Gaslands Game 1

Martin, FG and I got together for our first face-to-face game since... in nine months. The lockdown ended a couple of weeks ago, and there hasn't been a surge in cases, so I figured that it was OK to meet and catch up, pass each other stuff we have ordered for one another, and have a few beers together; in the interest of infection control, we used separate containers for our chips.

The game we have chosen for the session was Gaslands; it looked like a light, fun game, and the guys wouldn't have to bring a lot of figures on top of all the other stuff they were bringing to my place.

I have made some dashboards earlier, and the day before the game I made a few gates with some plastic sci-fi bits I had lying around and some hazard chevrons printed onto paper, laid out a race area, and we were ready to go.

We played the simple Death Race scenario, and it was a close race, with all of us crossing the finishing line in the same phase. We enjoyed it so much we decided to replay the race again. In the second race FG's vehicle got wrecked by Martin's vehicle and screeched to a halt just on the finishing line, allowing Martin to take the victory.

What surprised me about the game was how playable it was. I saw a few videos of the game on youtube and it seemed that most of the time the vehicles got wrecked by combat and collision before they even complete a full circuit. In our games we kept our eyes and the goal and did not deliberately manoeuvre our vehicles to attack - in fact, FG did not even get to use his mortars in either game.

The Performance Car seems to be a good choice for the game, since they received an extra activation every time they were collided into. My choice of a pick-up truck, however, seemed poor, as with its poor Handling I could not even manage to shift gears most turns.

The trick, it seems, is to have a team of at least two vehicles, and that was what we decided to do after the game: buy and build at least another vehicle each. I am keen to buy a buggy on my next trip to the mall, but FG is of the opinion that you don't pick a vehicle: you stand before the Matchbox rack and see which one calls out to you...