Gaslands initially came out as one of the Osprey 'blue book' rules but was fairly quickly expanded and reissued as 'Gaslands Refuelled'. As far as I can see the rules are largely the same in both versions but there is are a lot of extra background bits in Refuelled... factions, campaign rules etc.
One of the pleasures of Gaslands is that it's cheap (you can take the boy out of Scotland...). Although you could use any scale cars, most people use Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars which can be picked up for a song in toy shops or supermarkets or even more cheaply on eBay or at car boots.
The other real pleasure is that you then get to distress and remodel the cars to create Mad Max style vehicles.
There seems to be a whole industry out there of people 3D printing and selling guns, armour, spiky bits etc to weaponise your cars with. Northstar Miniatures produce a really handy set of bits to add to cars. I bought one of these along with some plastic templates and a dice set to help with the game. There are free card templates in the rulebook and online but my nice shiny red ones look much cooler! Like a lot of rules these days the game relies on special dice...again you can use normal d6 and convert the result (a bit fiddly) or print off the symbols on labels and then stick them a d6 (even more fiddly) so buying the dice as a deal with the templates seemed sensible.
The rules are pretty straightforward... all movement is determined by picking a template: but of course you can only use certain ones depending on your speed. One optional rule we liked is that if you pick up a template you then have to use it, even if the results aren't what you intended. I quickly found I was rubbish at spatial awareness and judging distance... more on this later.
You can also roll dice which have positive and negative effects. Sometimes the negatives can actually be helpful... they might for example allow you to spin or slide your way out of trouble but will give you additional hazard tokens (which are a bad thing... get too many and you 'wipeout'))
Combat is very simple... roll to hit, roll to save and then remove hull boxes. I was actually expecting more critical effects etc but perhaps these would have slowed the game down too much.
So in anticipation of a game later in the week my son and I decided to have a practice game this weekend. We hastily built a course using some gate models from Blotz (gates are quite important but you don't actually need a model like these...just some kind of marked line), fences marked by coffee stirrers and rocks using some stones from the garden. The cloth is actually a blanket the dogs sometimes use... luckily they didn't mind. We took 3 cars each although Callum had a motorbike instead of one car and we'd selected a range of weapons so we could try them all out. These included standard machine guns but also some extras like oil slick and napalm droppers. Callum had also chosen a special one-shot sonic weapon which didn't cause any damage but caused the target to flip over and crash.
On the starting line...
My 1st move with my nice performance car was straight into a pile of rocks... like I said, no spatial awareness! Luckily I wasn't going very fast....
Having got past the rock I now seem to be heading for a fence!
Crunch... Callum's truck hits me from behind with a front-mounted ram
The bike and my Landrover have a head-on crash... not a good idea if you're on a bike although somehow he survived it! My Landrover had already been flipped onto some rocks by the nasty sonic attack.
Gaslands is really great fun and brought back lots of memories of pushing cardboard Car Wars chits around the table but with the added fun of modelling your own cars. The only drawback is that buying the cars is quite addictive... now I just need to get a bus and a lorry....
Fun looking game.
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