Toot-toot-rum-rum

Being a responsible gamer, I actually own both versions of Gaslands even though I haven’t ever played it. Stepping into the project in a responsible way, I am determined to not just rush into modding cars. I need to read the rulebook at least once.

I know that the Osprey games aren’t for everyone but I do find them wonderfully easy to read. I find a lot of rule books so dense that I doze off before I can get very far in. I don’t have any such problems with these.

The initial suggestion is for each player to have two vehicles – one buggy and one car – armed with the same front facing machine gun. Given the gaming history in our group, I feel comfortable going for something a little more in depth for our early games.

You buy a vehicle, then its weapons, then get a sponsor who gives you access to certain perk categories and provides a handful of extra rules/powers to make the teams feel different. A couple of the sponsors definitely feel like they are for further down the line once you have some experience with the rules. As I read though, I found myself making mental lists. I couldn’t help it, I’d been good for at least an hour!

Grabbing the bag of cars that I dug out of the stash, I organised them into groups. One pile are cool but I don’t feel ready to tackle them yet; they got bagged back up.

Here we’ve got three groups. Bottom left are my sleek performance cars. They’ll be my Miyazaki team – all daring, skill and precision. Top are going to be speedy lads, probably Idris, maybe Order of the Inferno. The bottom right are two cars put aside for test models; the 911 is a duplicate and the yellow one is just the least interesting in the collection.

Gathering some tools, my bits box and my terrain greeble box, I spent a wonderful hour or so playing. I forgot to sand the paint down but luckily didn’t have any problems getting things to stick. As a test model I’m not too bothered but I definitely need to keep it in mind for the future.

• The gun is from a necron,
• the metal patches are thin plastic packaging with a pin pushed into the back to make the rivets.
• Rather than using granny grating for the windows, I wanted to go something a little lighter so used some netting from a cheap table tennis set I found years ago in a tat shop.

Quick coat of black primer and a nice easy paint job. This was the most fun I’ve had making and painting a test model, possibly ever. It wasn’t so much to test paint schemes but rather to get a bit of confidence before moving onto the cars I’m really excited for.

As I was working on this I was chatting to a friend (and member of the site) in our gaming group over Discord. He was working with his kid on their first models for the year. I sent through the first and second photos from above and got this message back…

So my “don’t spend any money” project has cost someone else ? On the plus side, it looks like I won’t have to put much effort into getting opponents!