Axles and Alloys II is a game of stupid automotive combat using Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars converted into post-apocalyptic, crudely armoured gun-toting wagons. Which then proceed to chase each other around a radioactive desert landscape attempting to destroy each other for absolutely no bloody good reason whatsoever. It's main influence is the toy car conversion scene that sprang up around Games Workshop's Dark Future in the 1980s along with my feeling that Dark Future was never a very good game in the first place and that Car Wars was too large and cumbersome to be worth playing.
The original Axles and Alloys, way before it ever got written up for web distribution back around 2001 or so was little more than a homebrew adaptation of Full Thrust with Hot Wheels cars
rather than Spacecraft. Axles and Alloys was the form the game took when dragged around the wargames convention scene in the English Midlands. It turned out to be surprisingly popular when released onto the intertubes for reasons I can't really grok but I suspect that it was a hit because it didn't take itself very seriously, offered a great outlet for the sort of creative urges
that enjoy converting Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars into post-apocalyptic, crudely armoured gun-toting wagons etc. and that previous attempts at this sort of thing (like the aforementioned commercial games) weren't actually very playable.
Designer: Owen Cooper