of the relevant squares on the board. I've settled on 50 circuit events, 50 touge events, 50 highway events, and 100 ? square events.

Unlike most board games, I want TGBS to have its own twist and make players make quick decisions, in the same vein as those cool mobile games where you are presented with a problem and have to choose from two or three possible outcomes. Besides the choice of what car to use when landing on a square with events, I'll try to build each event so there aren't obviously good or bad choices; it'll be a game of tradeoffs and options.

On the rare chance that I want something more TTRPG-y in certain events, each car will be assigned a bunch of "performance dice;" you'll need to roll as many d6s as the number displayed. Success will depend on the event or circumstances, but so far I like checks such as "Roll 5 or 6 X times to pass."

The racing is abstracted in each event's text blurb. Unlike past TTRPG projects, I have no desire to write a simulation here; it's entirely about feels and vibes, with a heavy helping of references to car culture, Gran Turismo, other racing games, and the occasional GT shitposts.

The problem is this part of building the game is long. It's a lot of writing and balancing, I don't think it's gonna be ready before my vacation ends at the end of this week. But I've made tangible progress and I'm confident this game will eventually be ready for a test run.

Instead of doing something productive, like working on the next MazeWorld update (we're less than a month since the last one) or playing Forza Horizon 5, I've decided to spend the first evening of my vacation working on The Garage Building Simulator instead.

The game's skeleton is there. We have a finalized board, squares and circles that correspond to events and things to do, and even six adorable little colored car board pieces.

I've made the decision of shoving all of that + player sheets and garage onto Google Sheets (with associated rules on Google Docs) for a few reasons:

• I'm working with tools I already use and know well
• I can't be assed to use an online board game generator or an equivalent
• I don't want, like, or support the devs of, Tabletop Simulator (nor do I want to force all my friends to buy an overpriced piece of software just for something like this)

What's left for me to do right now is actually putting the meat on the proverbial skeleton. The game now needs content. It needs cars and events, and a lot of both.

Since this is a wholly virtual board game, things that would normally be decks of cards to be shuffled and drawn will instead be TTRPG-style dice and lookup tables.

I quickly realized that busting my ass actually designing card-shaped things (despite having some experience doing that) would be a waste of time. I do not want to spend an eternity making graphical assets to replicate a board game experience when I could be making a functional game and get closer to playtesting instead.

So instead of something "elaborate" like this...

...I decided to just boil it down to what matters and just do this instead.

I realize that brings TGBS closer to a more traditional TTRPG (if you want to call "traditional" a wholly virtual game that will probably be played on Discord with our dice bots and voice chat) but it's something. Getting closer to a playable state is the only thing that truly matters. Playtesting and impressions are everything but it can't happen until I add more cars and events to the database.

So right now, that's what I need to focus on. Adding cars to generate with dice and writing events to look up in a table.

Wow, finally a game about cars, it was a long time coming

Still, I'm excited to be finally writing some kind of game about another one of my life's passions, that being cars and racing. While MazeWorld remains my primary TTRPG project and the creation I am most proud of, the central focus of that game is firearms, and the world simply isn't built to accommodate vehicles. Creatively speaking, I had to do something different.

Yeah, it's probably strange, but I've been wanting to make a board game for years now after having made a few TTRPGs, and I've been looking for years to do something with cars and racing as a theme, so to finally have the flash of inspiration I had last night was liberating.

Let's just go with this as a teaser: What if the Gran Turismo 2 map menu had been a big board for a board game? And what if the board game is still, thematically, about building a cool garage, finding cool and unusual cars, and racing in funny events?

That's basically the concept for The Garage Building Simulator (TGBS), picked the name to riff on The Real Driving Simulator.

The picture I included is an intentionally low-rez Photoshop screencap of the WIP board, complete with Photoshop guide lines.

I only slept 5.5 hours and I stayed up until almost sunrise despite having work today but it's gonna be worth it...

If that sounds like fun to you, let me know? I'd love to see if there's interest in it...