Gaslands Prison Blues

We played an epic game of Gaslands last night, with five players; the largest game we've done for a long time. Despite that we ran it through to a conclusion in around three hours of play.

Here are the five teams on the starting grid. The positions were not strictly legal according to the rules, but all of the players were happy with everything being moved up a little to accommodate one very large vehicle and one very large team.

The teams were:

Bryan running an Idris truck and buggy (the purple vehicles)
Stuart, running a Rutherford team consisting of Rock Lobster (front right on the grid) and The Analog Kid (the green car in the middle)
Bailey, running the Spongebob Speedboat sponsored by Rusty's Bootleggers
Caesar, running a Mishkin team consisting of the Barbie Bus and a supporting motorbike
Me, running a Warden team consisting of five no-frills explosive coffin cars. 

This was the course. A tight run to the first gate, followed by some more open racing with a crossover in the middle to bring down any leaders.

As you would expect the start was a complete mess, since the starting grid was slightly wider than the first gate creating a minor funnel. Added to this was the fact that both Caesar and Bailey had long vehicles that, after an initial bout of rear-end collisions, found themselves unable to move because they couldn't get a clear final position.

Off to the right you can see Caesar's bike, which was just designed to race around garnering shift results for the bus using its SatNav ability. I sent a car off in that direction as well, mostly to loop around and cause trouble with the racers as they negotiated the rest of the course. It wouldn't pass Gate One and get active weapons, but since the vehicle itself was a massive bomb I wasn't worried by this.

I didn't get any more pictures of the messy race to Gate One, but it was, as you'd expect, carnage. Bailey's speedboat became the filling in a vehicle sandwich and, rammed from every direction, was quickly wrecked. Bryan's buggy was also destroyed, followed by his truck. Stuart lost The Analog Kid as well. Meanwhile I managed to get two of my coffin-cars through the mayhem, and into an early lead. A third one followed them, having passed through the carnage almost unscathed, mostly because of the gaps created by various losses.

Stuart got Rock Lobster free of Gate One, and into the race. The Barbie Bus also made it, but was steering wildly and flipped. With an experimental nuclear engine onboard this was fatal; the bus exploded. The explosion took out Car 4 from my team which wrecked and exploded, but sadly too far from any other vehicle to do any damage.

This thinned out the active vehicles considerably. I still had four cars in the running, Caesar still had his bike in play, now turning rapidly to start running the course properly, Stuart had Rock Lobster in a solid third place and Bryan had got his truck running again and past Gate One. Car 1 and Car 2 held the lead in a fine display of formation driving.

Stuart raced after them, blasting away with his mini-gun and slowly whittling down both lead vehicles. They turned sharply to do the 180 degree turn between Gate Three and Gate Four, passing over some soft sand in the process.

Car 2 wiped out at that point, and ended up facing the wrong way. Car 1 survived some more shooting from Stuart, but was down to its last couple of hits.

The end of a chain of cranage. Out of shot at the top of the picture, Car 3 had cut across the course and rammed Bryan's truck. The truck wrecked and crashed into my Car 5, which also wrecked. And in doing so it exploded in a massive fireball, which finished off Rock Lobster. So three vehicles were destroyed in one moment, and with it the only serious opposition to Car 1 and Car 2.

Car 3 looped the wrong way through Gate Two, then deliberately collided with the supports. Naturally the collision destroyed it, and it exploded, with the explosion taking out Caesar's bike.

This left Car 1 and Car 2 as the only active vehicles in play, just as Car 1 raced across the finish line for a win anyway.

A win for The Warden, and back to prison for the crew of Car 1 who merely gained a stay of execution as their prize.

A five car team does slow the game down a little, but it helps if you know the rules fairly well, so can speed through their moves, and also the fact that they have nothing in the way of special abilities or unusual weaponry to keep track of means that each individual vehicle's actions were resolved quickly.

Bailey had to leave halfway through the game, so didn't respawn his speedboat, but otherwise we got a five-player game run through to to a finish in three hours, plus half an hour setup at the start.

Update: A fun feature of my team is that they often got to ram other vehicles with impunity. When you collide with someone they can choose to smash (do damage) or evade (avoid damage from the other vehicle). I consistently chose to smash. The opposing cars sensibly chose to evade, because if they did damage back to me and my vehicle was destroyed then they'd be immediately adjacent to a very large bomb. Yes, all that ramming meant I accumulated hazards, but that just meant I was more likely to flip, wreck and explode, so who cared?