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Setting

True to the style of both the movie and the alternative comic, West End Games' The World of Tank Girl is a fun and gratuitously violent romp through a post-apocalyptic setting in which Earth is mostly a desert wasteland under the thumb of the Big Business Corporation—especially it's Water and Power division. Players take the role of intrepid heroes and lunatics trying to survive using only their wits, skills, and really big guns.

System

And there are plenty of guns. Fans of the movie and the comic books will recognize the Dangerball, the Plasma-powered Flesh-Reversing Rifle, and many other classics. Of course, with a name like "Tank Girl," the game also has plenty of tanks, motorcycles, 18-wheelers, and various other vehicles. It also includes new vehicle combat rules for Masterbook so you can recreate "The Australian Job," Tank Girl's battle with Water & Power truckers, or that old Mountain Dew commercial. Other optional rules include a hit location system to make combat more bloody and less deadly.

While The World of Tank Girl book provides the setting, the Masterbook system provides the basic rules. There are 8 characteristics, with all skills related to a base characteristic. To attempt an action, you roll 2d10, add any modifiers to your dice, then look up that result on a table (printed on every character sheet) to find a Bonus Number. You add the Bonus Number to your skill, add any Result Modifiers, and look up the final sum on the Success Chart to determine the result of your actions. Even though this is complicated at first, it only took a couple hours of play for the GM and players to get the hang of the system.

Masterbook also uses special cards (the Masterdeck) in an interesting way. Every combat round has a specified action which will earn a player a card if performed successfully. This includes actions that would normally be thought of as unrelated to combat such as maneuvering, taunting opponents, and so on. The cards confer various benefits (e.g., die modifiers) or can create plot twists (e.g., the "romantic subplot" card). The result is a system that encourages roleplaying rather than the player and GM rolling dice at each other until a character falls over from loss of hit points.

Style

Even if you never play a game, the rulebook is funny and entertaining to read and captures the appropriate Tank Girl atmosphere. There are suitably rude comments for the reader and the editor from Tank Girl herself throughout the text, and the same style is found throughout the rules. For example, character generation includes a hilarious list of 100 "useless skills" (e.g., "is good at giving wet willies") and the pregenerated characters include psychotic punk rockers, insane scientists, koala bikers, and religious kangaroos. There is no original art as such. The art on the box, cover, and throughout the interior consists entirely of line drawings taken from the comics and stills from the film. Like the "flavor text," I found this truly enhanced the feel of the game.

Problems

The biggest weakness of The World of Tank Girl (besides the Masterbook system's complexity) is that it isn't ready to play "out of the box." The Masterbook rules don't fully describe basic weapons or equipment and any "SFX" (e.g., super-science, psychic powers, miracles, or magic) must be developed from scratch, using Masterbook's complicated system. Also, even though The World of Tank Girl includes an adventure and a number of ideas for the creative GM, a lot of work is necessary before the first play session. Since no adventures or supplements were published for the game, the prospective GM will be left to her own devices.

In Conclusion

The game is certainly fun to read, and I would recommend it on that basis alone—particularly to fans of the Tank Girl movie or comic book. There is also a great deal of potential for fun play for a group willing to put the work into filling in the gaps and learning the Masterbook system.

Even though it is not available directly from West End Games anymore, The World of Tank Girl is frequently available from online auctions or vendors specializing in out-of-print games. The World of Tank Girl was originally sold both on its own and in a boxed set with Masterbook rules, a set of the Masterdeck cards, and two ten-sided dice.