Gaslands Treasure Hunt

I played a game of Gaslands with Catherine this afternoon. I wanted to try out not only sponsors and perks but also the audience votes mechanism as well.

Catherine chose a Rutherford team - all missiles and rockets. I chose a team sponsored by the Warden - prison vehicles rigged for spectacular explosions.

It was also a chance for me to try out some terrain I'm working on made from precut balsa blocks, which I thought looked rather nice as concrete blocks arranged into walls. I need to base and paint them, but in principle they looked OK. I've modelled some as markers for gates and the start and finish lines for races; they have slots which allow billboards to be placed in them. For other types of games these could be used for advertising hoardings, so I made some adverts to go in them.

We played the Zombie bash scenario, which involves driving around 'collecting' zombies. In fact the 'zombies' are static, so could be represented by anything; bags of money, terrified pedestrians or whatever takes your fancy. I just used black counters. twenty of them.

I started off well, but on both turns one and two Catherine destroyed two of my three vehicles. My flamethrower car died on the starting line, whilst my ute managed one turn of movement before it to was blown to pieces. The cause? Heat-seeking missiles and some incredible damage rolls.

This left me with just a bike, against Catherine's two cars. However I was moving fast enough that her missiles couldn't catch me, and being nippier than her cars was able to match her in terms of collected tokens.

There was little direct combat. Catherine cleared up one side of the board and I kept well away from her. I did manage a high-speed run past her missile-car at one point, and lobbed a couple of Molotov cocktails at it, but they both missed. At one point I wiped out, and took a missile strike whilst I was motionless, but against the odds I survived. On my last hit though.

Catherine's cars drove slowly and carefully around, hoovering up victory points.

Honours were about even when I wiped out again. By this point Catherine had no missiles left, but she saw a chance to ram the bike.

I didn't stand a chance, and lost my third and final vehicle. However like all my vehicles it was rigged to put on a spectacular fireworks display when it went up. It exploded, damaging Catherine's car. I'd used audience votes earlier to put hazards on it, and the collision and explosion added more, causing it to wipe out and flip, taking more damage. The flip caused it to hit a wall. She ended up with only a couple of hull points left.

However by losing the like I lost a lot of my hard-won haul of counters. Although I would be able to use audience votes to respawn one of my vehicles on the next turn, Catherine was in a position to pick up a few more before then, and was almost certainly set to win. So I conceded the game to her.

We learned a few lessons about vehicle design from this game, and it was fun to use a bike for the first time; they're fragile but very mobile.