Arena Of Death

Last night was our regularly scheduled Gaslands game and we had a good turn-out for it with five players (technically we had a sixth but since he'd not played before he decided to spectate this time). We had Bailey join us after two years away in the far north (Newcastle) and June returning to the fold after a long illness. So we were in a celebratory mood.

We rolled the Arena Of Death scenario. Here's the arena with terrain and vehilcles. At this point we'd forgotten to add the ten gun turrets, but they were added before we started. 

Clockwise from the top left:

Craig's unpainted Scarlett truck
Bailey's Beverley team with a performance car and two ghostly quad-bikes
June's slime team which I think was two performance cars.
Thomas the Terror Engine (Scarlett. Harpoons and Rams). Mine, naturally.
Caesar's stretch limo, run as a Mishkin bus with tracks and a nuclear engine. It was called Barbieheimer. 

There were a lot of rams in play. 

Early moves. There were a lot of gun turrets about, but they count as destructible obstacles and with several rams in play and two heavy vehicles a lot of the turrets didn't last long. Still, the ones that survived the initial onslaught did dole out a bit of damage. 

Initial movement saw June and Baileys teams head straight for each other, whilst the Barbieheimer and Craig's truck also homes in on them. Thomas plodded slowly after June's team. The practical upshot of all of this was that a lot of the vehicles ended up in a small portion of the table.

Barbieheimer takes up a lot of space and it was a mistake to have sent it into a terrain-rich area of teh table. But Caesar was lucky with spins and managed to avoid too many collisions. 

June brought some weird luck with her. And early shooting roll saw her roll four ones, and then she managed this shift dice roll - four spins. Great for a Maxxine team. Less good for hers. 

Anyway I missed a whole set of photos that saw a lot of shooting, smash and bash. Bailey's main car got destroyed (which caused the ghosts to disappear), and Barbieheimer fell foul of one of June's cars that was able to stack up a massive 18 dice ram on it. Mind you, June's car didn't survive the collision either. 

Basically in a couple of gear phases Bailey, June and Caesar lost all of the vehicles, mostly to collisions. 

I'd brought up Thomas as fast as possible, and even managed a few harpoon shots that had thrown the odd vehicle out of alignment. But by the time I got into the thick of the action, the action had gone. 

For a while there was just me and Craig fighting it out. I harpooned him and dragged him into the concrete barrier, but couldn't quite drag him over that onto my wheel-spikes as well. Fun to try though. 

Ordinarily vehicles can't respawn in Arena Of Death, but Bailey's team are an exception to that rule, and one of his cars came back. So now there were three of us in play. I harpooned Bailey's car and dragged it towards me. It ended up in the path of Craig's truck.

The truck was wrecked. 

And so was Bailey's car. 

As sole survivor, Thomas was the winner.

Basically it was a victory mostly achieved by being so slow that most of the fighting was over before I reached it. I just mopped up the survivors. 

I went for a version of Thomas with a harpoon firing to the front and a second firing to the sides, with rams on each of those facings to dole out damage to anyone dragged into contact. I had the crew to fire both harpoons as well, which meant with good positioning I could handle two vehicles a turn. As it was I only got to shoot at one each phase, but the side-mount proved useful in increasing my attack opportunities. The downside was that I had little else in the way of weapons and, for a Scarlett vehicle, a pretty small crew. This is a design the needs further testing.