Mail Room: Gaslands Refueled

Forgive me, Car Wars, but I have sinned.

This is a remarkably solid car combat game. Where Car Wars these days is more of a sleek, high-tech vehicular battle game, Gaslands embraces the DIY, Mad Max-style scale combat mayhem. This is more of a hobby and modeling game: take a bunch of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, Dremel them apart, glue kit pieces to them, paint the plastic bodies like road-warrior vehicles, and assemble them into scale battlecar conversions.

This is very different than Car Wars.

The last time we had this in Car Wars was the Chassis and Crossbow rules out of the old Dueltrack game, but this leans into it hard and puts you in charge of a team of cars to accomplish races, missions, and other vehicular mayhem. Car Wars was always meant for one-player-per-vehicle battles, since the record sheets were complex, whereas Gaslands is simpler and aggregates a lot into easier-to-track values. You are meant to run a multi-vehicle team here, and record-keeping is not a burden.

It reminds me of a mashup of Car Wars and Warhammer 40K, meant for big-table battles and automotive mayhem. This would play extremely well in a hobby shop on a Saturday afternoon, and the team size and tracking requirements mean the game would run fast, and much faster than the all-day battles we had with classic Car Wars that took all day to simulate a 30-second combat. Head over for fast food and ice cream after, and you have yourself a good day.

Fast, fun, lightweight, and simple car-smashing and minigun-firing fun.

A huge DIY aesthetic, meaning you can hack up and create your own custom force of battlecars. Tear up cheap die-cast cars and break out the glue, plastic bits, and model paint. This hobby balances kitbash creation with automotive destruction.

That is Gaslands.