Our miniatures correspondent, Eric Tonjes, returns! If you missed Eric’s most recent reviews, don’t miss him on Guild Ball, Necromunda: Underhive and Warhammer 40,000 (8th edition).
Eric: Gentlepeople, start your engines. It’s Eric here, back after a bit of a hiatus to talk about one of the most interesting miniatures games to come out in the last few years: Gaslands Refueled.
While rarely remarked upon, automobiles are deeply violent machines. This is true on the level of raw mechanics, as we strap ourselves into steel boxes that harness explosions in order to drag us at high velocity. They are also some of the most dangerous devices made available to the average consumer – globally, autos cause somewhere north of a million fatalities per year.
Little wonder, then, that they have created a niche genre where this violence is made explicit. In movies like Death Race and Mad Max and video games like the Twisted Metal series I played with gusto as a teen, spikes and guns are strapped to these death machines to make them, well, Machines of Death.
Gaslands seeks to transliterate vehicle violence to the tabletop. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where earth has been turned to a wasteland and its citizens compete in contests of vehicular mayhem in the hope of escape, it simulates the belching exhaust, squealing transmissions and rat-a-tat gunfire that my inner teenager still craves.
