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. 

Saturday Night Live For Two

Last night was Gaslands week at the Gong Garage Gamers, but with one person crying off sick and others involved testing a game for a forthcoming show we ended up with just two players. 

We rolled a scenario and got Saturday Night Live which, with hindsight, is probably not the best scenario for two people as it involves some quite complex interactions to get the Audience Votes flowing for points. 

Caesar brought two Rutherford performance cars armed with mini-guns. 

I wanted to try out a team for The Order Of The Inferno, to see how it worked. It involves trying to set things on fire, including your own vehicles. I ran:

Jockey Full Of Bourbon - A truck with a flamethrower and napalm dropper
Stay On These Roads - A buggy with a napalm dropper
Picture To Burn - A bike with, you've guessed it, a napalm dropper

They were loaded with perks to repair hits and hazards on each other but to also ignite themselves when it became important to score votes. 

I set up a fairly open arena, and we started on opposite sides of it. 

Here's Jockey Full Of Bourbon (foreground) and Stay On These Roads. The bike had gone off elsewhere. 

One of Caesar's cars came straight at my vehicles, guns blazing but inflicting little damage. However with a spot-prize for initiating a ram, Caesar went for it, turning sharply back  and hitting my buggy. 

It was enough to wipe out his car. My truck shaved very close to it, unleashing flaming death from its side-mounted flamethrower as it did so, and destroying the vehicle. 

Caesar's other car was after my bike but I managed to zip past him before he could shoot at me and dropped some napalm just to be extra mean. Unfortunately Caesar managed to avoid the flames. 

Mind you, in avoiding the flames he nearly came a cropper, narrowly avoiding a collision with a shipping container.

Anyway, after a bit more driving around I got a chance to plonk some more napalm in front of Caesar's surviving vehicle. And I'd set my truck on fire so I could earn Audience Votes once Caesar burst into flames.

He drove through the napalm without taking a hit.

Unfortunately in setting up the napalm my buggy wiped out, crashed into a wall and was destroyed. 

Keen to pick up some sponsor-orientated Audience Votes by setting something on fire I went for another option. I set my bike on fire and then deliberately crashed it into Caesar's car. A collision with something in fire sets you on fire. 

Caesar tried to evade the damage from the bike, so amazingly I survived the crash and actually dealt a decent amount of damage. But I'd misjudged how many hazards Caesar's car had. The crash caused it to wipe out. Wiping out dumps all hazards. And if a vehicle has no hazards any fire it has goes out. 

So once again I'd failed to set something on fire, and now my truck was burning and I had nothing to show for it but damage. Still, the truck soon wiped out and wasn't on fire any more.

The current spot-prize involved ramming an enemy vehicle. Caesar went for it. 

My truck was wrecked. Caesar now had the only vehicle in play until I respawned.

At that point we called the game. We both had 7 or 8 victory points but needed 7 or 8 more to finish the scenario. Neither of us were in much of a position to collect them through sponsor abilities, so it would now be a long slog via spot-prizes. We decided to end the game and call it a draw.

Really we needed at least one more player. But for all that it was a fun game and I found it a useful exercise in trying to understand how best to use a sponsor I'd not tried before. 

Gaslands - Capture The Flag

We had four players for Gaslands last night. This meant that we were happy to go with a 50 can game. And three of us brough single 50 can vehicles.

We rolled Capture The Flag, which is an interesting scenario with just one vehicle. You have to have a flag on one of your vehicles (obvious choice if you have just one) but it's deposited in the arena if you wrecked. It can then be picked up. You win if you have two flags on one of your vehicles. Obviously harder to do if you have multiple vehicles, but fun with one vehicle.

Anyway, Daniel has a single flamethrower-armed truck from the Order Of The Inferno. Craig had a Scarlett truck, but hadn't really read through how Scarlett works, so had a less than optimal design. Caesar had two trucks, sponsored by Rutherford and both equipped with front-mounted tank guns. And I bucked the trend with my James Bond Aston Martin DB5 - a Verney sponsored performance car. 

After some early moves there'd been a bit of shooting. Biond had inflicted a hit with his machine-guns, whilst one of the tank-guns had failed to make an impression on the DB5 (it's tough).

The DB5 in action. 

Daniel chased down Bond and set the DB5 on fire. 

It took some speedy driving to get to a unfrequented part of the arena and put out the fire. You stay on fire so long as you have hazards, so I had to dump them fast. Best way to do that is to wipe out, which I did in such a way as to stay in the game for that gear phase.

Daniel did a slick turn around an obstacle with his truck. 

Caesar shot him, and his vehicle wrecked. This dropped the flag.

You can just see the purple flag tucked in behind the obstacle. And Bond had a plan. Of course. 

Meanwhile Craig's mini-gun armed truck was hunting Caesar's other truck. I think Caesar was taking a bit of damage. 

Back to Bond's plan. Caesar was lining up for a run on the flag (out of shot). So I had to be faster. Being in a perfoamnce car, that was easy. The rest was pure Gaslands. Step One: Ram the obstacle. 

 

Step Two: On the next gear phase, ignore the obstacle, drive through it and pick up the flag. A win!

Also drive through oil and loose gravel. The hazards were stacking up. 

We finished the activation phase. The DB5 was wildly out of control, but Bond had already won. However his move finished next to Caesar's truck, so it would have been rude not to use the Eureka! perk to magic up a one-shot tank-gun, and blow his truck to smithereens. 

Bond then wiped out. And flipped ...

...  over the arena wall. 

Technically that disqualifies a vehicle, but the game was won once the flag was picked up, so the later bits were just extra chrome. Bond grabbed the flag, took out an enemy in passing with a gadget and then escaped into the night. 

What a hero!

Saturday Night Live

Thursday saw me playing Gaslands for the first time in nearly six months. The past couple of times it had come up as a game at the club I had been otherwise engaged, so missed it.

We were supposed to have five players, but two couldn't make it at the last minute so ended up playing with three, 50 Cans each. And two of us had gone for 50 Can single vehicles. So this was a small game by Gaslands standards.

We rolled up Saturday Night Live as the scenario, which basically involves grabbing Audience Votes by any means possible, including via a number of scenario-specific spot prizes. The teams were:

Caesar, running two Mishkin buggies
Other Daniel, running a single truck sponsored by the fire-themed Order Of The Inferno
Me, running a single Rutherford heavy truck with a turreted tank-gun (Siberian Khatru)

Here's Casar's opening move, as his best buggy zipped forward.

Siberian Khatru lumbered into life and blew the buggy away with a single shot. This scored Audience Votes for me (lots of damage) and for Caesar (having a vehicle wrecked).

Caesar's other buggy lasted one gear phase longer before being flamed by Other Daniel's vehicle. Don't worry; this scenario has respawn rules, so one of Caesar's vehicles could come back.

I plodded around firing my big gun, and picking up votes for damage. However I was running out of ammunition.

At this moment the ever-changing spot prize was for performing a t-bone ram on another vehicle. Ramming a heavy truck is never sensible, but points are points. Even if  Other Daniel scored them accidentally.

Look, I don't pretend that these photos tell much of a narrative. We had three vehicles in play and it didn't take long before we'd all been destroyed and had to respawn. Essentially we chased around the arena trying to pick up spot prizes (Lose all hazards? Done. Perform a hazardous manoeuvre? Easy). It was great fun, but hard to keep track of.

Here's a nice head-on collision that was no fun for either vehicle.

A lull in the hostilities when, for a phase or two, none of us had an active vehicle in play.

My big gun had limited ammo (although I could use Audience Votes to buy more, and did), but with a crew of four and some hull-mounted machine-guns I could still dish out damage without the main armament.

Into the closing stages of the game and I was doing well on points. A few good damaging shots would see me pick up the win. At that point I then failed to reach the point-score damage threshold with any shot; my gunner just couldn't do it. 

We chased around an obstacle for a bit.

Siberian Khatru was briefly inconvenienced by being destroyed. Again.

But it was soon back in action and failing to score damaging hits.

Actually I was still picking up plenty of votes thanks to my vehicle being a crowd-pleaser. This meant that I got an Audience Vote every time I wiped out from getting too many hazards. And having a low handling heavy truck with a big gun meant that I was wiping out a lot. Sure I sometimes flipped and took damage, and often ended up facing in odd directions, but when your gun is in a turret direction is often meaningless. 

Anyway, there was drama towards the end. Caesar had a good run of spot-prizes and reached a score on a par with mine (you need 15 victory points to win, with each Audience Vote you earn being worth one - so long as it's earned close to an opposing vehicle. There's no hiding in the corner and doing fancy shit in this scenario). He then collided with the central pillar, and was wrecked. 

I failed to wipe out or score any major damage in the interim, so couldn't pick up the ONE VOTE I needed to win. However on my next activation I would.

And then Caesar respawned. The spot prize was to be at maximum gear. So he used all of his spare votes to ramp up to full speed from the off. That left him with one Audience Vote required to win.

You get an Audience Vote if a vehicle is wrecked. So he drove at full speed into an obstacle, the subsequent twisted metal of his vehicle winning the event for his team.

Sneaky. And pure Gaslands.

Final scores were:

Caesar - 15 points
Me - 14 points
Other Daniel - 5 points

Other Daniel had problems with his team abilities in that he scored Audience Votes for setting other vehicles on fire, but none of the vehicles he did it to lasted long enough aflame to actually score he points. 

Anyway, for a small game with (mostly) three vehicles it was a lot of fun, with all of us finding creative ways to pick up points and lots of cat and mouse manoeuvre. Siberian Khatru proved to be a useful vehicle in this scenario, with its many limitations kind of working to its advantage.

Siberian Khatru

Rutherford - Heavy Truck - 50 Cans
Max Gear - 3
Handling -2
Crew - 4

125 mm Tank Gun (Turret) - 4 Ammo
Machine Gun (Sides)

Perks: Headshot, Crowd Pleaser