Big Rig & The Final 5 – A Thunder Road: Vendetta Expansion Review

Two brand-new crews hit the scrolling highway — a hulking three-section war-rig and a swarm of five motorcycles — pushing Thunder Road: Vendetta to five players.

Big Rig & The Final 5 is the first crew expansion released for Thunder Road: Vendetta, Restoration Games' dice-driven racing-and-combat reimagining of the 1986 classic. Where the base game gives every player a matched set of three cars, this box hands two players something completely different: one crew drives a single, unstoppable three-section war-rig, while the other commands a pack of five nimble motorcycles. Neither plays like anything in the base box, and that's the entire point — this is the expansion that turns a four-player demolition derby into a five-player free-for-all with two genuinely new ways to wreck the competition.

Board-game.co.uk's review of the expansion praised the design of both new crews but noted the Big Rig makes the standard cars feel comparatively plain once it's on the table — its author recommended picking up Choppe Shoppe and Carnage at Devil's Run first if you can only afford one expansion, since those add depth back to the original vehicles rather than overshadowing them.

Unboxing & Overview — Watch First

The Two New Crews

What's in the Box

How Does It Play?

The Final Five crew gets six dice each round instead of the base game's four — five for the individual bikes, one for its command board — but only assigns two dice per turn across three turns. Bikes can drift into a space already holding another vehicle without causing a slam, and each bike can coast further than a standard car. The trade-off is fragility: a single point of damage takes a bike out of the race, so staying mobile and out of ramming range matters more than with the sturdier base-game vehicles.

The Big Rig plays almost like the opposite philosophy. Instead of finesse, it leans on brute force — it can fire both forward and backward, and its slams shove aside anything unlucky enough to be in its path. Reviewers have consistently flagged that once the Big Rig is on the table, the standard cars can feel underpowered by comparison, which is why several outlets recommend treating this as a "second or third expansion" purchase rather than the first one, best paired with Choppe Shoppe for cars that can hold their own against it.

Beyond the two new crews, the box's core appeal is straightforward: it turns Thunder Road: Vendetta into a proper five-player game (six with an unofficial house rule), which matters a lot for groups who regularly play with a full table. It doesn't change the base game's dice-luck-driven, chaos-over-control identity — it just adds two very different flavors of chaos to it.

Rating Breakdown

Pros & Cons

Who Is This Expansion For?