Gaslands - Capture The Flag

We played Gaslands last night and the fickle random scenario generator gave us another flag-based game. Unlike the previous game where the flags were on the board, in this version one vehicle in each team carries a flag. To free it up for capture the vehicle has to be destroyed and then you have to drive over the flag. You win if a vehicle is carrying two flags. Sounds easy, but it isn't.

We had four players. I ran a Rutherford team with two vehicles, Bailey ran his pair of Idris speed demons, Stuart, in his first game, ran a couple of Warden vehicles equipped for ramming and close-range combat and Caesar went mad and ran a Mishkin bus with lots of guns and an nuclear engine.

We'd played a couple of gear phases before I thought to take any pictures. At this stage all vehicles were running and so all the flags were safely tucked away.

I made the big mistake of ramming the bus with my mortar-armed truck, Marvellous Engines Of Resistance. Since the bus is a heavyweight vehicle and I wasn't I ended up taking more damage, despite my ram. To the right is my other car - the flamethrower-toting Back In Black.

The flamethrower in action - burning Bailey's performance car. It didn't destroy his vehicle outright, but it did catch fire and that got him on the next activation. Since it was Bailey's flag vehicle, that release one flag into the wild.

Stuart showed how it is done - he rammed the bus with Dreamline. Again the weight disparity caused issues, but Stuart's team could pile on extra damage when ramming by adding hazards.

The ram didn't destroy the bus, but the subsequent gunfire from Stuarts car did. And that was another flag up or grabs (the pink counter).

I then lost Marvellous Engines Of Resistance, and that was yet another flag available.

Bailey had picked up his own flag with his second vehicle, and was heading for the flag left by Caesar's bus.

Unfortunately with the start of a new turn, Caesar could respawn the bus, and with pole position managed to nip in and grab his flag back before Bailey could get there. The two vehicles met in a head-on collision that left them both on their last point of damage.

An overview of the action. Stuart still had two active vehicles and was holding a flag on one of them. Bailey and Caesar also had flags on their vehicles. I had nothing.

I'm not sure why I took this photos of the bulldozer Natural-Born Killer, but here it is.

The bus was no wildly out of control, and eventually collided with some more terrain which wrecked it again. Totally destroyed this time (although it could respawn at the team's start point).

Back In Black also went out of control, whilst picking up a flag, and flipped, got wrecked, exploded and dropped the flag.

There's a gap in the photo record here, but at some point none of us had active vehicles in play. A new turn came around and we all respawned one vehicle. Bailey and I were well-positioned to drive in fast and grab a flag each.

Bailey made a run for a second flag. Caesar's bus, back in action for the third time, zipped in and unleashed a volley of gunfire which destroyed Bailey's vehicle. But the fickle nature of Gaslands is that even a vehicle in the process of being wrecked can collect items or cross finish lines, and that's what Bailey did. His car disintegrated into a mass of twisted metal against a concrete bunker, but in passing he had collected a second flag for the win.

That's two wins in a row for Bailey.