Gaslands has been causing something of a craze recently, and it's pretty easy to see why. Post-apocalyptic, high-octane car racing is always fun, and the abundance of cheap cars means that anyone can stop by their local dollar store and walk out with enough models for a variety of options.
Bill's been excited to try out a game, and so Gaslands was featured for the first Friday Night Fights event at Half Day Studio.
There were four players controlling two cars each. Bill had two pickup trucks, Kai went with a pickup truck and a car, and Keith and I chose a car and performance car combo.
We chose to use the Death Race scenario, where players have to race through a series of gates in order.
After a few missteps, we managed to get through the first turn. The game has an odd turn structure where there are six "Gear Phases" in each turn, ascending from 1 to 6. A car can activate in any gear phase that matches their gear or higher (so a car in gear 3 can activate in Gear Phase 3, 4, 5, and, but not 1 or 2). This means that a car can activate multiple times in a turn.
With most cars jockeying for position, I decided to have my performance car use one of its nitro-boosters to shoot through the gate. However, this (plus some collisions that my other car was involved in) caused both my cars to wipeout, reducing them back to first gear.
It became painfully clear just how problematic being stuck in first gear can be in this game when most of the other cars are in higher gears. I was stuck unable to do anything as the rest of the cars were able to make 2-4 additional moves.
Keith, Kai and Bill were mostly focused on each other, with Bill's and Keith's lead cars playing catch with Molotov cocktails.
It took us about two hours to get through one and half turns, which was mostly due to the four of us trying to work our way through the rules. That should speed up in the future.
However, it looked as though Keith was likely to stay in the lead, since Bill's pickup (the only vehicle with enough distance and speed to keep up) wrecked and then was destroyed.
I'm hoping to play more in the future, since the game should speed up once we have a firmer grasp on the rules.
It absolutely went quicker once we figured out how the phase system worked. A curious thing I noticed between last week and this week is that wipeouts are checked for after EACH car activates so its a lot easier for cars that wipe out early to catch back up as other cars could wipe out moments later. 5 players, 1 car a piece on a tighter track and we hit turn 4 in the same time as our first game.
ReplyDeleteCool to hear this both on the blog and in person. I'm looking forward to playing again!
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