Arena of Death

We played more Gaslands on Thursday. I still haven't painted my terrain.

Anyway, I used a modified table for determining what scenario we'd play, which gave better odds for the non-race scenarios, whilst still making the Death Race more likely. We felt that this would encourage the design of teams that weren't just organised for racing on the basis that there's a better than 50% chance of the scenario being a race.

So we rolled and .. we got The Arena of Death!

This is a pure combat scenario. There are no respawns, so once a vehicle is destroyed it doesn't come back. And victory goes to the player who has the last functioning vehicle. That's it. Dotted about the field are gun-turrets which inflict a small, but annoying, amount of damage on anything that passes within a certain distance of them.

Vehicles start at various points on the edges. Caesar had an Idris team of two bikes and a car, built for a combination of speed and firepower. He was set up close to Jason's Mishkin team, featuring the obligatory experimental nuclear reactor.

I was trying out an interesting 50 can 'Last Of The V8 Interceptors' build from the Gaslands Facebook group. It seemed to have an interesting combination of abilities, although brutal combat isn't high on its list of capabilities.

Elsewhere Dave was running a couple of cars sponsored by Slime, and mostly equipped with hand-weapons, whilst Ed was running a Batmobile, sponsored by Idris and featuring a turret-mounted laser.

Jason pushed his big truck into the centre, whilst his car became entangled with Caesar's motorcycles.

He rammed one of Caesar's bikes, destroying it, but wiped out in the process, ending up facing Caesar's other bike. The ensuing, unavoidable head-on collision destroyed both vehicles, mainly since Caesar, seeing no escape for his bike, pushed it up to full speed before impact. Because this is GASLANDS!

I'd been playing it safe with the Interceptor, but came under fire from Jason's big truck, taking a fair bit of damage. I returned the favour with some cunning use of my ability to manage hazard tokens, and Jason wiped out.

Unfortunately I then decided that destroying a gun-turret by ramming would be a great idea. It wasn't.

Weakened, the Interceptor strayed into range of Caesar's rocket-armed car, and I was wrecked, putting me out of the game.

Having wiped out, Jason was slowly trying to get back into the action. Dave rammed him head-on, eliminating him.

Dave had played a quiet, safe game up to this point, but now Caesar and Ed were quietly cruising the edges of the table building up audience votes for their high-speed hi-jinks, and Dave went hunting for them.

Dave's red car engaged Caesar, but Caesar's rockets finished him off.

Meanwhile his other car was chasing Ed's Batmobile.

Some cunning use of audience votes, followed by a grenade attack, saw the Batmobile destroyed.

This left two cars in play - Dave's car loaded with pistol-armed lunatics with far too many grenades and molotov cocktails for their own good, and Caesar's rocket-armed performance car that was, by this stage, very low on ammo.

Caesar fired the last of his rockets, reducing Dave to his last hit. In this state Dave would actually accumulate audience votes fairly swiftly, thanks to his team's special Live Fast ability.

With no viable options left, Caesar rammed Dave, only needing to inflict one hit, and hoping that the collision damage on himself wouldn't be too excessive.

It wasn't. Dave crashed, and amazingly didn't explode (there was only a one in six chance of this). The explosion would have taken Caesar's car out as well, although in fact he would still have won as, for the brief moment before the explosion, he would have been Last Man Standing.

This was a fun scenario, even though it does leave players knocked out of the game, possibly from early on. We did forget one small rule to do with audience votes, which would have kept some players invested, a mistake we won't make next time.