End of the Series

So we did a thing. After all these months of the pandemic lockdown, we were finally able to get into the last race of this year’s Infinity Games Gaslands series. Sure we had a game last month, but that was only the race before the end. We got the last one in now and so the winners and losers of the series are decided.

Going into the race I didn’t have high hopes to win. The sponsor I am currently using (Scarlett Annie, the pirates) isn’t as well suited for Death Race. And we were playing Death Race in this last game. What I knew I could do though, was crush as much of the competition as possible to increase my odds.

Now you have to picture the starting line. We had three people playing in this race. My team, the Warden’s team, and Beverly (The Devil on the Highway). I had 4 cars; 2 buggies, a regular car, and the battle bus (pirate ship on wheels). Notice I mention the battle bus. This thing is a beast. It is heavy and ponderous but it can smash through most other vehicles in its way. There were 4 cars on the Warden’s team and then three cars for Beverly.

And this is where we run into the singular problem of Maxine. Her team rules allow some mischief that is a bit different than the other teams. When the player uses her only one car is actually able to count toward victory conditions. The other cars on the team are “ghosts” and don’t really interact with anything else on the board like other vehicles. When you are running a team against them that relies strongly on being able to smash the other players this becomes a problem. Add to this, the guy playing the Maxine team was using a heavy truck as the real car. The heavy truck like a battle bus is huge and slow. They are built to take a decent amount of damage. Yep, something I am not really going to destroy the first time I come across it.

Anyway, the race played out pretty much like most death races play out. We had a bunch of carnage at the main gate. The battle bus did what it was designed to. I rammed two cars with it and took them out of the game. One of my buggies and my basher did their tag team set up on another car and I managed to get some damage in that way as well. But the important part of the race came from the three cars that broke away toward gate one (in death race this is where weapons go live). All three of us had at least one car make it through that gate.

This doesn’t matter too much to most of my team because the ramming attacks can be done just because you have metal machines smashing into each other. But in death race the objective is to get one car over the finish line after going through all the gates, usually your fastest car. For me, this meant one of the buggies.

Through a series of events that involved cars dropping things like land mines and caltrops and general weapons fire, I ended up losing my lead buggy to an unfortunate explosion. While around the same time, my battle bus had gone through the first gate and was gaining ground on Maxine’s heavy truck. Yeah, some how through all the chaos, the two slowest vehicles on the board had taken the lead over all the other vehicles.

Due to time we weren’t able to make it all the way to the finish line in this game. As it played out, I had knocked about half the hull away on the heavy truck but hadn’t been able to get a second attack on it where I could have finished the job. The heavy truck finished its last move just short of hitting a wall it would need to break through. But it was enough to leave it in the lead position on the board.

The slow car takes the race

In a nutshell, this is Gaslands. Crazy things happen, like the slowest cars winning a race (I feel like there is a parable in there somewhere). All that really matters though, is the carnage. How many cars end up flaming slag is as much the entertainment if not more of the entertainment than the cars just driving around the race track. And this is why we play. You just never know what might happen.

###

If you enjoy these stories, consider leaving some coffee money in the jar or you could buy a book or two. Either way helps keep the stories flowing.