Gaslands Review

1st Gear:  Do you remember a time when miniatures gaming was much more about having fun with toys, and less about min/maxing your army lists to ensure complete and total victory over unsuspecting fools?

No?  Me neither!

But, if such a time existed, Gaslands comes from that time.  is a miniatures rules set from Mike Hutchinson and published by .  It takes the time-honoured traditions of Car Wars and other post-apocalyptic car battle games, the flavour of the Mad Max-type setting, and the mechanics of a 21st-century miniatures game, and rolls them into one tasty, succinct, and inexpensive package.

A player needs only the book and some Matchbox or Hotwheels 1/64 scale cars to get playing.  This review will take a look at the setting, rules, and materials needed to play and give you the information you need to decide if Gaslands is for you.

2nd Gear:  Gaslands is set in a (surprise!) dystopian alternate timeline, where humanity began Martian colonization in the early 1980s.  Eventually, the Martians rebelled. In a sudden, but inevitable betrayal, they basically laid waste to the Earth.

Now, our rich Martian overlords run the Earth like an apocalyptic theme park, full of violent games to amuse themselves and the restless hordes of the underclass.

The impoverished and desperate people of Earth compete in these games for a chance to get to Mars and live a better life.  Few, if any, will make it.  And some, just a few perhaps, dream of settling the score with their Martian oppressors.

The most popular of these “sports” is a TV show called Gaslands.   To represent the varied forms of bloodsport in this alternate timeline, the game presents six different scenarios, ranging from the standard (but innovative) Death Race to the self-explanatory Monster Truck Smash, to the wild game show of Saturday Night Live. Rounding out the flavour of the game are the different “sponsors” who you can choose to support your team.  From the gun-crazy Rutherford, whose teams have access to high-grade weapons, to the totalitarian Warden Cadeila, whose drivers are convicts welded into their vehicles, there is a sponsor to suit any of your (depraved) tastes.

3rd Gear:  The old and wise among us might recall that a game of Car Wars required a master’s degree to understand, and a full weekend to play.  Not so with Gaslands.

Drawing on the classic themes of mayhem and destruction, Hutchinson has synthesized the movement templates of X-wing with his own unique additions of gear changes and Skid Dice.

When a car moves, you simply choose a template appropriate to your gear (or not and get punished by your opponents choosing for you!) place the template and (at your option) roll skid dice up to your current gear.  These skid dice allow you to do awesome stuff like shift gears to go faster (usually important in a race) and cancel hazard tokens (get six and you wipe out!) to help you win.

But what the dice give, they also take away: you can get a Hazard, Slide or Spin result, which will usually mess up your plans, but can occasionally be a blessing in disguise!  So unlike X-wing, where the results of your template are totally predictable, the shift dice add an incentive to take a chance with the possibility of rewards or disaster.

Each car has 3 essential stats: Handling, Max Gear, and Hull Points.  Handling is how many shift dice you can roll.  High-performance vehicles get more. Max Gear is your top speed, allowing you to use the longest templates to move ahead.  Hull Points is how much damage you can sustain. For example, a standard car has 10, a pickup truck has 12, and a dune buggy only six.

Weapons range from the humble pistol to the mighty rocket launcher.  Weapons roll dice, usually hitting on 4+.  Cars can, of course, ram and crash into each other, and there are options for smash attacks or evasion that are simple but effective. The game admonishes players to observe the “rule of carnage” and resolve ambiguities in favour of the most destructive result.  That’s fun, folks!

4th Gear:  What about the models, you say?  There are none.  Wait, what?  Well, really there are no official models, no.  For models, you will need to raid your old Matchbox case or the local Target for likely cars.

We are typically talking a couple bucks each, here.  If you are a Flames of War player, a trip to the bits box will provide you a bounty of weapons options.

I mounted everything from .30 cals to spare 7.5cm PaK guns on my cars. Optionally, there are a lot of 3rd party providers moving to fill the gap, with 3D printing making fan-designed weapons a thing.  Folks, this part of the game cannot be undersold:  converting and painting 1/64 cars into wasteland warriors is enormously amusing.  It’s addictive, too.

I started with four cars and had 14 a couple of days later.  As the setting is post-apocalyptic, you can (if you choose) go to town with rust and chipping effects, dirty washes and dry-brushed dust.  It’s actually really easy to make a great-looking Gaslands car in a short time.

I am looking forward to converting up a War Rig (tractor-trailer combination) for extra fun David and Goliath battles in the wastelands.  Check out the Gaslands (now over 5,000 strong) for an amazing and dizzying array of fantastic conversions and gorgeous tables.

Like Frostgrave before it, this Osprey title is really inspiring hobbyists to be creative.  Oh, on a side note, fancy plastic templates and skid dice are available, and you probably want them, but you can copy and print your own from the rulebook!

5th Gear:  The surprise conclusion to this review is:  I really like this game. There is an enormous amount of play value in this slim 64-page volume.

I have not even touched on interesting mechanics such as audience votes, building custom cars with a points system, or campaign rules, which are all included.

There is already a for a mini-campaign pitting a War Rig vs. a war band of cars in a desperate battle across the wastes.  If you want to recapture some of the innocent fun of gaming with toys, but still have an elegant set of reasonably detailed rules at your fingertips, and a wide range of scenario and campaign possibilities, this game will meet your needs.  It’s a very impressive product.

And speaking of kids, my 9-year old loves the game and painted up a half-dozen cars. Even my 7-year old painted up a battle trash truck!  Grab this book for the reasonable cover price, or at your favourite online bookseller, grab some cars, and get ready to make “vroom-vroom” and “dakka dakka” sounds until you feel like a kid again, too.  Gaslands is a legit good time.  And that’s what we are really here for, right?