New Year, New Gaslands

Our first club night of the year kicked off with Gaslands as the main game. As ever it was well subscribed so we took the step of running two games instead of one. Each game had four players. That way we could use 50 can teams and not worry too much about how many vehicles were in use; games with five or more players start to bog down if there's too many toys in play.

I ran one table whilst Caesar ran the other. Coincidentally we both rolled the Death Race scenario.

This time I kept the course small and simple - a start, two gates and then a run to the finish. It could have possibly used a final gate between the blue and brown containers, but that's something to consider for a future game.

The four teams were:

June - Two Slime vehicles - Both cars
Graeme - Two Warden vehicles - Both coffin cars
Bailey - Three Scarlett vehicles - He ran two drag-racers and a motorbike
Me - Five Warden vehicles - They were all  coffin cars each with nothing but a box of grenades and the will to explode.

Here's the start and the course.

Three of the teams had vehicles with rams, so the carnage started even before the first gate. Bailey got a drag-racer off to a great start, and Graeme went well too. Then June activated her first vehicle; a ram festooned lunatic that smashed its way through both Graeme and Bailey's cars to take a strong lead.

Back near the start I caused chaos by ramming my own vehicles in an attempt to destroy some of them whilst there were plenty of targets for the explosive collateral damage. Vehicle 1 did eventually explode, causing some damage, but not as much as I'd hoped.

Vehicles 4 and 5 hared off, lost control, crashed and exploded without damaging anything else.

But the mess near the start had thinned things out a lot. Graeme had lost both of his vehicles already and Bailey was about to lose his final drag-racer (out of shot to the right) to a complete lack of control. June's car, top left, was working its way around the course. I sent one of my cars, bottom middle, to intercept.

A crash and an explosion saw June's car badly damaged, but not destroyed.

I had now lost four of my five vehicles. The blue counters are the Audience Votes I now had.

At this stage there were only three vehicles left in play. In addition to my car there was June's (now making a run for the finish) and Bailey's respawned drag-racer.  The drag-racer had been destroyed by June's car, so he went after her in revenge.

In the dice-tray are the dice he rolled for one smash attack - around twenty of them. He had a ram, piles of hazards and Battlehammer and was going at full speed. The carnage was ... immense. Both his and June's vehicles simply ceased to exist.

This left my Vehicle 2 as the only survivor and, therefore, the winner of the race. That was lucky.

I like my explosive coffin-car team. It plays faster than you think as there are basically no perks or special rules to keep track off. Moves are simple and generally fairly obvious.

It should be noted that no-one fired a shot in our game; most people never got vehicles to the point where weapons were hot or, if they did, they never had any viable targets.

On the other table there were fewer vehicles; I think three of the four teams were one vehicle each. 

I ended with Caesar;'s Miyazaki car making a run to the finish whilst being shot to pieces by Stuart's Rutherford monster-truck. Caesar did a classic Gaslands finish, piling on hazards to flip over the finish line to destruction.

Two games worked well as a way of dealing with the large number of players we always get for Gaslands.I think I'd plan it for any game with six or more people. Five is kind of the worst number we can get; no sensible way to create two games, but pushing it for one game.