The Return Of Thomas

We played Gaslands last night, and I'd been asked if Thomas The Terror Engine could put in a reappearance. So I duly obliged.

We had four players and, as usually happens, we rolled Death Race as a scenario. Here's everyone on the starting grid:

The four teams were:

Caesar running two Mishkin buggies (Davros and Emperor Ming), armed with death-rays in turrets.
Bailey running a couple of Idris nitro-monsters
Darren running three mini-gun armed Rutherford cars
Me running Thomas, a Scarlett Bus with a harpoon, ram and lots of crew.

Here's the course. It's quite tight for a big locomotive, which makes you think that the designer had it in for me (The designer was me).

And they're off. Darren got his first car away. If you're familiar with Gaslands you'll know that the rest of that first phase will be chaos.

It was. But Bailey got his performance car away and into an early lead. Thomas was also in a strong position, lined up on the first gate and unopposed.

Thomas reached the first gate and weapons were now active. So I harpooned Bailey's car, spinning it around.

Back at the start-line things were still a shambles, and a couple of vehicles had wiped out already.

Thomas took a surprising lead. Bailey's car wrecked. Between us we created something of a roadblock - with a maximum gear of 3, Thomas wouldn't be moving for a couple of turns now, and everything behind him was piling on the speed.

More chaos and collisions ensued as we entered the second turn, and Thomas got moving again. Being a Very Ponderous Engine I took him the long way around on this turn, whilst Darren's car made a bid for the lead on the inside. Behind Thomas you can see one of Caesar's buggies that got to close to the mighty engine. A volley of gunfire shredded it.

Gunfire did for Darren's red car as well, but Caesar and Bailey were coming up on the inside as well. Thomas was taking hits from various weapons. He has a lot, but they were being steadily eroded. The death-rays were a concern as well; a good hit from a death-ray can cause a vehicle to be instantly vapourised, and Caesar had piled on the points to maximise how much damage they could do.

Bailey got his sporty car ahead of Thomas and on the way to the third gate. But I harpooned him and dragged him onto the blades. However the collision was enough to destroy both vehicles.*

The race went on for a little while afterwards, but we were running out of time (one of the players was on a time deadline, despite the rest of us being on a pre-public holiday No Need To Get Up Tomorrow mission), so we had to finish it with no clear leader.

However Caesar finished the evening in style, eradicating Darren's black car with a death-ray. 

I think Caesar would have probably taken his buggy to victory; once they get going they're very fast and maneuverable, and he hadn't taken a lot of damage thanks to his Mobile Mechanic trait allowing him to repair it. This is the first time I've used Thomas under the latest version of Gaslands, and (with the addition of the experimental wipeout and evade rules) he was surprisingly competitive.

*I realised afterwards that I forgot to give myself the audience votes for destroying Bailey's vehicle, which was a shame, since they would have given me enough to immediately respawn Thomas and stay in the race.

Update:

The stats for Thomas are:

Scarlett - Bus - Handling 2 - Max Gear 3 - Crew 8 - 50 Cans

Weapons: Harpoon (Front), Ram (Front), Heavy Machine Gun (Sides)

Traits: Battlehammer, Boarding Party, Terrifying Lunatic