Gaslands Overdrive

So we have a current club policy of a scheduled game each week now. Other games can be organised, but week on week you always know that there will be a game of ... whatever that week's game is. They were taken from a list of the most played games of last year, and one of them was Gaslands.

This week was the first scheduled Gaslands game of the year. Something else was scheduled to run alongside it. The person running that phoned in sick at the last minute. So nearly everyone who turned up that evening wanted to play Gaslands.

Anyway, that's how we ended up with a six-player game, including one person who had never played it before, and a complex team sponsor we'd never had used before.

We ended up rolling the obligatory Death race. Here are the fourteen (yes, fourteen!) cars on the start-line. We had three Idris teams, two Rutherfords and one Beverley (a team that has one actual vehicle and a number of subsidiary ghost vehicles). There were four teams of two vehicles and two with three vehicles.

The course was a figure-of-eight, of sorts.

Given the number of vehicles the start was surprisingly orderly, with no collisions (accidental or otherwise). Bryan's police bike quickly hit the first gate.

A couple of gear phases in and it all started to get a bit messy.

A few more vehicles made the first gate, but some had wiped out and were partially blocking it. It would be a few phases before they moved, meaning anything not through the gate already was going to have a lot of problems.

Bryan's bike forged ahead. Declan (first-time player) got a car through, but it wiped out. Still. at least it was through.

I got one of my cars through as well, and chased Bryan's bike through the second gate, ramming him. I did very little damage and, afterwards, I worked out that I could have rolled just as many dice shooting him.

So at the top of the picture you can see the vehicles that got through the first gate - Bryan's bike, one of my cars and both of Declan's. Although both of Declan's had wiped out, so weren't going anywhere for a bit.

Meanwhile the run to the first gate was still an absolute mess.

Here's Caesar explaining to someone how they might get out of the mess.

It took us 2 1/2 hours to get that far, so we called it a night. It was a fun game as far as it went, but far too unwieldy for an evening's play. We may need to consider our options for future scheduled Gaslands games if they attract this many players - four is really the maximum for a game you know will play to the finish. One possible option is for people to bring a regular 50 Can sponsored team, but also a 20 or 25 can single vehicle, as we have shown that races with one vehicle built on a few points with no sponsors can be a surprising amount of fun.