Gaslands Death Race

I don’t know if you will remember this but it wasn’t all that long ago that I wrote about the game Gaslands. To recap, this is a racing/car game that uses Hotwheels and Matchbox cars as the minis. There is a big following for the game but a good number of the people involved are spending more time modding cars and making terrain instead of actually getting into games for it.

That in itself is interesting. I have known people in the past that are happier painting their minis than they are playing games with the minis. I am not sure how that works mentally for these people. Personally, I would rather play the game with the cars as I buy them and not eve worry about anything other than playing. But it is never quite that easy for most things. I may never understand that aspect of life.

Anyway…

Back on track… So I have been taking part in a monthly death race at a game shop that is actually an hour away from my house. That seems a bit strange when you look at it logically. But logic doesn’t have a place when you are looking at the bigger picture. Sometimes games drive you further away from home than you expect. I know people that travel across the country to play some of their games. No one ever said that gamers were logical.

But I digress…

So as far as the race went, we had just about the typical run of it. The start is always the hardest part of all the races we have done so far. We seem to run into congestion at the starting line and end up ramming into each other making this huge mob of explosive carnage before we can even make it to the first gate. The first gate is always important because that is when weapons unlock, unless you have a ram. No need to unlock one of those. Two of my cars had rams on this race.

The problem that arose for me though, I was racing a motorcycle. My original intention had been to get it through the first gate to unlock rockets. It would have been a glass canon, a sacrificial pawn if you will. The amount of damage that can be done with rockets is a siren’s call that I couldn’t ignore. And I paid for it. The motorcycle didn’t get past the first couple activations. It was a beautiful death for the bike, but I was forced to change the way I did things for the race.

What turned out to be the stand out for me this time had been the rams. Between the three vehicles I had, two of them had rams. And those things did everything and more of what I had hoped they could do. Lesson learned for the next race in the series. Sure ballistic weapons are good, but if your car is fast enough and pushing a ton of speed, you can do some serious damage with rams.

Dice were on fire that day… So much carnage

Anyway, in the end I didn’t win this race. I came in second. And looking back I can see some of the mistakes I made in the end. Nothing catastrophic but enough to give me some ideas of where I want to go with the next bit of it. The take away for me of course, is learn the spots where you really need to push the lead and the spots where discretion can make the difference between hitting a wall or making the turn you absolutely need to make the last gate and the win.

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