Death Race

I played a game of Gaslands with Catherine yesterday. In the past I've shied away from two-player games after a bad experience with one a few years ago, but they seem to be popular on the Gaslands Facebook group, so I thought it would be worth trying again.

I had some teams set up from Thursday's game, so gave Catherine a choice of one of them. She went for a two vehicle Idris team. I went for a team of three Maxxine buggies. Interestingly neither team was particularly combat-orientated; the most powerful weapons were a couple of heavy machine-guns on my buggies and an SMG in one of Catherine's cars. 

We rolled for a scenario and got a Death Race. I set up this course, the structure of which can be seen in THIS POST. It allows you to go through some gates in either direction, and with some flexibility on the order as well. To be honest it was probably a bit too complicated, and I should have rotated the centre gate by 90 degrees and had the vehicles run straight at it from the start.

The start itself was messy, with my lead buggy doing a slide straight off the grid.

This just made life difficult for everyone.

However we soon got ourselves in to some semblance of order, and picked a route to the first gate.

My buggies did some deft dancing, and with three of them in action I soon picked up a stack of audience votes. However as we turned towards the gate I found they were getting in each other's way, and things got unpleasant. One buggy bounced off a wall, but fortunately didn't take any damage.

Catherine's car was first to cross Gate One and start firing; her SMG inflicted a few hits on my lead buggy. And a buggy can't take much more than a few hits.

We mostly negotiated Gate One with little difficulty, aside from Catherine's red performance car which had found its approach blocked by my team. She decided to take it the long way around and come in from the other side. At the top of the picture her black car Black Dog, was approaching Gate Two.

I'm not sure what stage we were at here; I was so involved in the game that I stopped taking photos, and with vehicles travelling in all directions I know things got very confusing. One of my cars - Tom Joad - tangled with Black Dog and I think both cars wiped out. My blue buggy, Blues Breaker, was set to cross Gate Four (which is just Gate One again) but got entangled with Catherine's performance car, Perfect Day, and had to about face. In the end I decided to drive right round and approach the gate from the other side, but this would leave me with a bit of ground to make up.

And here we are at the climax of the race. Black Dog had taken the lead and was moving fast, but I pushed my buggy up to top gear as well. 

But Black Dog is limited to Gear 5. I took Blues Breaker up to Gear 6 and was lucky enough to get the spin I needed to make a run for the finish-line.

The winner!

This was unique for a Gaslands game in that not a single vehicle was wrecked. Blues Breaker was down to its last couple of hits, and the final head-to-head with Black Dog had been hair-raising as I tried to stay in contention but not in a position where Catherine could end with me in range of her guns. But I managed it, and crossed the line with the vehicle just holding together.

The Maxxine buggies were fun to use, and a picked up a ridiculous number of Audience Votes from their antics, which I used to burn off my own hazards and to dump hazards on Catherine's cars. The tight track didn't really favour an Idris team, but they were designed around maneuver as much as speed, and did OK, as the close finish shows.