Gaslands!

Gaslands is really a victim of its own success at our club. Whenever we schedule a game it is often well-subscribed with people wanting to play, which means we have potential problems with finishing the game. Really anything over four players is inviting issues for a normal evening's play.

Our usual solution is to play a smaller game; one vehicle and a limited number of points. That's what we did this week when we had seven people wanting to play. We went with sponsors but limited everybody to one vehicle and only 25 cans. To be fair this made some sponsors unviable.

We got a race. Here's everyone on the start-line. Left to right we have:

Graham - Warden car
June - Slime car (first time our group has used Slime in a very long time)
Craig - Scarlett van
Me - Miyazaki performance car
Caesar - Rutherford performance car
Daniel - Rutherford car
Stuart - Verney car

And the course - up the left side, down the middle and then back up the right.

June got out into an early lead thanks to her vehicle's Pinball ability, that gave her an extra move.

Mind you, bouncing off my car gave me an extra move too. Everybody else was moving up to the first gate but things were going to get congested pretty fast.

Some deft driving from Caesar.

Some less deft driving from Craig, who still somehow got away with this (despite a few bumps).

Vehicles were now passing the first gate. I had my car (Red Barchetta) out in front, but had wiped out thanks to taking too many hazards evading the harpoon on June's vehicle.

Graham nearly rammed me. But there's a whisker of daylight there.

I got moving again, and avoided the awesome front-mounted artillery of  Daniel's Clockwork Angel only to fall foul of the crew's accurately applied handguns. Clockwork Angel was wrecked just after that, leaving June and Graham heading through Gate 2 towards a pile of wrecks and obstacles.

June described what happened next:

"I pivoted into Daniel's car with my rear drive, wrecking that car, causing it to skid into another wreck, clearing both. Then I placed some mines and shot Graham with my harpoon, doing 9 hits, reeling him into my side. We both smash attacked and both got brought down to 1 hull point. Then I wiped out and flipped, rammed into the gate, and exploded. The explosion hit Graham and wrecked him, making him skid forward into my mines."

In a couple of moves four of the seven vehicles were wrecked and destroyed.

The green car is Graham's wreck, replaced with a proxy because of the footprint and fragility of the original vehicle.

A new turn and a lot of people got to respawn, creating another traffic jam.

Craig contrived to park his bus across the next gate.

At that stage, with things still an entertainingly chaotic mess, we ran out of time. 

I think some decisions were made as to who was in the best position. I couldn't tell and it certainly wasn't me (I'd wrecked again).

What we did conclude was that seven vehicles with full sponsor rules, was still too much for an evening's play. To be fair we did have one Slime car and two performance cars, both of which get extra moves under certain circumstances. so they tended to add extra time. But a race tends to be one of the longer scenarios anyway, and we simply didn't have enough time for it. We now have at least three people who are confident enough to put on and run a game, though, so I think in future we may consider splitting anything over five players into two smaller games.

Some additional pictures - first from Caesar.

And then from June