Gaslands

 

Last week we gave Gaslands a rare outing as Andrew hadn't had chance to try them before.  To keep things simple we had a couple of cars each and raced around a figure of 8 track... I possibly made the track a bit too big but I was worried that my rubbish driving skills Andrew's lack of experience would make negotiating tight bends a bit tricky.  In hindsight a smaller arena would have upped the level of carnage which is always a good thing in Gaslands!

Each vehicle's weapons don't activate until they've gone through the first gate so Andrew took advantage of this by speeding through Gate 2 and immediately dropping mines in the gateway!

We'd decided to award points for completing a lap but more points for wrecking vehicles.  Andrew's lead car sped round the course and took the 1st lap before deciding that racing wasn't as much fun as concentrating on attacking enemy vehicles!

I spent a lot of the time trailing behind Andrew's lead car while his 2nd vehicle, a truck, struggled to get up to speed... his dice rolling was pretty atrocious for a lot of the game until he managed to line up a shot on one of my cars and managed to roll this...

... 6's count as 2 hits so this was pretty devastating, immediately destroying one of my cars!

He then proceeded to execute a very neat reverse turn and blast my other car into smithereens... I'm putting this down to beginners luck and definitely not my rubbish tactics!  Excellent fun and a game that I ought to get out more often

Gaslands - best of 3

 

Lockdown is nearing, if not an end, then at least a change in England's restrictions and the prospect of a proper game is on the horizon.

In the meantime my son and I have been digging out smallish games we can do at home,,, we haven't a decent sized table for a large game.  Luckily we both like skirmishy style games played in a relatively small area so we have plenty to choose from. The game of choice over the last couple of weeks has been Gaslands, which we played a lot last year but which hasn't been out for a while.

In previous games we haven't really used the rules around Sponsors and Perks properly and so we wanted to test these out.  In the rules there are a number of Sponsors... factions which give you different bonuses and skills but which can limit or influence how you play.  For example my son played a couple of games using the Mishkin Sponsor.  This is a group backed by Elon Musk a high tech masternind which gives the cars access to lots of flashy experimental tech, while I used the Highway Patrol who are good at pursuit and whose sirens can cause opponents cars to slow down or take hazard counters.  These defintely add a lot to the game.

We also tried some different scenarios: we've generally just stuck to the Death Race scenario which as it suggests, is a race around a track.  This time we tried a couple of scenarios, both set in an arena.  The 1st couple of games were using the Saturday Night Live scenario.  In this players gain Audience Votes by a changing rota of tasks (eg being the active player and deliberately choosing a move which gives you a hazard, or crashing into something)... votes are generally useful and can be spent throughout the game but in ths scenario they also give you victory points.   Thanks to my inept driving skills and repeatedly accidentaly crashing into things, I found I was somehow racking up points and somehow won the game.  

As we hadn't played for ages it took us a while to get going with this game so we stage a rematch using slightly different cars.

This proved a closer game but again I was able to win... partly because my son had concentrated on flashy high-tech wizardry at the expense of guns that actually caused damage, but also because he had opted for faster but more vulnerable vehicles which didn't stand up to being rammed.

A near miss by 2 trucks

A crash about to happen!

And another crash!

Wrecked vehicles everywhere!

Our 3rd game used a similar scenario... this didn't have the changing menu of audience votes but did have a selection of gun turrets deployed around the arena which indiscriminately attacked any car which came close.  This proved a very close game with us both being reduced to 1 vehicle each after a turn and the game ending in a hail of rocket fire as both our trucks blasted each other, with mine coming off worst.

The games were great fun and increasingly close as we got to grips with tactics.  I'm now feeling inspired to add some more vehicles into the mix and paint up the Lorry and Trailer I have waiting on the paint table. 

More Gaslands

Another game of Gaslands this week against my friend Anthony.  I set up the Death Match scenario as this seems a good introduction to the game.  This scenario is based around a figure of 8 track passing through 4 gates.  We decided weapons wouldn't arm until the first car had passed Gate 2 which would give him a chance to get used to the driving mechanics.  I shouldn't have worried about that...

We'd no sooner started than his Pick-up deliberately rammed into the side of my nice Performance Car.. a pretty clear statement of intent! Having taken quite a bit of damage my car used it's speed to get out in front and hopefully out of danger.

My other car, a smaller Buggy, didn't get far either before being hit by very accurate machine gun fire from Anthony's other car with a surprising number of 6s being rolled (which add extra damage) and was wrecked before it made it to gate 2.

We'd decided to respawn with a new randomly drawn car if we were wrecked so my buggy was replaced by a motorbike who was quickly shot up by Anthony's 

Pick-up who hadn't made it very far round the course due to some problems negotiating corners.  The bike took several hits and had to use his smoke to make a quick escape.

My Performance Car had tried get ahead of Anthony's other car but couldn't avoid the HMG fire and was also wrecked just after clearing Gate 3.  We'd decided to award a point for each wrecked car and 2 points for a succesful lap (this gives an incentive for racing as well as just attacking other cars) which meant Anthony was 2 points up and had a clear run to the final gate.  

I decided to push my bike to gear 6 (which is the maximum and makes cornering a bit tricky).  The bike zoomed up behind the enemy car, taking shots at it with the rider's shotgun before pouring out smoke and spinning wildly in a last ditch to cross the line first and tie the game

Just before I could cross the line Anthony's car raced through the smoke, picking up hazard tokens in the process... the driver leaned out and with a single shot from his pistol wrecked the bike which skidded to a halt inches from the winning line!

Another great game. I'm really impressed with this as a system... easy to pick up (clearly too easy as Anthony wiped the floor with me!!!) and really adaptable.

Gaslands Death Race

Earlier in the week we were able to try out Gaslands with 4 players on a larger table, with some excellent terrain supplied by Eric the Shed.

We used the 'Death Race' scenario which is pretty much as you'd expect... a race around a circuit.   We laid it out as a figure of eight to ensure maximum opportunity for crashes although as usual most of the chaos happened as soon as we reached the 1st bend!

In order to save a bit of time we'd pre-made a selection of cars and trucks and randomly gave each player 2 vehicles.  This does take away from part of the fun of the game which is designing your own car and picking weapons etc but it did save a lot of time.

On the start line...

We decided to award each player a point for wrecking an opponents vehicle, and 2 points for completing a lap.  In our practice game we found there wasn't an incentive to complete laps when you could just concentrate on detroying the opposition... this way there was an option for players who wanted to race rather than fight.  In the event awarding points per complete lap was a bit optimistic as only one vehicle actually made it all the way round by the end of the evening

And they're off....

We played on a 6' x 4' table with some large rocky cliffs at the corners and plenty of rocks and crates etc scattered around.

2 players had a motorbike each and these sensibly accelerated away to get away from the heavier pack of cars and trucks.  The 2 bikes fought a high speed duel all the way round... fighting it out with pistols and machine guns at breakneck speeds.  Somehow they both managed to just avoid wiping out although it was a close call.

The bikes speed off ahead of the pack

One of the bikes used his smoke dispensers very effectively to screen his bike from enemy shooting and to annoyingly block part of Gate #2.  The 2nd bike then added some dropped Caltrops into the gate making it extremely hazardous.  By the end of the game one of my cars would end up wrecked in the gate as well!

On the first bend after Gate #1 it all went wrong.  I managed to spin into some rocks and was then rammed.  My sporty Performance Car never managed to get out of gear #2... potentially you can get up to gear 5 or 6 although this can make manouvering pretty tricky as the bikes found out.  Both my cars were pretty beaten up after being rammed, crashing and being shot and were then finished off when Callum's truck unloaded his flamethrower onto both of them, giving him 2 points.

Meanwhile up at Gate #4 Eric the Shed's motorbike had pulled ahead of rival Mark's and crossed the line at the gate tying the scores for a draw, with Mark's bike in close pursuit.  

The game worked really well... within a couple of turns everyone had grasped the movement rules (including not picking up a movement template unless you were going to use it) and how to use the Skid Dice to accelerate and manouevre and hopefully everyone enjoyed the game.

With hindsight there are a couple of things I'd do differently.  Everyone had 2 cars or bikes to begin with but actually just having one would have been better and would have sped up play.  Players could then re-start with a new car if their first one was wrecked.  We also ruled that weapons didn't arm until cars had passed gate #2... otherwise it would have been carnage on the start line.  Because of the chaos on the first bend we then allowed everyone to arm up after gate 1 as we were never going to make it as far as gate #2!!  Ideally using an online spreadsheet car builder to let people build there own cars in advance would be fun but as onnly a couple of us had played I think using the pre-made cars was best in this case.

Great fun and suitable chaotic... Thanks to Eric the Shed for hosting and supplying the brilliant terrain!  

Gaslands

I've been eyeing up Gaslands...the Car Wars style game that came out a couple of years ago from Osprey.  I loved Car Wars when it first came out and still have my Ziploc bag of the 1st edition that I bought from Games Gallery in Glasgow in the very early 80s.

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....