Death Race - Again

 We played Gaslands last night and, once again, managed to roll a Death Race. I think one day we will ignore the roll and force the game to be something else, as we seem to get more than our fair share of them.

We had four players:

Graeme running a Miyazaki team consisting of two performance cars (one of which was basically a tuk tuk)
New player June, who ran a two car Idris team.
Bailey, running his three vehicle Beverly team - one real performance car and two ghost buggies
Me running my James Bond DB5, Goldfinger, sponsored by Verney. A single performance car.

So we had several performance cars in play.

Here's the starting setup - the cars would race down the middle, around to the right and then back up the middle before heading to the left and a run to the finish.

We actually kept the terrain fairly open and this led to a relatively trouble-free and sensible start with few collisions. June got the pink car Lola into an early lead, closely followed by Graeme's red car. Goldfinger also made a strong start.

James Bond wiped out early though - blocked by Bailey's car, I used the Stunt-Driver trait to ignore it. But the hazards were too much, and I wiped out, flipping over Lola as I did so. On the plus side the random spin left me facing the way I wanted to go!

I had to sit out much of the first turn, but Graeme forged ahead into a commanding lead, that was eventually ended by one of Bailey's ghost cars leaving a trail of flames across the track, destroying the Miyazaki vehicle.

June's second car (Mr Apollo) had had a terrible start, failing to shift up a gear in the first turn and therefore being stuck out of the action for most of the turn. It made up for it in the second turn with a nitro-fuelled run through and beyond the first gate, and set off in pursuit of the one solid car on Bailey's team. In the distance you can see that Graeme got his tuk tuk into action, and that Lola was still running strong. I also had Goldfinger back in action, thanks to a ram from Bailey triggering my slip-away ability and giving me a couple of free activations.

Unfortunately not long afterwards we had to end the game as June had to leave. We still had half the track to go although I suspect that the race would have been fairly quick as enough vehicles were taking damage that the numbers would be thinning out fairly soon. Everyone still had a vehicle in the running, though, and to be honest it was still anybody's race.

This was a fairly smooth game - only having four players helped and Bailey had more of a grasp on the complexities of a Beverley team this time. June did really well for a first game, picking things up very quickly and running a good race from the start. Once again my Bond car proved interesting to run, but I still haven't had chance to fully show off all that it's capable of yet.

This game was one of the first we've had where the performance car's slip-away ability was used to any great degree. Often when performance cars are rammed they don't really have the room in front of them to usefully exploit their free post-ram move. But in this game there was enough space and we made the most of our freebie. The downside is that performance cars can't really take sustained ramming.

Thanks to everyone for a fun game.