Gaslands Carnage

It’s a snow day and as always, I am behind on everything. Anyway, I am using that as an excuse to talk games again. Yep, this is another game thought we will “suffer” through. Or something.

Anyway, it was just a bit ago one of my gaming friends and I had gone about an hour away for a tournament. It was worth it for the tourney format. Where our normal shop does Archon format (3 decks and when you win you have to switch to a different deck), this shop was doing survival format (3 decks, when you lose you lose a deck, keep playing till you run out of decks). Great day where I didn’t play nearly as well as I would have liked but at the same time, some epic games happened. But that isn’t the reason for why we are here today. I am still building up to it.

Throughout the day, one of the players had been talking about a game they are playing at the shop, something I had never heard of. Now you have to picture this, Death Race the movie but done on the table top. Lots of guns and lots of speed in a post apocalyptic world. That gives you an idea of what Gaslands is about. Actually that tells you pretty much the idea of what Gaslands is about. Basically, the designer (Mike Hutchinson) took the concept of the movie and turned it into a game where you can use Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars as your minis. What you end up with is probably one of the least expensive miniatures war games on the market today.

Where most games seem to be going to kickstarter to fund their development, Osprey games set up a 65 page rule book that you can purchase through Amazon or a couple other war game sites for fairly cheap. All their templates and tokens are downloadable or copyable from the books or website. They have a partnering system where third parties can 3d print or laser cut the templates and dice needed for the game. But really, as it is right now, I have a ton of 6 sided dice already (I could sticker the skid dice templates to them or leave them as is), I printed out the movement templates with cardstock and backed those with the cardboard from a frozen pizza box, and I went to Meijer and picked up a five pack of Matchbox rescue vehicles and another five individual muscle and sports cars from Hot Wheels. Throw in some random terrain on a play mat to make a race track and we have a game ready to go.

The crazy thing is, I haven’t been excited about the idea of painting up minis in a long time. The time commitment and energy for that is something I don’t want to bog down my time right now. But I looked at these out of the box toy cars and I can see something as simple as gluing a 3d printed machine gun or flamethrower on them and calling it good. And you don’t even need to do that. Sometimes using your imagination can go a long way. I was even looking at a video of someone doing a zombie race recently. I have plastic army men or there are a few games that have similar zombies or what ever you want to use that can be placed on the track for changing up the carnage of the game. The game is all about adding more carnage to the gaming table.

Now if you haven’t really gotten into any kind of gaming (aside from something like standard card games or mass market games) you may not realize how crazy the ideas of this game actually are. As an example, playing Keyforge is fairly cheap. You can buy a deck for 10 dollars and use some random stuff as the tokens and keys you need for the game and still be competitive. But the reality is you will end up spending so much more than that because one deck isn’t really what you will end up with. I have known people to own 20 decks and more. And these are just the average player. Games like Warhammer 40k end up in the thousands of dollars when you really get into it. So to find a game that leaves you at a place where you don’t really need to spend all that much, I mean, a squad of three cars is only a couple bucks new, well, that is almost revolutionary. Mind you, that is part of the trouble of a game like this though. You can find yourself in the store looking at toys and come home with another ten cars without realizing what you have done.

But in the end, gamers tend to like having a decent amount of variety in their games. At least the ones like me do. And to find a game where the cost to enter and to dig deeper into the game is so low, you can expand the options for a game night without breaking the bank. I like finding stuff like that.

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