Gaslands - Team Bones

Gaslands is a tabletop game developed by Mike Hutchinson and published by Osprey Games in 2018. In the game, players take command of vehicles on post-apocalyptic alternate history Earth, competing in a televised blood sport. Gaslands is designed to be played with converted diecast cars, and it involves template-based movement and different play modes. The premise is quite attractive, both from the hobby and gameplay side - so I’m not surprised it’s grown popular. I’d been aware of it for a long time, but it’s not a fantasy skirmish, so I stayed away. My significant other is to blame that this eventually changed. We were shopping for cars for his collection, and I spotted the Burago Knuckle Dragger. Half a dozen skeleton-themed cars later, I have a whole fleet of customized and painted vehicles, with more on the way.

Apart from the aforementioned Knuckle Dragger, my cars are all Mattel’s Hot Wheels. The guns come from North Star (plastic) and Anvil Industries (resin), while the crew and biker are plastics from North Star. The cars are so much fun to customize and paint. I expect some of it comes from the novelty of it, since I’m used to 28-32mm fantasy and SF figures. Stepping outside of that comfort zone is refreshing!

These cars aren’t conveniently held together by screws, so taking them apart does require the use of a power tool. I used my dremel, but a table drill is likely the best choice. Once it’s taken apart one can easily sand all the parts, glue the wheels in place (or even replace the wheels), and make necessary modifications. Fine sanding is a good idea to help conversion bits and paint stick to the model’s surfaces. The plastic with polished chrome finish especially needs this treatment. I used decals from GW and Fallout Hobbies to add numbers and assorted skulls over the paintjob.

The acrylic transparent lights were added after painting. You can see them best in the images below. Both the circular and rectangular ones are nail art decorations - I keep finding new uses for that stuff.

I can’t say much about how it plays yet, since we’ve only played a single test game to try out the base mechanics. I liked it enough to want to play more. We will need to make terrain, tokens and templates, so expect more Gaslands hobby stuff here.

Do you play Gaslands? Let me know in the comments.

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